March 10, 2013 | Read Time: 8 minutes
Ask Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps, when he knew that his nonprofit organization would take off, and he’ll tell you a tale.
It’s a bit of a role reversal for a man whose goal is to record hundreds of thousands of other people’s stories and save them for posterity.
He recalls being at New York’s Grand Central Terminal with the famed oral historian Studs Terkel, “cutting the ribbon on our first interview-recording booth, which we couldn’t keep filled,” and wondering if the charity’s idea of giving people the chance to document pivotal stories from their lives would catch on.
“Studs said, ‘If you do this well, you’ll come to understand who built [Grand Central’s] walls and floors.’ We’ve spent the last nine and a half years trying to live up to that.”
Mr. Terkel died several years later, but he would be happy to know that, in the interim, StoryCorps has helped generate 45,000 interviews, mostly of the ordinary people he celebrated.
Surprising Longevity
American Documentary, another nonprofit that allows people to spin nonfiction tales—in this case, through independent film projects—tells a similarly humbling tale. Initially, says Simon Kilmurry, executive producer at the organization best known for the “POV” series that airs on PBS, the leaders of the group thought it might last no more than three years.
But this year—more than 350 films and several Emmys, Oscars, and Peabodys later—the nonprofit is celebrating its 25th anniversary, complete with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. And it is using the occasion to deeply ponder its future.
“Twenty-five years is a long time, especially for a group that works in media,” says Mr. Kilmurry. “The question becomes, after 25 years, what do you do next?”
Now, after those anxious beginnings, both nonprofits are joining an elite list of organizations that have won a major award designed to showcase what it means to be both a creative and an effective organization.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a longtime major supporter of both American Documentary and StoryCorps, last month included both groups on a roster of 13 nonprofits it says have shown great results in achieving their missions.
Each organization winning a MacArthur prize receives up to $1.5-million.
Elspeth Revere, vice president for media, culture, and special initiatives at MacArthur, says what makes the two groups stand out is that neither stops innovating or expanding, which makes them progressively more effective in reaching audiences.
‘Death-Bed’ Questions
For StoryCorps, being effective has meant reaching out to 500 nonprofit groups around the country each year in search of interviewers and interview subjects. Typically, an interviewee and interviewer know each other and may even be related.
StoryCorps casts a wide net, says Mr. Isay, the group’s president, sending inquiries to charities that serve juvenile offenders, homeless people, gays and lesbians, and others who typically don’t get much media attention.
“The idea is we can get to new groups of people who are willing to ask questions that you’d almost ask someone on their death bed,” he says. “StoryCorps is very much about mortality, about what it means to have lived a life.”
One recent example of StoryCorps’ work finds Rowena Gore-Simmons, the leader of 2 God B the Glory, a charity in Baltimore that helps female ex-offenders readjust to life after prison, being interviewed by her daughter, Kenya Gore, about the years when Ms. Gore-Simmons was herself incarcerated for theft, beginning when Kenya was 4.
Kenya asks her mother what she thought about when in prison. The older woman replies, “I would like to be a better mother, and learn about being a mother. I want to hold you, to count your fingers, to brush your hair.”
Interviews like this, often emotionally charged, are recorded in two “mobile booths” that travel around the country, with permanent booths in Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco. Another permanent booth, being built with support from the Joyce Foundation, will open in Chicago later this year.
The 40-minute interviews are recorded on two compact discs. Interview participants take one copy and StoryCorps delivers the other to the Library of Congress, which is cataloging them as living history.
StoryCorps fills a void in the news media, says Mr. Isay, who has won six Peabody Awards and previously received a MacArthur “genius” grant.
“There’s an inherent decency in the vast majority of people—something that you don’t see in news accounts,” he says. “News isn’t the genuine American story. I’d like to think what we do is.”
NPR Exposure
Unlike in the early days, there are now more than 2,000 pairs of interview participants on a waiting list.
“We now take reservations,” Mr. Isay says. “We can’t possibly meet the demand.”
