In the Spring and Summer of 2020, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of professors and graduate students from various Southern California universities sensed that their world was about to be upended. They saw the existing economic and health disparities among their fellow residents in Riverside and San Bernardino County begin to fracture in ways that couldn’t be ignored.

In the Fall of 2021, StoryCenter partnered with ETSU’s Department of Communication & Performance to lead a cohort of 10 graduate students and faculty through the process of developing a brand new podcast showcasing their storytelling work both locally and nationally. We began the workshop by collaboratively developing the podcast’s title, communicative purpose, and content themes. Each participant chose a specific topic and produced their own segment as part of a cohesive podcast. Their episodes vary from guest interviews to traditional spoken-word monologues to research-driven local snapshots.

After September 11, 2001, it became clear that relationships between the U.S. and international Muslim communities needed to improve. In October 2002, Congress took a step toward fostering human understanding and open, sustainable relationships across those cultures by establishing the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) program through the U.S. Department of State. Each year, the YES Program invites high school students from countries with significant Muslim populations to live in the United States with a host family for an academic year. Not only do participants gain firsthand experience of American culture, they also have the opportunity to help their host communities learn about their home countries.

Over the past two years, StoryCenter has been honored to play a role in an innovative program in the Rio Grande Valley of Southern Texas. The project called Historias Americanas, was a three-year intensive for K-12 educators, designed by project partners, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the Museum of South Texas History. The intent was to improve the quality of American history education in the Brownsville and Edinburg school districts by building on student and community knowledge and shining a light on the cultural wealth of the area. Local history was melded with the broader history of the United States to fill in faces that were blatantly missing from textbooks.

Colleges and Universities across the United States and around the world are increasingly embracing models for service learning, as a way of connecting students with local communities and needs. As a way of kicking off a service-learning program led by the UMBC New Media Studio (NMS), StoryCenter led a series of digital storytelling trainings for staff and faculty. What then emerged was a collaboration involving the NMS and Retirement Living Television (RLTV), a closed circuit television programming effort of the Erickson Retirement Communities (now Erickson Living). 

In 2005, two members of the Ohio State University (OSU) library system, Karen Diaz and Anne Fields, attended our StoryCenter digital storytelling workshop in Asheville, NC and together created a story about renovations to the OSU library. Upon their return to Ohio, they engaged the newly formed Digital Union in a project to integrate digital storytelling into the library system’s information technology and curriculum support services. A year later, OSU invited us to lead an on-campus workshop, for a group of faculty and staff. This session resulted in the formation of an OSU Digital Storytelling Leadership Team, comprised of members drawn from several parts of the university.

StoryCenter's pioneering digital storytelling methods support multi-modal learning and have been demonstrated to increase college students' engagement and retention. Houston Community Colleges (HCCS) is the fourth largest community college system in the United States, serving more than 55,000 students. Beginning in 2014, we led Educational Technology Services and Curriculum Innovation Services staff from the six colleges, as well as faculty from various disciplines, through a series of three-day digital storytelling workshops. Following completion of their own stories, a sub-group of participants attended customized training for facilitation and implementation in the classroom. The program is part of a three-year training and implementation effort designed to incorporate digital storytelling methods across the six HCC campuses.

Graduate-level education in public health often involves professional field placements that test the knowledge of students within contexts and conditions of community and international settings. Reflection on field placements can become a critical part of the training process, for pre-professions. The stories of student successes and challenges in these placements assists in telling the story of an educational institution's own goals and accomplishments for preparing the public health leaders of tomorrow. The Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, understands the importance of supporting its graduate students in sharing stories of how service placements have changed them, as people and as professionals.  

The school dropout rate among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth is nearly three times the national average. With support from Colorado Public Television (CPT12) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the American Graduate Project aims to re-engage Denver, CO LGBTQ youth in school, through a combination of the multi-media effort "Drop in Denver," community conversation, and the provision of individual guidance to LGBTQ youth.

Though all areas of Appalachia share the problem of rural poverty, the central Appalachian region, which includes western North Carolina, has the highest poverty rate and a higher percentage of working poor than any other area in the United States. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission, nearly 60 percent of adults in central Appalachia did not graduate from high school, and almost 30 percent of Appalachian adults are functionally illiterate. Gender inequality in the region is also high – women from the Appalachian states share common challenges resulting from low educational attainment, limited employment skills, few strong role models, and low self-esteem. 

Upon arrival in the United States, many refugees speak limited or no English, possess few viable job skills, and are faced with the challenge of living with the trauma they may have experienced in their home countries. They also lack the kinds of social networks outside of their own refugee community that can help them get established. In the face of inordinate adjustment challenges, refugee families become the working poor, and refugee children are often considered "at-risk," in educational settings. Many refugee teens face difficult social adjustment issues at school, making it hard for them to stay on course academically. Others have to drop out of school to work at menial jobs, in order to help their families financially.