International Day for Sharing Life Stories

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January 1, 2008
Press Release

Campaign Flyer

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Listen! - Escuche! - Escute! - Écoute!

We invite you and/or your organization to endorse our joint call for Listen! - International Day for Sharing Life Stories, on May 16th 2008. The day will be an opportunity for people around the world to gather in community halls, classrooms, public parks, theaters, auditoriums, as well as websites, email exchanges, and virtual environments to hear each other’s stories.

We are part of an international movement of practitioners who view listening, collecting and sharing life stories as a critical process in democratizing culture and promoting social change. We want this day to be especially dedicated to celebrating and promoting Life Story projects that have made a difference within neighborhoods, communities, and societies as a whole. We have written to you because we feel you share this commitment.

We will encourage participation in the day through many possible events, including:

• Story Circles in people’s homes, at workplaces, schools, community centers, virtual environments
• Public open microphone performances of stories
• Exhibitions of Stories in public venues, as image, text, and audio-visual materials
• Celebratory events to honor local storytellers, practitioners and organizations
• Open houses for organizations with a life story sharing component
• Online simultaneous gatherings, postings, and story exchanges
• Print, Radio and Television broadcast programming on life stories, and documentaries that feature oral histories and story exchanges

To facilitate this process our two organizations will act as the coordination body for compiling a worldwide calendar of events for the day, and over the entire May 16-18 weekend. Calendar listings will appear, along with a map of the participating organizations, on a special website dedicated to the day.

Your personal or organizational endorsement will be used by our two organizations to help build support for our organizing efforts in the coming months. We encourage you to begin to think of how you and your organization could participate on the day, however your commitment to participate is not required at this time. If you support this idea, please let us know, by emailing us at internacional@museudapessoa.net.

Museum of the Person

The Museum of the Person is an international network of virtual museums of life stories, located in Brazil, Canada, the USA and Portugal. Our mission is to contribute to make every person´s life story valued by society.

Center for Digital Storytelling

The Center for Digital Storytelling is based in Berkeley, California. CDS is a non-profit training, project development, and research organization dedicated to assisting people in using digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives. Our focus is on developing large-scale projects for community, educational, and business institutions, using the methods and principles of the Digital Storytelling Workshop. We also offer workshops for organizations and individuals and serve as an international clearinghouse of information and resources about storytelling and new media.

If you want to see the organizations and people that are already supporting the International Day for Sharing Life Stories, please visit the Endorsements page.

If you have any doubts, comments or if you want to declare your support to the International Day for Sharing Life Stories, please fill out the form available in Contact. If you prefer, write directly to internacional@museudapessoa.net.

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