COMMUNITY EVENTS
The Mogan Center promotes folk arts, dance and music and helps to cosponsor many of the ethnic festivals held in the city. Programs such as Black History Month, Dia del Portugal, Irish Cultural Festival, Women’s Week, Greek Independence Day, Puerto Rican Festival, Lao New Year’s Day, Franco American Week, Armenian Commemoration Day, Native American Pow Wow, the Southeast Asian Water Festival and the Jack Kerouac Weekend are major attractions for the region and in which Lowell National Historical Park and the University of Massachusetts Lowell has had a growing collaboration.

RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION PROJECTS
The Mogan Center produces at least one major historical/cultural/folklife documentation project each year, working especially with local and regional scholars and organizations. Special attention is paid to projects that fill in gaps in the city's record or projects involving materials at risk. Documentation projects range from oral histories, archival inventories, outreach to underserved populations and historical research. Recent projects have included an oral history project on Cambodians in Lowell, Puerto Rican artifact outreach and Lowell District Court archival inventory report.

SCHOLAR IN THE CITY RESEARCH PROGRAM
The Mogan Center sponsors an annual Scholar in the City Research Program to support work in the area of public history as it is related to the city. The Scholar is selected in a competitive process and offered a stipend. The Scholar conducts research on a Lowell topic and offers public programs while the scholar is in "residence." The primary purpose of the program is to develop new scholarship to strengthen the interpretation of Lowell’s industrial and immigrant past and its present day sense of community. Potential topics of study could be waterpower, change in the environment, technological innovation, capital and labor, growth and decline of ethnic neighborhoods, women in the workforce, urban politics, preservation of traditional cultures, or the history of the textile industry.

EXHIBITS
For over a decade, the Mogan Cultural Center has provided the community, the space to create temporary exhibits which "tell the human story...of Lowell.” As the exhibits program expanded in the 1990s, local people became invested in Lowell National Historical Park by being the driving force in telling their own stories. This process cultivated a sense of "ownership" of the park and provided a strong support network to continue the Mogan Center's mission. Exhibits at the Mogan Center should meet the following goals:

• To engage the local community in sharing their collections, memories, and histories through exhibits and special events at the Mogan Cultural Center.
• To select exhibits and special events which enrich the programs of the Lowell National Historical Park and the University of Massachusetts Lowell offered at the Mogan Cultural Center.
• To foster a greater understanding and appreciation of the "Working People of Lowell" by the local community and visitors.

To view the Black History Month Exhibit please click here

Review a list of previous exhibits at the Mogan Center.

EDUCATION
In the past, the Mogan Center has hosted non-credit general education courses in its third-floor classrooms. These covered Lowell history, Lowell architecture, and genealogy, and were taught by staff of the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The Mogan Center currently selects course instruction, prepares course descriptions and runs the classes, which are publicized and enrolled through the University's offices. First offerings in the new program have included several courses in Basic Khmer (Cambodian) and Spanish languages. Other non-credit courses for the future may include Piñata Making, Irish Step Dancing, and African Fan and Hat Making. In the Fall of 2003, we will be offering a series of language classes for those interested in conversational Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Khmer.

WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITY
The Mogan Center seeks to work with the community to help preserve the history and culture of Lowell. We solicit individuals and organizations to partner with us to come up with ideas for community events, research and documentation projects, the Scholar in the City Program, exhibits and education. If you would like to propose your own idea please review the Request for Proposal or contact Mehmed Ali at 978-275-1826.