Today, March 11th, 2025, is exactly five years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. Since March 2020, over 1,000,000 Americans have lost their lives to the virus and American society has experienced a halt to, and a restart of, many social activities. While the pandemic is less prevalent in the lives of most Americans today, many, including those with long COVID, still feel the pandemic’s effects daily. To commemorate those lost and to inspire reflection about the pandemic, the American Folklife Series is launching a mini-series of blog posts related to the COVID-19 American History Project—a Congressionally mandated initiative to collect Americans’ stories about the pandemic and to archive them in the Library of Congress.
In this post, we announce the online publication of a new interview collection from the COVID-19 American History Project—It Takes a Village: Rural Central Appalachian Childcare Providers’ COVID-19 Experiences.
The American Folklife Center is proud to announce the online publication of It Takes a Village: Rural Central Appalachian Childcare Providers’ COVID-19 Experiences – a collection of twenty-five interviews with childcare workers in five Appalachian states, documented from October 2023 to July 2024. The collection, created by folklorist Nicole Musgrave, details these workers’ experiences of the pandemic and their reflections on the social and educational development of the children for whom they cared. Given that all the interviewees are Appalachian women, it also provides an important perspective on gender and place during the COVID-19 pandemic. It Takes a Village is the second collection from the COVID-19 American History Project to be posted online. The first, Pandemic Stories from New Orleans-Area Service and Hospitality Workers, is also available for access and research.
It Takes a Village is an important collection, in part, because of the unique situation of childcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the height of COVID-19, schools and childcare centers were “ground zero” for efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus. Many were forced to close, adapt to changing safety precautions, and transition to online learning. Childcare workers faced the difficult task of teaching and caring for young children, trying to protect themselves, and needing to adapt to changing regulations—all at the same time. In Appalachia—a region plagued by material poverty and where 70% of the population lives in a childcare desert—childcare workers are 92% women. The interviews in It Takes a Village, therefore, provide an important snapshot into the precarious lives of working women in rural Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee, who faced hardship, yet were undeterred from serving young people during the pandemic.
Folklorist Nicole Musgrave conceptualized the project, interviewed participants, and took photographs for the collection. Musgrave’s inspiration for It Takes a Village came after she was hired, in the fall of 2020, to conduct phone interviews with childcare providers and parents of young children in east Kentucky. In these discussions, Musgrave heard important stories of childcare workers’ difficulties, and their creative solutions, to the problems of the pandemic. Recognizing the value of these first-hand experiences, Musgrave decided to apply to the American Folklife Center to conduct her oral history project for the COVID-19 American History Project. To learn more about Musgrave’s collection, and to see excerpts from her interviews, read her July 2024 post on Folklife Today. On March 11th, 2025, Musgrave will join three other researchers to discuss her work at Documenting COVID-19: A Discussion on Community-Based Research during the COVID-19 Pandemic. A webcast of the program will be posted to the website of the Library of Congress soon after the event.
At this writing, the American Folklife Center has collected over 100 interviews for the COVID-19 American History Project, in many locations throughout the United States. If you would like to add your pandemic story to the COVID-19 American History Project, visit the Archive Activation page. By following the page’s prompts, you can record your COVID-19 story. All recordings collected through the Archive Activate page will be archived in the collections of the Library of Congress.