Speaking Place works internationally to address critical social issues facing communities.
Our principal focus is on documenting and reviving endangered languages, addressing a worldwide trend that has reached crisis proportions.
Building on four decades of experience, our interdisciplinary teams work closely with communities to train local partners in the use of innovative, media-based language and activity documentation methods. Community members learn how to create locally-designed documentation and communication processes in order to strengthen their language and culture. The results often lead to social change.
Speaking Place is active in research and development of child and adult language learning programs set within indigenous and minority cultures. Other Speaking Place projects have also fostered social change within participants’ communities—motivating participation in public health initiatives and environmental preservation, for example; helping to heal community trauma and improve police-community relations; and working to end discrimination, substance abuse, and teen pregnancies.
Speaking Place provides training in community self-documentation of language and cultural practices using video, as shown here by Director Ben Levine.
It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation based in Rockland, on the coast of Maine.
News and Updates:
June 2020: Speaking Place Staff News – In a nationwide online event, Co-Director Ben Levine shared clips of early video he had produced in the 1970s with Howard Gutstadt as part of the video collective People’s Video Theater/Survival Arts Media, some of which was featured in the highly acclaimed documentary “Crip Camp,” now available on Netflix. [READ MORE]
February 2020: Maine filmmakers helped revive long-lost footage that will appear in a Netflix documentary, Bangor Daily News –Speaking Place Co-Director Ben Levine videotaped disabled teens at a summer camp in upstate New York in 1971. The footage found its way into the 2020 Netflix documentary “Crip Camp.” [READ MORE]
February 2020: Maine Charity Working to Preserve Languages Worldwide, Lewiston Sun Journal – In a modest house not far from the harbor, Julia Schulz and Ben Levine are working to revive endangered languages from Maine to Mexico. [READ MORE]
April 2020: New publication – Speaking Place Staff and partners collaborated on a presentation and article recently published in Papers of the 49th Algonquian Conference: "The Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Language Portal: Who Uses It and How?" by Julia Schulz, Robert M. Leavitt, Ben Levine, and Newell Lewey.