He credits NPR with some of that popularity; its stations run three-minute snippets of StoryCorps interviews every Friday morning, reaching 13 million people.
One-quarter of StoryCorps’s $8-million annual budget comes from NPR’s parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Another quarter comes from major private grant makers, including the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, and MacArthur, which has regularly supported StoryCorps by giving it $250,000 a year.
The rest comes from corporations, individuals (interview participants are asked to make a donation of $25), sales of the project’s books, and fees charged for providing services to other organizations.
StoryCorps will use a portion of the MacArthur award to increase the number of recorded interviews available for people to listen to online and to improve access to them by developing a more readily searchable Web portal. The rest of the money will go into the group’s cash reserves.
“We’re at a point where we know how this works,” says Mr. Isay. “Now, the plan is to become a national institution. Our goal is to eventually do so many of these interviews that we touch every American family.”
Diverse Focus
American Documentary, with a $3.4-million budget, will use the bulk of its MacArthur award to build up its reserve fund.
But about $200,000 will go toward building a facility in New York, set to open this spring, that “will be the focal point for the documentary film community,” says Mr. Kilmurry.
The site will have a screening room and space for regular seminars on editing and getting viewers involved in the issues raised in documentaries.
The organization has long been lauded by MacArthur and others for its ability to attract new viewers. “POV” covers diverse topics.
In the past, the show’s independent filmmakers have told the stories of white supremacists, migrant Latino laborers, and the history of black characters on television.
American Documentary’s staff has worked hard to inform people who might be interested in a particular show when it will be broadcast.
When a “POV” documentary on migrant workers was scheduled for broadcast, the organization bought air time on Spanish-language stations and arranged for promotions to run at the time when the workers themselves were likely to be driving to their jobs.
“At 5 a.m., we broadcast on certain radio stations that we’d have a show about them,” says Cynthia Lopez, American Documentary’s executive vice president. “We added some short vignettes from the documentary” to the radio spots, she adds.
The organization holds 600 screenings of “POV” films across the country each year, featuring hired speakers and audience discussion.
The group also holds conversations about its films on the Web.
That dialogue—and the fact that the general audience it draws is mainly between the ages of 40 to 55, younger than the typical PBS viewer—makes the organization attractive to foundations, Ms. Lopez says.
Besides MacArthur, American Documentary receives grants from the Fledgling Fund, Ford, the Righteous Persons Foundation, and the Wyncote Foundation, though most of its support comes from the National Endowment for the Arts and PBS.
“Foundations want solutions,” Ms. Lopez says. “But they need solid information in the visual arena to get people talking about finding those solutions. Documentaries can promote public dialogue—forums that reach out to people on all sides of an issue.”
More Interest
Besides celebrating anniversaries—StoryCorps is gearing up for its 10th in October—and being MacArthur grantees, the two groups have other things in common: Both are based in Brooklyn, N.Y., and they occasionally work together.
“POV” has begun adding animation to some StoryCorps interviews, and Mr. Isay sits on American Documentary’s anniversary advisory committee.
Both also have a stake in continuing to grow the audience for honest stories about real lives.
“There’s a greater appreciation these days that documentaries aren’t the dry, blandly educational, voice-of-God experiences that they were 30 years ago,” says Mr. Kilmurry.
“Film is great at putting a face on complex issues,” he says. “Foundations respond to that idea.”
Whether foundations will continue to do so at a rate that will support the growing number of filmmakers and oral historians is still up in the air, says Ms. Revere.
“We aren’t seeing more foundations getting involved, but we’re seeing a lot more interest from audiences,” she says. “There are plenty of places to see short subjects. The in-depth, quieter version of storytelling is something people are seeking out more often.”
And although MacArthur applauds American Documentary and StoryCorps for their ability to engage a wide variety of listeners and viewers, the grant maker isn’t counting on them or other American media groups it supports to change the world.
“What’s important for us is that citizens are deeply educated—that’s important in a democracy,” says Ms. Revere.
“And these stories are a great way to get people talking.”
