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Help us open more doors
Every accessible heritage experience begins in a real place: a trip, a tripod, a descendant willing to tell a story, and a participant willing to say what didn't work. There are four ways to be part of that, and only one of them involves money.
Give
What your gift actually buys
HeritageWays is small, and that has one advantage worth stating plainly: you can see exactly where a donation goes. These are real line items from producing accessible heritage experiences.
An hour of transcription
Captions and a written transcript for one recorded oral history, so a Deaf or hard-of-hearing visitor gets the same story.
One described scene
Audio description written and recorded for a single 360° scene, written to be listened to, not skimmed.
A testing session
One accessibility evaluation with a participant, including the stipend that pays them for their expertise.
A day in the field
Travel, equipment and a full day of 360° documentation at a heritage site. The raw material for everything else.
Participants are paid. People with disabilities are routinely asked to give their time and expertise to accessibility projects for free. We don't do that. A portion of every gift goes directly to the people whose feedback shapes the work.
Other ways to support accessible heritage
For organizations
Partner with us
If you hold a place worth experiencing and it's hard for some people to reach, we'd like to talk.
HeritageWays works with museums, parks, historical societies, preservation organizations, community groups and descendant families. Partnership can mean site access for documentation, collaboration on interpretation, sharing oral histories, or co-applying for funding.
- Museums and heritage centers wanting a virtual layer on an existing visit
- Parks and historic sites with structures that can't be made physically accessible
- Disability organizations who can connect us with research participants
- Universities and researchers working on access, heritage or immersive media
- Schools and educators who want to use the tours in a classroom
For participants
Join the research
This is the one we need most, and the one nobody else can do.
The research depends on people with disabilities evaluating the experiences directly: testing whether the navigation works, whether the audio description describes the right things, whether any of it is worth the time it takes. We're particularly looking for persons with disabilities, including people who are blind and people with visual or motor skill disabilities.
You don't need any technical background, and you don't need to know anything about heritage sites. Knowing what doesn't work for you is the entire qualification.
Participants are compensated for their time. Sessions can be run remotely or in person around Knoxville and Blount County, with whatever accommodations you need to take part.
Current research · Phase 3
Take the 360-degree virtual tour survey
Phase 3 of the research is open. The survey is run through the University of Birmingham, UK, and the research tour is part of it, so please start from the survey link rather than looking for the tour on its own.
360-degree Virtual Tour Survey, University of Birmingham UK. Please share it with anyone who might take part.
For individuals
Volunteer
Some of this work needs hands and time more than it needs money.
- Oral history. If your family lived in these mountains, that's a story we'd like to record before it's gone
- Transcription and captioning. Turning recorded interviews into readable text
- Research and archives. Chasing down the history behind a structure, a family, an object
- Photography and video. Assisting on documentation days in the field
- Outreach. Connecting us with a community, a site, or an organization we should know
Before you give
Questions people ask
Is my donation tax-deductible?
HeritageWays is a nonprofit organization, and our application for recognition of tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code is in process. Please check with your tax advisor about the deductibility of gifts made while the application is pending. Every gift gets an emailed receipt.
Where does the money actually go?
Into producing the tours: travel and 360° documentation at heritage sites, audio description writing and recording, captioning and transcription, accessibility testing, and stipends for the participants who do that testing.
[Once you have a first annual report, link it here and state your program-expense ratio. Donors look for it, and a small organization that volunteers the number is more credible than a large one that doesn't.]
Do you sell or share donor information?
No. We don't sell, rent, trade or share donor information with anyone. If you'd rather not be named in any acknowledgment, tell us and you won't be.
Our full Donor Privacy Policy spells this out.
Can I give in memory or in honor of someone?
Yes. Add their name in the form's note field and tell us whether you'd like the family notified. Given what this work is, memorial gifts tied to a place someone loved feel especially fitting. A tour of a site that meant something to them is a durable thing to leave behind.
I have a place you should document. How do I suggest it?
Email lwren@retiree.utk.edu with the site, roughly where it is, who owns or manages it, and why it matters. Sites where physical access is genuinely difficult, and where someone can grant permission to document, move fastest.
Are you only working in the Great Smoky Mountains?
That's where the founding research is based, and where the first tours are being built. The intent is to extend to meaningful places across the United States. Which ones, and how quickly, depends largely on funding and partnerships.