IFA – Inclusivity For Archives för svenska 
IFA was a 1-year project (March 2021 – February 2022) made possible by a bequest in a will to the community archives of south-west Götaland. This experimental project reached out to immigrant and ethnic minority groups and associations of all kinds, to support and encourage the documentation of their activities and preserve them for posterity.
Voluntary associations throughout our area of operations (the municipalities of Ale, Härryda, Kungälv, Mölndal, Partille and Öckerö) were invited to contact our project manager Arif Naqvi to arrange an informal discussion about how they document their history in order to develop appropriate ways to archive them for the future.
There was no cost attached to taking part in this project and all kinds of organisations were included: cultural, sporting, educational, religious, workplace, political, social, large or small, active, dormant or closed down.
Participants did not even have to be formally constituted or could be online, as long as they had a democratic form and goals, were based in our area of operations, and had someone who could communicate in either Swedish or English in our meetings.
The IFA project has now formally ended, however the community archives continues to work for greater inclusivity. Through this project, we have learnt how to work with a variety of groups to ensure they can trust that their stories will be stored with due consideration of their specific contexts and challenges.
It is a priority for the archives to remain flexible in how it collects information and makes it available in ways that protect the interests of the members of such groups, while raising awareness of the reasons why they exist and what they are trying to achieve.
You can still download the project’s information sheet in English and in Swedish. There is also a qualitative interim report (in Swedish) evaluating the project’s progress written in November 2021 and a quantitative final report (also in Swedish).
Arif can be reached via email at arif.naqvi(a)molndal.se.
