Story Pirates Changemakers, the nonprofit arm of Story Pirates, works to ensure that our high-quality literacy programs and creative content are conspicuous, accessible, and affordable to under-resourced elementary students, teachers, schools, and communities, ensuring that children from all backgrounds have the opportunity to believe that their words and ideas matter. We do this by teaching and inspiring creative writing for elementary age students through live shows, the #1 podcast for kids and families, and curricular school programs. As a result of those efforts, each year, thousands of kids send us their original stories.
While we can only adapt a fraction of the stories we receive, it is fundamental for kids to know that we are not operating a contest, and that the value is in the exercise of writing itself. To ensure that message is clear, we work with volunteers from around the world to provide personalized notes that compliment each author’s creativity and encourage their future writing because we believe that when a caring adult tells a child that their words and ideas matter, that child will believe them. We call this program Story Love.
In the early days, we powered this program with golf pencils, handwritten stories on their original paper, and rolling suitcases to bring them to the conference rooms of our corporate partners. When the pandemic began and our traditional methods of operation – including everything we did in schools and theaters – couldn’t exist, we began digitizing stories on cheap scanners sent to every staff member’s home and developing a complicated database built for virtual volunteering. This was not without challenges! The first versions were regularly blocked by company firewalls, and our meetings were filled with early Zoom tech glitches. But our corporate partners stayed with us, offering better resources (and patience) to help us professionalize and scale our offering.
What started as a fun diversion for 20 employees at a time is now a global volunteer initiative that can engage corporate employees anywhere, anytime, and that has gratified and inspired the creative imaginations of thousands upon thousands of kids who now see themselves as accomplished writers, compelling thinkers, and individuals with something valuable to say. We are deeply fortunate to rely on some of the largest corporations in the world, like NBCUniversal, Bloomberg, Amazon, and Salesforce, with which every new employee engages in a volunteer session with us during their orientation. And those relationships are deepening as well as growing.
Corporations are now partnering with us to create satellite programs in specific geographic regions around the country by sponsoring curriculum for full districts, and enabling us to bring a high-end live show to premier venues in their areas. We are blown away by the scale at which we can see our reach growing.
Time and again, we receive reports of increased skills and interest in Language Arts as a result of our efforts. So as not to burden the students with more testing, we rely on the extensive evaluative measures already in place at the schools we work with to measure the academic impact. At the end of the school year, teachers complete a survey about the students’ appreciation for and increased interest in storytelling and reading, as well as their academic gains as a result of their participation. Internally, we measure the effectiveness of programs by collecting and analyzing all evaluations and feedback from teachers and making adjustments for future district-wide partnerships. Discussion of feedback is baked into our regular meeting agendas and organizational culture, so we continue to adjust the program to ensure the program materials and lessons are culturally relevant, entertaining, and streamlined for usability.
