I exult in uncovering and reporting on online venues that are repositories of stories. Here are three I just learned of:
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- Facebook expects to add its 500 millionth user this week and intends to mark the occasion by focusing on user stories rather than numbers, reports Mashable. The social-media behemoth will celebrate by unveiling a Facebook Stories section of the site. Facebook will “sort actual, submitted user stories by location and theme. Theme examples given included ‘finding love’ and ‘natural disasters,'” Mashable reports. Facebook is collecting stories here, and — arrrgghhh! — they are limited to 420 characters each. I could certainly tell a story or two — such as my story of finding my childhood best friend through Facebook, but in 420 characters …?
- The Wing to Wing Women’s Mentoring Project™ is a global volunteer
movement that aims to inspire women to reach out to other women and, through the simple act of offering guidance and insight, help them achieve their personal and professional aspirations. The program’s goal is to eliminate negative competitiveness and encourage positive assistance, woman to woman, one woman at a time. One way the project is advancing its goals is by sharing stories by both mentors and the women they mentor. The site collects stories here and shares them here. - The Hidden World of Girls is a new NPR multimedia series by THE KITCHEN SISTERS exploring the hidden world of girls. Stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities — of women who crossed a line, blazed a trail, changed the tide. The inspiration behind the series:
The idea for this series was inspired by reading the obituary of Lula Mae Hardaway, Stevie Wonder’s Mother, a sharecropper’s daughter, a girl forced into prostitution, a teenage single mother whose young blind boy was discovered singing on a street corner in Detroit by Berry Gordy Jr., a determined woman who along with her son, received the Grammy for writing Signed, Sealed Delivered. Hers was a story we knew we wanted to tell. The series was inspired again when we watched a young 16 year old charanga player in an all-girl high school mariachi band competition in San Antonio, playing for the love of tradition, for a sense of belonging and for a scholarship, the first girl in her family to play an instrument, the first to dream of going to college. We knew this was a story we had to chronicle. And when they opened a new beauty school in Kabul, we looked at each other and thought again about “The Hidden World of Girls.” Over the last few years we’ve been collecting small stories, shards of sound, and images that have helped us imagine this series.
Instructions for submitting stories are here; radio stories can be heard here; and stories can be read here. There’s also a Facebook page for the project.