StoryCorps

StoryCorps is an American non-profit organization which aims to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs. Its mission statement is "to help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all—one story at a time." This award provides general operating support to StoryCorps to pursue its mission to record, preserve, and share the stories of the American people.

StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization created in 2003 as a national oral history project that gives ordinary Americans the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives. Working through several initiatives, StoryCorps collects tens of thousands of interviews each year and presents one each week on National Public Radio (NPR). StoryCorps also partners with POV and Upworthy to create animated versions of select interviews, which are distributed digitally. MacArthur funds support general operations of StoryCorps. The outcome of this grant is that more people will have the opportunity to record interviews through StoryCorps, and the U.S. public will have access to more first person stories about people from underrepresented communities.

StoryCorps is a national oral history project that gives ordinary Americans the opportunity to share and preserve the stories of their lives through recorded interviews. This award enables StoryCorps to: (1) partner with community-based organizations across the country to collect interviews involving a range of people whose lives have been affected by jail incarceration; (2) use these interviews to produce finished audio content for broad dissemination through National Public Radio and other broadcast and online outlets; and (3) create a searchable archive of interviews, associated photographs, and other materials for use in future research and communications projects connected with the Safety and Justice Challenge, the Foundation's criminal justice reform initiative aimed at reducing over-incarceration by targeting the misuse and overuse of jails.

StoryCorps is a national oral history project that gives ordinary Americans the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of their lives through intimate interviews between themselves and their loved ones. The interviews are placed in an archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and some are excerpted for public radio broadcast. Since the project began in 2003, StoryCorps has collected over 50,000 interviews involving over 90,000 people, making the StoryCorps archive the largest single collection of human voices ever recorded. The archive is a cultural and historic asset for the nation and future generations.

StoryCorps’ mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives. Since 2003, it has given more than 80,000 people the chance to record interviews, pass wisdom from one generation to the next, and leave a legacy for future generations through its archive at the Library of Congress. It shares selected excerpts of these stories through broadcasts on National Public Radio to an audience of some 14 million weekly listeners, and through animated shorts, its popular website, podcasts, and best-selling books. These powerful stories illustrate our shared humanity.