The aim of this paper is to describe two collaborative linguistic research and documentation projects which created two corpora of Ch'ol narratives, available through the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America. The paper outlines how the projects served twin goals of (i) facilitating linguistic research and documentation materials on Ch'ol, and (ii) increasing language awareness and building capacity among Ch'ol-speaking students through the process of corpus creation, in which students were involved in all stages of the project. The paper discusses how this "crowd-sourcing" approach to linguistic corpus creation has the potential to benefit both language communities and researchers. The authors of this paper represent the different roles of participants in the project: native-speaker linguists working in universities in southern Mexico, linguists in the US and Canada, as well as a Ch'ol-speaking student who participated in the workshops and corpus project. The paper also highlights how material from the corpora has been used in subsequent linguistic research as well as for pedagogical materials.