CBBG wins two prestigious awards

Since the Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations project wrapped in 2014, it has earned two prestigious accolades. In 2015, CBBG was the recipient of the 2015 Oral History Association Elizabeth B. Mason Project Award, which recognizes outstanding oral history projects in the field. The project, said the award committee, "took an open-ended, collaborative, community-based approach to exploring mixed heritage populations; we felt it provided an ideal model for work that historical societies ought to do." CBBG project director Sady Sullivan and BHS Oral Historian Zaheer Ali accepted the award at the October 2015 Oral History Association Annual Meeting. 

In July 2016, Brooklyn Historical Society earned a Leadership in History Award from the American Association for Local and State History (AASLH) for the CBBG project. Reflecting on the award, BHS President Deborah Schwartz observed, "discussions on race and ethnicity are particularly timely and relevant given the country's cultural and political climate - the subject matter is just as complex as it was in centuries past. Our goal is to inspire spirited discourse in a productive way. We are very proud of the wokr that has gone into this historically significant project, and hwe have established a dynamic model for how issues of mixed heritage and identity are discussed in a public forum."