Home | The Pandemic Journaling Project

Usually, history is written only by the powerful. When the history of COVID-19 is written, let's make sure that doesn't happen.

The goal of the Pandemic Journaling Project is to make sure that ordinary people struggling through this pandemic have their voices heard, and their experiences remembered.

Make sure what you and your family are living through is not forgotten. Join the Project, and start telling your own story. You don't need a computer, and you don't even need to write anything to participate. All you need is a phone. It's easy, and it will only take as long as you want to spend — as little as 15 minutes a week.

Start your journal

Once a week, you'll get an email or text message with a link. We'll ask a few questions, then it's your chance to describe, in your own words, how the pandemic is affecting you. You can:

Write it down.

Record yourself talking.

Take a photo of something important to you and write, or talk, about it.

We'll save your journal entries here, in the archive we're building. With each entry, you'll choose whether to keep it private (for yourself and our research team) or give us permission to share it publicly on this site. You can access your own journal, download it, and keep it for the future on our secure MyJournal page

Before you start, we’ll ask some questions about you, your health and wellbeing, your views, and the impact of the coronavirus on you and those you care about. We'll ask a few questions each week too, right before you start your weekly journal entries. Your answers to these survey questions, together with your journal entries, will be preserved as a digital archive. They will help researchers learn how different people are experiencing the pandemic, identify challenges in our country’s pandemic response, and work toward solutions.

Start your journal

The Pandemic Journaling Project

Your story matters ...

Here’s how it works.