Learning the Labor of Love: Student Storytellers Promoting Preservation
Heirloom Digital is in the business of legacy. Future-proofing precious items from faded photographs and brittle letters to muffled audio from old cassette tapes is our work, but our purpose goes beyond preserving tangible assets. We fulfill our mission by documenting pieces of a life well-lived and sharing stories to help the love live on.
I’ve written before about our mission to preserve the past, celebrate the present and benefit the future, and how it became deeply personal for me. This work is not just an act of remembrance; it’s an act of connection, of making meaning and carrying the past forward. Lately, I’ve been thinking about who is best poised to carry this torch into the future. My conclusion is unequivocal: today’s students.
An internship in family and cultural history preservation is the perfect opportunity for this generation because the role sits at the intersection of heart and technology, offering a chance to build a professional skill set while doing work that is profoundly human—work that more would do if only they had the capacity, whether skills or time.
Students hungry to learn storytelling skills that are transferable to any workplace are ideally suited to intern with Heirloom Digital, using their families as their clients. Their families also benefit by having their history captured by the younger generation whose sincere interest and access to family members turns the work into a bonding opportunity—with digital skills acquisition as a bonus.
Digital Skills to Preserve the Past and Thrive in the Future
We often talk about the need for students to gain “digital skills” for the modern workforce, but what does that really mean? In our field, it’s about:
- Digital stewardship. It’s learning the technical process of digitization—transforming a box of analog memories into an organized, secure and shareable digital archive of life’s most important moments. Digital stewardship is also about disaster preparation and cybersecurity, skills valued by families and workplaces alike.
- Research. It’s the thrill of the hunt, digging through genealogical records or cross-referencing old letters to piece together a family timeline. It’s becoming a detective for a family’s lost history.
- Writing. We help our clients create beautiful heirloom books and memoirs. This requires students to learn how to interview with empathy, listen for the deeper narrative and weave disparate facts into a compelling, coherent story.
- Storytelling. This is the ultimate survival skill. An internship in preservation teaches you how to find the universal theme in a personal story, how to honor a person’s voice and how to create something that will resonate for generations.
A Look Inside the Ideal Internship
On top of its sentimental value and emotional benefits, our storytelling business equips students with real-world skills to succeed tomorrow.
For example, our most recent interns were eager to learn about the business side of our work. Jordan, a junior at UT Austin, and Lilia, a high-school senior, teamed up to devise a low-budget marketing strategy to showcase our product line in a high-value way. This challenging task began with reading the business plan to ensure that their strategy would tie back to core business goals. They learned to cultivate a strategic, growth-oriented mindset, ask thoughtful questions, conduct research and collaborate effectively to divide the work according to the team’s strengths. They reviewed our brand standards and used our Canva Pro account to develop storytelling concepts, which they later co-presented in virtual meetings. The result was a new series of product-based featured stories and client testimonials on Instagram and Facebook, optimized according to feedback and performance data available in the Meta platform. The stories that they envisioned and helped bring to life are now visible at the top of our social media channels, creating ongoing strategic value.
At the end of the internship, I asked them what they learned while working for us. In Lilia’s words,
Interning for Heirloom Digital opened my eyes to the backside of running a business. I was given the opportunity to review documents about the company’s past years and see the slide deck with Heirloom Digital’s brand standards. Seeing the amount of thought and reflection happening behind the scenes was fascinating to me. Overall, I enjoyed working on marketing strategies, the process of creating content for social media platforms, and knowing the purpose of the work would also benefit families who used the service.
Connecting Generations in a Disconnected World
This generation of students is the most digitally native in history. But they’re also hungry for connection and purpose. This work provides both. An intern in this field doesn’t just scan photos. They become a bridge connecting a grandfather, who may only remember the past, with a granddaughter, who will now be able to access that past on her phone. They use the tools of their generation to safeguard the stories of generations past, ensuring that future generations have a foundation on which to build. It’s giving them the gift of knowing where and who they come from.
We’re all creating our legacy with every day we live. For a student, what better way to begin building your own than by preserving the legacies of others?
To learn more about how Heirloom Digital helps families and organizations preserve their legacies, please visit us at www.heirloomdigital.com.
