Central Florida Regional Pilot
Building a Legacy is underway in Central Florida — the regional phase of Peace Pavilion’s national recording work, with sessions taking place across Greater Orlando, Kissimmee, and Sanford.
We are recording the lived experiences of Muslim Americans across the region, in their own voices. Not a survey. Not an interview about being Muslim in America. A structured conversation, an hour or more, in which someone shares their lived experience in their own words.
More than 125 hours of lived experience recorded. Four states. Three languages. The work continues now.
Seed support for the Central Florida Regional Pilot has been provided by the DeVos Family Foundation and the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management, through one of five Seed Grants awarded in 2026.
The generations who built these communities are aging.
The people who built community in this region — who opened the first businesses, who raised children in a country their parents had only read about — most of them have never been asked to share that experience from beginning to end.
What they carry is not written down anywhere. Once they are gone, it cannot be recovered.
Why this work, and why now →A trained facilitator sits with one storyteller.
Before anything is recorded, we walk through what will happen and what we are asking permission for — what is preserved, who may hear it, and how those decisions can be changed later. Nothing is recorded until the storyteller has understood all of it and decided, use by use, what they permit.
Then the recording begins. The conversation follows four movements, shaped to let someone speak about their own life on their own terms.
- 01 · Origins — Where you come from, and what it gave you.
- 02 · The Journey — What you built, navigated, and survived.
- 03 · Lived Experience & Belonging — What it has meant to you, on your own terms.
- 04 · Legacy as Testimony — What you want the next generation to know.
The conversation is not rushed and it does not follow a script. If something matters to the storyteller, we stay there. They can pause at any point, or stop.
Your story stays yours. We will never change your words, and every permission you give can be changed or withdrawn at any time.
That principle is narrative sovereignty: your authority over what you shared does not end when the recording does.
How your story is protected →The next generation is learning to ask.
Young people from these communities are trained to record the lived experiences of their own elders. They learn how to sit with someone properly — how to listen without steering, how to hold a silence, how to ask about a hard year without flinching.
What they record stays in the community it came from. And the skill stays with them.
A community that can record its own memory does not need permission to be remembered.
We all have a story to share. What is yours?
Everyone carries lived experience no one else has had. We record it, protect it, and bring it into public life — through exhibitions, public programs, and everything the collection makes possible — so that Muslim Americans are part of the American record, and stay part of it for generations who come after.
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01
Share your lived experience.
Sit with a trained facilitator and talk about where you come from, what you built and survived, what it has meant to you, and what you want the next generation to know.
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02
Name someone.
Most people do not think their own life is worth recording. Someone else usually knows better. If there is an elder, a friend, a neighbour, a colleague, a family member, your hero, your mentor, your parents, your siblings, your teacher, your doctor, or anyone else whose experience should not be lost — tell us about them.
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03
Bring a gathering to your community.
Bring together people whose lived experiences should be recorded. Fund a day, organize one, or offer a space — we bring the rest.
Learn more →
Sessions are arranged one at a time, and we come to you — a home, a community space, or a room we set up nearby. Tell us who should be recorded and we will be in touch to find a time.
From regional to state to national.
Central Florida is preparing us to take this across the state, and then to communities in cities across the country. More to come.
Everything recorded here becomes part of the Living Memory Collection. The methods we are testing in this pilot phase are the ones that will carry the work forward — and what we learn in these rooms is what Unsira is being built to hold.
In time, this work builds toward a national museum dedicated to Muslim American lived experience — a permanent public home for what is being recorded now. That institution does not exist yet. What will fill it is being gathered one conversation at a time.
Everyone carries a library of lived experience that disappears when they do. When we know one another’s, fear has less room to grow.