Ace Charitable Foundation

Sharing Testimony across Continents

The ACE Charitable Foundation has been a generous long-term supporter of the Institute’s work in Rwanda. Previously, the ACE Charitable Foundation provided multi-year support for the Institute’s partnership with Aegis Trust to use testimony as a learning tool to broaden the understanding of genocide’s lasting impacts and to motivate social change. With ACE’s support, the Institute preserved and indexed a collection of testimonies at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre from eyewitnesses and survivors of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Working in Rwanda, the Institute staff taught indexing techniques to the staff at the Centre, to build local capacity for the development and growth of the Centre’s own archive of survivor testimonies and artifacts documenting the Rwandan Genocide. Today, a collection of 66 Rwandan testimonies are part of the Visual History Archive (VHA), and the Institute is committed to using them in a range of digital educational activities.

The ACE Charitable Foundation recently awarded a new three-year grant to incorporate Rwandan testimonies into IWitness, the Institute’s educational website that enables teachers and students to interact with more than 1,300 testimonies from the VHA. The grant enables the development of an English-language learning activity that can be accessed by American and Rwandan students, and IWitness users around the world. In April 2014, the Institute launched an IWitness activity in honor of the 20th commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide focusing on the experiences of a survivor named Kizito. In a collaborative project, the Institute and classrooms in New Jersey and Rwanda will complete the activity together, sharing their insights and learning from one another. The ACE Charitable Foundation’s support is allowing the Institute to share these stories across continents to help build a more peaceful world and help end genocide.