APALA Travel Grant
Jeneanne Ka-makana-lani Len Tai Lock is an associate librarian at the Salt Lake City Public Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is a former elementary school educator with a specialization in heritage language- and culture-focused approaches to teaching and learning. She is fluent in Spanish and English. Her educator background and language fluency contributes greatly to her work at the Salt Lake City Public Library.
Jeneanne recently received a Talk Story: Sharing stories, sharing culture grant to support the launch of new programming for the Salt Lake City community. Some initiatives made possible by the grant include the City’s first annual Pacific Islander Art Festival, development of a Hawaiian culture literacy kit and partnering with a local school to implement heritage language and culture-focused approaches to serving Pacific Islander and Latinx students.
Jeneanne participated in the 2019-2020 APALA Mentor/Protege Program, which helped her set goals including pursuing a master’s degree. In April, Jeneanne was accepted into the University of Utah in the Environmental Humanities graduate program and was awarded a Pasifika Mellon Humanities Fellowship to begin studies in Fall 2020. In three years, she hopes to apply for a graduate LIS program, most likely at the University of Hawaii – Manoa.
The 2020 ALA Annual Conference would have been Jeneanne’s first time attending the ALA Annual Conference. Since the 2020 ALA Annual was cancelled due to COVID-19, Jeneanne intends to use her Travel Grant funding to attend the 2021 ALA Midwinter Conference.
The APALA Travel Grant will provide $500.00 to support attendance at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference. The Travel Grant will fund one APALA member to attend the conference and will be used to help cover registration and travel expenses. Grant recipients will write reflections on their time at the conference for publication in the APALA website/newsletter.
APALA Scholarship Award
Patricia Ledesma Villon is an incoming MLIS student at the University of California, Los Angeles concentrating in Media Archival Studies. She holds a deep interest in working with collections, particularly audiovisual materials, that reflect Asian American history and culture and underrepresented artists and mediamakers.
In addition to her work as a library aide at the Oakland Public Library in Oakland, CA, Patricia currently works on Memories to Light: Asian American Home Movies, a community-driven audiovisual archival project at the Center for Asian American Media. On this project, Patricia provides donors access to their family’s home movies and helps contribute to APA history through the digitization and revisiting of these narratives recorded on non-digital formats.
In her application materials, Patricia explained how her experiences in community-based archiving and library work have been formative to her “growth and essential to [her] praxis as an APA LIS worker.”
The APALA Scholarship will provide $1,000.00 of financial assistance to a student of Asian or Pacific background who is enrolled in, or has been accepted into, a master’s or doctoral degree program in library and/or information science at a school accredited by the American Library Association (ALA).
Congratulations to our 2020 Travel Grant and Scholarship Award recipients!