Every year, scores of new kids discover the Story Pirates Podcast or experience one of our popular in-school creative writing programs that are granted for free to Title I classrooms across the country. Tens of thousands of them are inspired to send us their own original stories. Despite our rapid organizational growth, we remain committed to ensuring that we read and respond to every single story we receive. We believe that when a caring adult tells a child that their words and ideas matter, that child will believe them, so we work to ensure that each young author receives a positive, personalized response to every story they send, encouraging them to keep writing and keep exploring their creativity. We call this initiative Story Love.
The Story Love project began in 2004 and quickly became a challenge as we gradually reached exponentially more kids each year. The biggest challenge and opportunity for Story Love arose at the start of the pandemic when we could no longer host in-person events or engage in our normal school programming. In the wake of COVID-19, faced with the prospect of being unable to work in person with any of the students we typically serve, our incredible staff focused its creativity and ingenuity on pivoting to virtual program content, and the result was the realization that the magic was not only in live performance. Rather, with stellar curriculum and audio (which we had already mastered with our wildly popular podcast), we could reach exponentially more kids than ever before. The result was Story Quest, a four-episode podcast series for the classroom, a wildly engaging way to teach the building blocks of narrative writing. When students then began submitting stories electronically, we needed to develop a whole new system of collection, loving and returning stories. The Story Love team worked tirelessly to create an entirely new system of uploading and digitally logging stories within an online database. Then, these scans were made available online to volunteers via our website. Volunteer events shifted to online videoconferences, where volunteers could read the scanned stories that had been individually assigned to them and utilize a submission form where volunteers could leave typed or handwritten feedback for authors. Those notes are then returned electronically to classrooms via email, and the program has become a popular employee engagement tool for major corporations like NBCUniversal, Amazon and Salesforce.
Story Love has been a resounding success this year to date. We’ve held a total of 158 volunteer events with 26 top-tier companies to help us reach even more under-resourced kids. Over 2,400 volunteers have helped us to write over 8,700 notes that we have been continuously sending back to authors. Since 2020, over 18,000 volunteers have written 61,641 notes. We have continued to successfully maintain this program and leave no story unloved.
