What is a Legacy Project or Legacy Capturing?
Someone’s legacy is layered, and it can include a multitude of things such as their memories, stories, life’s work recipes, values, wisdom and lasting impact they have on those around them. It can be how the person’s values can live on through their friends, family and community, or it can be how their contributions (whether practical, emotional or spiritual) to those around them changed and touched people.
A Legacy Project (or as I call it ‘Legacy Capturing’) is the act of preserving these parts of a person, and collating them into a tangible keepsake for their friends, family and community to share and be a way to continue to connect with the person who has died, and bring them into the future with you.
This kind of project is often undertaken during times of a terminal diagnosis, after the death of another loved one, or during your own planning for end of life. There is no right or wrong way to create a legacy, as long as the person you are honouring is considered.
Why should I start a legacy project?
Preserve family history
Share life lessons
Provide comfort and closure
Enhance emotional well-being
Create connection and conversation with loved ones
Inspire broader impact
How to start a legacy project
Think about what your person did in their life. What did they value? What mattered most to them? What were they good at, what were their skills? What brought them joy? In what ways were they creative? What do you remember most about them?
Considering the person and how they lived their life can inform what kind of legacy project you choose to create. Were they a chef or a wonderful home-cook? Were they a writer that never got to publish anything? Did they like to paint or draw? Were they passionate about gardening or animals? Were they an advocate for a particular cause? Dive deep into who this person was, and from there a legacy project can grow.
Types of legacy projects
Having an illustration done of their garden that they loved.
Press flowers from their garden into a special journal.
Publishing their poetry, short stories or autobiography.
Collect their favourite and personal recipes (in their handwriting is lovely if possible) and create a recipe book from them.
Creating a book out of photographs they’d taken throughout their life.
Making a scrapbook of photos of them with their friends, family and community.
Recording voice messages of them reading stories to children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews.
Creating a short documentary about them and their life.
Start an organisation or a grant in their name.
Make a quilt, teddy bear, wall hanging or memorial piece out of their clothing or other fabrics that they used in their life.
Purchase a bench in their favourite park.
Create a community garden in their honour.
The possibilities are endless, and are entirely personal to you and your person. Creating a legacy project, or capturing a legacy is about honouring, remembering and preserving the parts of someone you loved, and having something tangible to hold onto.
Resources: The Legacy Project Intervention to Enhance Meaningful Family Interactions: Case Examples (PubMed)
