The month of June was concerned with a general set up for the scanning
and organization of the PBF archives. This consisted of several meetings with
David Ibsen, contacts from Ambrose University, and PBF members who played a
part in the future of the archive. The PBF archives consist of textbooks,
notes, yearbooks, and anything else pertaining to the Prophetic Bible
Institute, Berean Bible College, and Foothill Bible College. These institutes
were part of William Aberhart’s legacy. Before the scanning could take place,
however, many details needed to be arranged. We were hoping to recruit high
school students, in need of work experience, near Ambrose University to scan
the PBF documents. My first goal in June was to contact high schools in hope of
finding such students, however I did not hear back from any of them.
My second goal was to recruit as many organizations and individuals with
PBF connections to attend a meeting discussing the future of the archive. While
I did not hear back from several organizations, several PBF alumni attended the
meeting, and the meeting held on June 27th was a success. We discussed the
content and future of the archives as well as a PBF meeting supposed to be held
next year. There were many details still needing to be arranged pertaining to
the future of the archive. Towards the end of June, I met with the archive
manager of the Glenbow Museum to discuss whether, after completion, the PBF
archive could be donated to the museum. Glenbow accepted. Still hoping that
high school students would help, I started the process of scanning the
archives on my own.
The month of June was also concerned with research on my personal project: the
policies put in place by William Aberhart during his time as the Premier of
Alberta, specifically the policies concerning mental health and poverty. While
social credit was his most famous policy, Aberhart played an important role in
guaranteed income and the eugenics movement in Alberta. My research process
consisted of reading and listening to Aberhart’s original speeches and
broadcasts, reading recent articles, looking through the Glenbow archives, and
interviewing an economist. This research has also given me a better context to
Aberhart’s life and legacy. It has also helped me better understand the
importance of the PBF archives and appreciate and understand the PBF alumni
that I have met.
I mainly worked on scanning and organizing the PBF archive for the first
few weeks of July. I would spend approximately every other day in a library
study room at Ambrose University, scanning the archives and organizing the
scanned pictures (jpeg’s) into folders on my computer. Every time I scanned a
new document, I would add it to a master doc of everything scanned into the
digital archive, that way I can easily compare the digital PBF archives with
the Glenbow ones. On alternate days, I copy and paste each jpeg into a
publisher document, where I crop them and fit them to a page. This way all
jpeg’s pertaining to the same Archive document can be put together in one
single digital document. Once the pictures are formatted to the page, I convert
the publisher document into PDF and save them in the same folder as the jpegs.
Due to the large quantity of documents needing to be scanned, this process will
most-likely make up the majority of my work for the rest of the summer. Further
discussion still needs to take place on the future of the Archive and how much
of it the Glenbow Museum will take.
Along with the scanning of the Archives, I have continued (though less
frequently) my research on Aberhart and his policies concerning low income and
mental health. In the mid-late 1930’s, Aberhart introduced the Social Credit
party where he promised to give everyone a monthly amount of money. Though his
party won the majority votes, Social Credit was not successful. There were many
economic and political issues for why the “guaranteed income” promised to the
people could not be given out. The idea of guaranteed income continues to be
explored by political parties and economic policies, however it is continually
found that, though in theory the strategy is ideal, in practice it is
challenging. This led me to study what policies should be in practice today, in
view of the lessons learned by Aberhart and his policies for putting money into
the hands of the people. While directly giving out money is found to not work
today, there are other means to help the ever growing problem of homelessness.
An alternative to guaranteed income is “guaranteed housing”, an idea quickly
spreading in North America. The Housing First project helps give homeless
individuals stable housing with no to very little rent. This approach is found
to be very effective in North America today in the quest to end homelessness.
In this way, my independent research has been studying housing first and
comparing it to Aberhart’s Guaranteed Income and Social Credit policies.
August consisted of work continued scanning of the archive and
preparation of the archive for easy delegation of the task to future interns. I
also spent a significant amount of time in preparation of a second PBF meeting
on August 10, where we discussed the future of the archive and its format as
well as how to organize the PBF group and its members. We also held a meeting
on August 10 concerning intern recruitment and internship details. I spent a
significant amount of time leading up to the meeting trying to recruit students
for the internship and organizations as sponsors. Though finding organizations
proved to be more challenging, we were able to recruit several students for the
meeting. With the archive still needing to be scanned and donated to Glenbow,
the last weeks of my employment have consisted of organizing the archive to be
passed on to interns and further meetings with Glenbow Museum.
