About Us
Our Mission: Story Preservation Initiative believes in the transformative power of story to connect people around our common humanity and create a better future.
Our Work: We are a producer and online distributor of original, content-rich audio-based narratives for K-12 students. SPI stories are the raw materials of history, roadmaps to scientific discovery, and windows to the minds of artists and skilled tradesmen and women.
What We Achieve: SPI brings listeners into contact with extraordinary people whose stories engage their hearts and minds. These personal narratives impart content knowledge and foster curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, opening doors to possible careers in professions associated with the arts, sciences, humanities, and skilled trades.
SPI was founded in 2010. We make our work available to all free of charge.
“When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.”
Our Initiatives
K-3 Learning
Lab
Storytelling and reading aloud to young children lay the foundation for early literacy and are key to future reading success. SPI’s K-3 project brings timeless and imaginative stories—including folklore, fables, and contemporary tales—to life through a diverse group of master storytellers in the online Learning Lab. This project fosters English language literacy and social-emotional learning while sparking imagination, curiosity, empathy, and a lifelong love of storytelling.
Learning Lab
The Learning Lab features a collection of first-person narratives from people in the arts, sciences, and humanities, as well as eyewitnesses to history. These voices connect learning to lived experience and encourage creative and critical thinking. We are actively working to preserve the collection and expand public access, safeguarding an irreplaceable record of human experience and knowledge for generations to come.
“History is best taught and learned by the telling of stories. By listening to the stories of people who lived through the historical events and eras we study in class, students have felt a direct relationship to those events in a way that is otherwise difficult to achieve. Personal stories being told by the people who lived them is the “hook” that history teachers are so often looking for. I am so pleased to be able to use these accounts in my American History class. ”