7000 BC is honored to have been awarded a CARES Act Grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Mexico Humanities Council. We received the grant for our proposal, Between the Panels: Storytelling Using the Medium of Comics. For more than fifteen years we have been providing comic book workshops to New Mexico communities through libraries, schools, and other institutions. Our Between the Panels workshops center on comics as a storytelling medium, empowering New Mexicans of all ages to tell their stories in words and images.
In 2019, 7000 BC added two new aspects to our workshops. First, we began developing a multimedia comics curriculum for onsite and virtual educators. Second, we began planning to provide vitual workshops for remote areas of the state that would not normally be able to bring us in. The CARES Act grant has had a fourfold impact on our work. It has allowed us to continue providing workshops throughout the shutdown, kept our instructors employed and their instructional skills sharp, allowed us to hone our virtual workshop skills as they become more essential, and given us room to further study and develop our comics storytelling curriculum. We are extremely grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Mexico Humanities Council for the opportunities this CARES Act grant has provided.
