Folkstreams is a non-profit organization that aims to collect and make available online documentary films about folk art and culture.
[1] It preserves and provides wide access to documentary films about the activities, voices, and experiences of members of America's diverse regional, ethnic, religious, and occupational cultures.
Encouraged by folklorist Dr. Daniel Patterson from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Davenport saw the importance of these films and knew from experience that their natural audiences had difficulty finding and seeing them.
Their age and outdated formats, their non-standard lengths, the regional and ethnic speech of the people they feature, and their unusual subject matters had excluded many from the mainstream mass market television and cable broadcast opportunities in the last half of the 20th century.
The goals of Folkstreams are to stream more such films and contextualize them with background essays and notes, to enlighten the audience about the importance of folklore and folklife in the lives of all people, and to encourage filmmakers to deposit copies of their work in archives for long-term preservation.