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 PublishingDuring 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 ProjectsFrom 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.
|
|
|
|