March 2026: Press Release
DiasporaDNA Story Center Receives $100,000 William Penn Foundation Grant To Bring Living Legacies To Philadelphia
Founder Monica O. Montgomery, MA Is Making History — One Archive, One Story, One Community at a Time
PHILADELPHIA, PA — March 23, 2026 — DiasporaDNA Story Center is proud to announce it has been awarded a $100,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation in support of Living Legacies: Art, Archives, Ancestry and Activations— a two-year program (February 2026–February 2028) that will preserve, celebrate, and activate the histories of Philadelphia’s global majority communities. This is DiasporaDNA’s first major institutional grant, a milestone that marks not just an organizational achievement, but a broader affirmation that the stories of Black and brown communities are worth investing in.
Announced on March 3rd, the first day of Women’s History Month, this grant takes on particular resonance. At the helm of the organization is Monica O. Montgomery, MA, Founder and President — a woman who has spent her career doing exactly what Women’s History Month celebrates: making, stewarding, and reframing history. Through DiasporaDNA Story Center, Montgomery centers the perspectives of the global majority, ensuring that the richness, complexity, and brilliance of Black and brown lives are not merely footnoted in the historical record, but elevated as the story itself.
“Our archives,The Montgomery Collection, is a love letter to our families and communities, proof that our stories have always mattered. At DiasporaDNA, we are not waiting to be included in history — we are making it everyday, building the archive from the inside out. For Women’s History Month and beyond, I want every woman in our community to feel the power of being a history maker.”
— Monica O. Montgomery, MA, Founder & President, DiasporaDNA Story Center
About Living Legacies: Art, Archives, Ancestry and Activations
Over the next two years, DiasporaDNA Story Center’s Living Legacies program will unfold across Philadelphia in a series of activations, artistic commissions, and educational events expected to positively impact 3,500+ Philadelphia area residents. Program highlights include: Free Archives & Vibes pop-up activations bringing the archive directly into community spaces; a Junior and Senior Archivist Camp for youth and elders, culminating in a public “History in our Hands” showcase; two newly commissioned original artworks inspired by the Archives; and public programming at Cherry Street Pier - DiasporaDNA’s new HQ.
The Montgomery Collection: Women Who Made History
Central to the Living Legacies program is The Montgomery Collection, a curated archive of artifacts, ephemera, and objects that illuminate the histories of the global majority. Within that collection, DiasporaDNA Archives & Education Consultant Nideen Froukh has identified items with particular depth in the stories of Black women who shaped Philadelphia and the world. In honor of Women’s History Month, DiasporaDNA invites the community to encounter this capsule collection, Women Who Made History, not as relics, but as radical acts of preservation.
In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement by Paula Giddings. This book tells the history of Delta Sigma Theta, a Black sorority chartered in 1913 by twenty-two young women at Howard University. Featuring firsthand anecdotes from Delta sisters and rare photographs from the sorority’s earliest days, In Search of Sisterhood sits at the powerful intersection of race, gender, politics, class, and academia. During Women’s History Month and beyond, artifacts like this remind us that history is not a single story — preserving the lived experiences of Black women ensures that the full breadth of American history is never forgotten.
Henry Ossawa Tanner: His Boyhood Dream Come True by Faith Ringgold. This 1996 children’s book rescues a towering but long-overlooked Philadelphia painter from art history’s margins, returning his story to the children who most need to find themselves in it. In Ringgold’s hands, Tanner’s journey — from a Philadelphia park where a nine-year-old first glimpsed his destiny, to the Paris salons that recognized what his own country refused to see — becomes both a reclamation of Black artistic genius and a love letter to the city that first shaped him.
Soul, Soy and Salsa: An East Harlem Cookbook by Elizabeth Calvert, illustrated by Yushi Nomura. Published in 1979, this cookbook was the brainchild of two women in Harlem who wanted to share a multicultural spread of recipes inspired by and dedicated to the vibrant community of East Harlem. During Women’s History Month, it’s worth pausing on that — two friends, a kitchen, and a vision that became a lasting cultural artifact. This book is incredibly rare — we only know of two other copies in the world — and beautifully captures the heart of The Montgomery Collection Archive, bringing together diasporic communities of the global majority and bridging cultures through a shared love of food.
These objects carry voices that formal institutions have long overlooked. Through Living Legacies, they will be brought into community spaces — from Germantown to North Philadelphia — where the people whose ancestors they represent can encounter, interpret, and add to them.
Making History. Stewarding History. Reframing History.
Women’s History Month exists because women’s contributions to history were systematically erased, minimized, or made invisible. At DiasporaDNA Story Center, that erasure is understood not as a relic of the past but as an ongoing condition — and the work of the archive is an act of repair.
Monica O. Montgomery, MA is a woman making history with this work — A Temple University Alum and doctoral student with the School of Business, Department of Community Engagement at Point Park University, she is building an institution from the ground up that refuses to leave the stories of the global majority to chance or to others. The Living Legacies program is a testament to that refusal, and to the belief that community members are not just the subjects of history, but its rightful keepers.
Lead support for Living Legacies: Art, Archives, Ancestry and Activations is provided by the William Penn Foundation. Additional support for DiasporaDNA Story Center is provided by Alston-Beech Foundation, Philadelphia Activities Fund, PECO, Pennsylvania Creative Industries, and Team Pennsylvania.
About DiasporaDNA Story Center
DiasporaDNA Story Center is a Philadelphia-based organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and activating the histories of the global majority through art, archives, and community engagement. Founded by Monica O. Montgomery, MA, DiasporaDNA Story Center centers the perspectives and lived experiences of BIPOC communities, ensuring that their stories are documented, honored, and made accessible for generations to come. Learn more at www.diasporadna.org
About William Penn Foundation
The William Penn Foundation, founded in 1945 by Otto and Phoebe Haas, is committed to expanding access to resources and opportunities that promote a more vital and just city and region for all. We do this through funding programs in the Philadelphia region in arts and culture, children and families, democracy and civic initiatives, environment and public space, and workforce training and services. Learn more at www.williampennfoundation.org.