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These are listed in alphabetical order. This is a growing and evolving list: please send us resources you know about. We are looking for projects that exemplify community outreach and support of conversation and reading/writing.
Bookcrossing
www.bookcrossing.com
Bookcrossing is a network of over 400,000 people worldwide who are playing an interactive story game. Members register a book number on the website and then post the site address and number inside a book they want to share with others. Across the front of the book is a label that reads: Free book. They then leave the book in a public place and the person who finds it is invited to post a journal entry on the title, and leave it out for the next person to find and read. The whole idea is a labor of love developed by Ron Hornbaker, a web-designer who is a partner at Humankind Systems, Inc., a software and Internet development company with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, and Sandpoint, Idaho.
There are currently nearly 2.5 million books in the game. Ten copies of Storycatcher went into play in October 2005.
The Center for Digital Storytelling
www.storycenter.org
The Center for Digital Storytelling is a California-based non-profit organization rooted in the art of personal storytelling. Its mission is to assist young people and adults in using the tools of digital media to craft, record, share, and value the stories of individuals and communities, in ways that improve lives. In addition to their Digital Storytelling Workshops, they work with a wide range of community, educational, and business organizations to offer customized services and consultation on the development of special projects.
Conversation Cafes
www.conversationcafe.org
This is a project of the New Road Map Foundation that grew out of the distress after 9/11 and the desire to foster a culture of conversation that would provide place and process for people to come together, bring their diversity of thought and feeling and find their ways to stories that could restore a sense of community. Constantly evolving, this is now a self-organizing international movement of people who find the courage to "host" table conversations at cafes and provide the space for Storycatching.
The Giraffe Project
www.giraffe.org
The Giraffe Project is dedicated to telling the courageous stories of ordinary people who take heroic action with their lives. They introduce themselves on their website by saying: Giraffe Heroes Project is a national nonprofit that honors people who stick their necks out for the common good, inspires others to do the same, and gives them tools to succeed. Since 1984, the project has been finding people who act with courage and caring in their communities or farther afield, then telling the stories of these "Giraffe Heroes" in print, in schools, on television and radio, and on the web.
This is a truly inspiring website and will give you lots of stories and connections into the kinds of actions that create and sustain hope.
Global Playback
www.globalplayback.org
Playback Theatre invites personal stories, told in community, and honors the storytellers through enacting their experiences. These enactments have promoted compassion and understanding in challenging arenas around the world. Groups in conflict and people divided by race, class or caste have found new attitudes of acceptance through sharing experiences in playback performances. This is storytelling transformed into theater—not by professional actors, but by people who are willing to take the power of the written and spoken word and enliven it for all to see.
Nancy Pearl
www.nancypearl.com
How many librarians do you know that have had an action figure modeled after them? Well, librarian Nancy Pearl is a phenomenon. In 1998 she developed the program "If all of Seattle (her hometown) read the same book." This movement to create a community through collective reading has spread to many cities. Pearl is a commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and the author of two books that list her favorite reading: Book Lust which sold 80,000 copies, and the newly released, More Book Lust. When I handed her a copy of Storycatcher, I told her, "I named my book after you…" Nancy is a remarkable catcher and releaser of published stories. She likes to honor good books that are not necessarily best sellers, and is a devoted reader of memoir and biography as well as fiction.
Story Circle Network
www.storycircle.org
Story Circle Network, originating from Austin, TX, is dedicated to helping women share the stories of their lives in writing and raising public awareness of the importance of women's personal histories. The Story Circle Network is made up of women who want to explore their lives and their souls through life-writing--writing that focuses on personal experience, through memoirs and autobiographies, in diaries and journals, in personal essays, in poetry. The Network is for every woman who aims to claim the power of her experience, who wants to map her journey, and who is determined to name herself. The Network has a facilitator's guide to help women establish Story Circles in their communities.
StoryCorps
www.storycorps.net
StoryCorps is a national (USA) project designed to instruct and inspire people to record each other's stories in sound. The project is designed to capture the stories of ordinary people so these can be treasured by families and communities, and also to place a copy of each story in archives in the Library of Congress. The first StoryBooths opened in New York City's Grand Central Terminal in October 2003. The organization also has traveling recording studios, called MobileBooths, which embarked on cross-country tours in May 2005. People sign up for an interview time and StoryCorps sound engineers handle all the technology of recording so that people can focus on talking with each other.
Clips from these interviews are played regularly on National Public Radio and the movement has garnered corporate support and great public interest.
Veterans History Project
www.loc.gov/vets/
Housed within the American Folk life Center in the Library of Congress, the Veterans History Project seeks to collect, preserve, and share the stories of ordinary soldiers in the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. The site offers guidelines for sending material and links to similar programs such as The Memory Project which collects the stories of Canadian veterans (www.thememoryproject.com/veterans_index.cfm)
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