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Week of March 30 - April 5, 2008
MESA, ARIZONA – Project StoryKeeper, an organization whose mission is to preserve the American heritage by capturing and sharing the life stories of all Americans, today announced it is seeking 100,000 volunteers to be trained for the special skill of interviewing and gathering audio biographies of elders. The stories will then be posted on the internet for family and friends to enjoy, preserve and add to for generations to come.
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“I personally did not know my parents all that well, and by the time they passed away it was too late,” said Dennis Stack, Founder of Project StoryKeeper, the organization which is initiating the not-for-profit Project Storykeeper. “As a stockbroker, I worked with many of my clients very hard to preserve their money and wealth for their children, only to see it squandered or create more problems than it solved. It finally hit me that in our society we do a heck of a good job preserving the valuables . . . but not such a good job of preserving the values.”
Project StoryKeeper is Stack’s answer to that challenge. The project involves recruiting 100,000 volunteers, ideally those that already work or could work within elder care settings such as hospices, assisted living facilities, and home care agencies. Volunteers will be trained on how to use a special “audio biography kit”, which includes questions, interviewing techniques to be used in drawing out the personal histories of senior citizens within those facilities.
Proper training is essential since a StoryKeeper’s job of capturing a life story – with all its joys, sorrows, lessons and laughter -- is a specialized skill. “It’s not as easy as just putting a microphone in front of someone,” said Tom Cormier, Executive Director of Project StoryKeeper. “We have developed a process based on several years of conducting thousands of interviews; there’s special technique to getting the interviewee warmed up, opened up, and speaking freely and openly.” Cormier also stresses that the process is best left to a third-party Storykeeper, since having a fresh listener – one that’s unbiased with family history and politics – is essential to lively and enthusiastic storytelling.
The upside of Project StoryKeeper is huge. Stack has found the process of gathering a person’s personal history is equally therapeutic for both the “keeper” and the teller. “For the teller, there is an element of joy, healing, and escape involved in reliving their past with someone new,” said Stack. “The memories, for them, are priceless. For the StoryKeeper, we’ve found that facilitating the interview makes their time of service so much more interesting and enjoyable…their relationship with these seniors is much more rewarding.”
Best of all, storytellers and their families then have a permanent audio record on the internet of that person’s life -- as Stack puts it, “who they are.” They can then refer to the interview on their own family website, add to it and cherish it for years to come. “Today there’s a huge disconnect between teenagers and their elders,” said Stack. “When they get older they’ll come to realize how important it was to know their senior family members. With Project StoryKeeper, our mission is to capture who these people are, the voice, the wit, the personality . . . so anyone can get to know them as a person. It will be preserved so they can be there for future generations.”
More Information:
Project StoryKeeper’s mission is to help preserve the American heritage by capturing and sharing the life stories of all Americans, especially our country's oldest and wisest members. The organization believes that everyone can benefit from the wealth of experience and wisdom found in each individual, and has acted on the vision to provide easy-to-use audio-biography tools to help everyone contribute to the mission of preserving the past, enriching the present and strengthening the future—one story at a time.
Visit their site at www.storykeeper.org .
Source:
Adapted from materials provided by Project StoryKeeper.
Copyright:
Copyright © 2008 Alzheimer's Weekly LLC. All rights reserved.
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