Our Story

WHO WE ARE

OUR STORY

As Tolkien said, "The road goes ever on."

In January of 1990, a group of 31 women came together to write in their diaries. Storymakers, which we named ourselves, met monthly for over twenty two years to write, share and celebrate life. It was out of our commitment to write honestly, listen deeply and support each other's vision of our lives, that StoryArts was born.

StoryArts, Inc. was the vision of Lois Sunrich, our Founding Director, and a small, intimate Board of Directors devoted to celebrating life's stories. We incorporated in October 2000, in order to create a nonprofit organization of life story writers, interviewers, editors, graphic designers, book artists, printers and binders who could provide custom memoir publishing and community story art projects to the community.

It was an experiment. Could the meaningful and often even life-changing experiences many of us had garnered from our 10-year participation in Storymakers, a county-wide women's journal writing project, be fine-tuned, expanded and offered to Elders and their families? And if so, could our Elders' cherished stories, along with the wealth of untold stories in our neighborhoods somehow also be honored, celebrated and passed on to future generations? And could we develop viable funding to support our vision, a consortium and our Founding Director, Lois Sunrich?

Family Publishing

During our first few years we focused on learning the fundamentals of custom publishing, and found we were able to produce unique, high quality, artfully designed books for our client's families. To produce these publications Lois hired, coordinated and oversaw a consortium of custom publishing experts and venders who worked for us as independent contractors. By doing this work, Lois was able to train herself in the art of fine book publishing and also collected a storehouse of stories from the past century, which both enriched her training and inspired our consortium members, immensely.

Our Elders were often in tears when they saw their books for the first time, as were the family members who received their own copies from their Elder in a "book signing, life celebration" in a family room filled with relatives from around the United States. Even after the death of a beloved Elder, when a great nephew read his auntie's stories for the first time, he was deeply grateful to her for passing on her story. Our consortium witnessed, over and over, our books valued beyond measure, by our clients.

StoryArts has now produced thirty-three high-quality published works. They include the love story between a soldier who died in Vietnam and his childhood sweetheart-bride written for their six-week old daughter, now an adult, whom he never met, a living American pioneer's families' 1000-year journey from Europe to a small hometown in Idaho, a courageous Holocaust survivor, the search for a mother sixty years after her death, and many more. Each publication was uniquely designed to meet our client's financial investment and also to reflect the essence of the stories, the authors and their families.

Community Projects

From our inception we wanted to offer both Family Publishing and Community Projects. Our publishing services were funded on a fee-for-service basis, and it was our hope that the income from these publications would eventually become a third of our total revenue. You see, we were hoping that perhaps the publishing revenue might help fund our Community Projects, along with some public grants. We envisioned producing city-wide Youth/Elder Projects, we called Legacies, which intended to be our primary offering to the community.

However, during our third year we realized our Family Publishing services took all of Lois' time, but were not even bringing in the revenue needed to support her, still our only staff person, much less fund our Community Projects, which was our primary goal as a non profit.

Therefore by 2003 we decided to focus our efforts on Legacies, alone, in hopes that would help us be self-supporting financially. As a result, from 2004 through 2006, we produced our first year-long Legacies Project in Encinitas and then our second in Solana Beach.

Legacies was a grand leap for us. Just as in the beginning when we had to learn the art of custom publishing, we now had to design and produce city-wide story art projects, which had never been done before. It was a completely innovative, new concept.

The idea was to pair Elders off with young people, primarily high school students, and let the young people tell their partner's story through art books and at a community-wide storytelling event. It was an ambitious vision and complex endeavor that turned out to be profoundly impacting for all those involved. And, our first project in Encinitas drew the attention of the Seth Sprauge Foundation, which has become a devoted funder for many of StoryArts community projects.

With the success of these two projects we decided to give our full attention to an extensive grant writing campaign, to fund a San Diego Legacies Project for which we had gotten significant community support. Steve Howard, our Board Chairman, and Lois designed a funding strategy, working diligently for many months. She first researched funding sources and then sent out extensive packages of information to a wide spectrum of local and national sources.

However it turned out, sadly, we did not have enough lead-time to bring in the full funding required prior to the start of the next school year, which was when the San Diego project was scheduled to begin.

Lois had invested all her time and energy over six or seven years in developing and producing our publishing services and Legacies projects. There simply was not also time for the long-term nature of relationship building with donors needed for successful fund raising, in the short amount of time we had. We had no choice, we had to face our longstanding, seven-year pattern of insufficient funding and so decided to suspend providing any services during a period of reevaluation in order to consider our future as an organization.

Transition Years

After seven years of steadfast effort on the part of our Board, Steve and Lois, our consortium members and volunteers, it was clear that, no matter how successful and well received our books and community projects were, our funding issues were insurmountable. We therefore not only terminated our plans to produce a Legacies Project in San Diego, but also, and even more impactful, stopped any further development of the organization while we took time to evaluate our future.

With the help of Marybeth Holliday, a previous Board member and organizational consultant, each of our Board members evaluated, personally, if they felt called to continue serving on the Board now or not. As a result three members resigned, and three stayed on to oversee a period of evaluation in which we would determine if StoryArts was able to continue offering services.

During this period of reexamination, with the support of the Board that remained, Lois began developing a retrospective project designed as a multi media story art book collection, which would tell the story of her twenty years producing story art projects. It would be compiled for her two sons, and therefore be an authentic, sample "legacy" to the younger generation.
The purpose was to both review StoryArts contribution in the community, and produce a hands-on life story project for potential clients who could easily create one themselves, thereby giving us the skills to then eliminate the previously expensive costs of fine, custom publishing or large scale, grant-based community projects.

As Lois began working on the project, which she titled Dear Curt & Brad… A Retrospective Collection, she presented these art books at Board meetings, where we now had three new members. To her surprise, she was given enthusiastic feedback to continue in the direction she was going.

Diary Openings

With the encouragement of new Board members to continue the Retrospective Collection, Lois realized it was becoming necessary to conceive of a way to share these one-of-a-kind story art works with the community, if future clients were going to be able to share similar books with their family and friends. She therefore designed a process she called a Diary Opening.
Essentially it is a weekend afternoon celebratory workshop in which a life story is told and corresponding art books are showcased while participants write and read a story of their own as a response.

Later during this period, Lois also developed and produced Memoir Makers, a year-long, monthly women's project. The reason for pulling together this circle was simple — to help bring in client fees, as she continued StoryArts organizational reevaluation and produced the Retrospective Collection. However, to everyone's surprise, as the year went on, Memoir Makers became an exceedingly creative, effective and economical model for clients to tell their stories, create art books and build an intimate community, concluding in a Book Arts Exhibit and Diary Opening, all of which were the ultimate goals of the Retrospective Collection, as well as the heart of StoryArts mission.

As the summer of 2010 came around it began to be evident that we had made it through a difficult, uncharted transitional period. We also now approached our 10th year as a nonprofit. With the help of new members on our Board, Lois' tenacity in the face of challenge, our anonymous funding angel and the Seth Sprague Foundation's financial support, as well as the Memoir Makers' courage to participate in an experimental project, we had emerged from a three-year transitional period with a new vision.

We are now able to offer our services economically, while creating intimate community productions. Yes, we have gone from high cost, fine publishing and expansive citywide productions to hands-on story art books and intimate community building.

In the summer of 2010 we held a 10-Year Celebration, in Lois' home-studio, to announce that we had chosen to continue on. At this event we gave out a mini memoir, written by Lois titled The Road Goes Ever On… as our 'thank you' for the steadfast support we have received through these challenging years, and to insure the community knows their part in our unfolding story.

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