The Houston Flood Museum, in collaboration with One Breath Partnership and CORE Design Studio, will debut a mobile storytelling booth at the City of Houston’s Earth Day Speaker Series on Tuesday, April 18, 2023.

The mobile booth, designed and fabricated by CORE’s Alan Krathaus, creates an intimate space that encourages community members to record their personal stories about their relationship to their environment. The booth will collect stories that document the full range of experiences people in the greater Houston region have had with floods, disaster recovery, air and water quality, health, climate change and environmental justice.

Houston Flood Museum founder Dr. Lacy M. Johnson:

“Over the past five years of collecting stories about flooding in Houston, I’ve noticed that there is far more that people have to say about flooding, infrastructure and policy than there is space to say it at the tables where decisions are made about these subjects. We continue to collect these stories because only by being honest and candid about our collective history can we hope to learn from it, to mourn what we have lost, and, with any luck, to find inspiration about how we might move together into the future.”

The stories will become part of the Flood Museum’s digital exhibits at HoustonFloodMuseum.org, and the booth will be available at community events going forward.

The booth will be one part of three full days of programs at Houston Public Library’s Julia Ideson Building and City Hall on April 17, 2023 through April 19, 2023. Panel discussions will feature health experts, city planners, artists and activists. The programming also includes keynote addresses from:

• Mayor Sylvester Turner
• Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, the Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy
• Dr. Robert Bullard, widely known as “the father of environmental justice,” who is the founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice and distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University

Find a full agenda of the keynotes and panel discussions here.

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