Casting a Wider Net: A Community Oral History Project

Casting A Wider Net showcases the stories of Cape Verdean, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran members of New Bedford’s working waterfront in their own words. The exhibit is the culmination of the Casting A Wider Net community oral history project which was developed to collect and share stories of communities of color that have been and continue to be an integral part of New Bedford’s commercial fishing industry. The resulting photographs, recordings, and transcripts will become part of the Center’s archive and the NOAA Voices web-based archive and are the basis for the exhibit. Learn more about the project here. 

Visitors have the opportunity to hear the voices of each person who was interviewed, view a scrapbook of photos narrators and their families, and can even write them a message in the exhibit guestbook. 

In November 2025, the Center was awarded a Expand Massachusetts Stories — Story Forward Grant from Mass Humanities to share the Casting A Wider Net (CAWN) exhibit with the greater New Bedford community in a new initiative called Sharing the Catch. The funding will allow us to travel the CAWN exhibit to three sites across New Bedford in 2026 and develop tie-in programing and curriculum materials. The exhibit will travel to New Bedford Community Health, the Community Economic Development Center, and Global Learning Charter Public School.

The grant also funded the creation of a digital version of the exhibit on FHC’s website.

Check out what people are saying about the exhibit on our Press Page!

The Casting A Wider Net project was funded in part by a Wicked Cool Places grant from New Bedford Creative, a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and an Expanding Massachusetts Stories grant from Mass Humanities, which received support from Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Casting A Wider Net traveling exhibit is supported by – a Wicked Cool Places grant funded by the City of New Bedford through its Arts, Culture & Tourism Fund with additional support from Barr Foundation, Bristol County Savings Bank, and Mass Cultural Council. For 2025, this project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.