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supporting descendant-led projects that preserve Black placemaking, freedom-seeking, migration, and placekeeping heritage through creative storytelling

The OPI is directly affiliated with the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, an educational and social justice initiative dedicated to supporting the preservation of Black settlement landscapes, heritage, and grassroots preservation practices through research. 

Heritage Brunch 

Grant funds support descendants of community members with ancestral roots, residency, or kinship to founders of historic Black settlements and their anchor institutions (churches, schools, lodges, community centers, small businesses, and landowners).

Descendant labs 

With preservation, cooperative sustainability and education at its core Southern Android Productions is a multimedia cultural arts social enterprise facilitated by lead artist Viktor l. Ewing Givens. The project celebrates the use of archives both material and immaterial as a site for generating contemporary new works. For nearly a decade Givens has engaged Crockett Texas in expanded ethnographic interventions examining post migration cultural evolutions in descendent rural communities. He is excited to partner his creative sensibilities and cultural services with the Texas freedom colonies project to amplify preservation advocacy for intergenerational audiences