What's Your Story?

Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone knows how to tell a story... yet.

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What We Do

"Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion."

- Barry Holstun Lopez

What's Your Story? trains individuals and groups to document their own or their community's stories through writing and photography. We also help organizations and institutions share their work with the public by documenting the stories of their evolution, success, and daily activities.

What's Our Story?

Photo by John Hayt

Kimi Eisele and Josh Schachter have collaborated as educators and artists since 2000 when they joined the staff of Voices: Community Stories Past and Present, a Tucson, AZ-based nonprofit organization that trains community members to document and present their stories. At Voices, they mentor teenagers in writing and photography, helping them produce stories for 110 Degrees, a youth magazine about Tucson life and culture. They have conducted numerous documentary arts workshops for youth, educators, and community members. They have also collaborated to produce stories for various institutions and media outlets and for personal documentary projects.

Kimi Eisele: I am a writer and educator dedicated to helping others record and share their stories as a way of building community. My essays and articles have been published in Fourth Genre, OnEarth, Orion, Orion Afield, various anthologies, and other places. My work focuses on themes related to globalization, geography, the environment, Latin America, youth, health, and the arts. I earned a master's degree in geography from the University of Arizona, where I founded and designed you are here: the journal of creative geography, a literary magazine that explores personal interpretations of space and place. I have taught geography and language arts in Ecuador and coordinated many "sense of place" projects (combining writing, interviewing, and photography) to children and adults in the U.S. and Mexico. I am an artist for the Arizona Commission on the Arts' Residency Roster.

Josh Schachter: As a photographer and educator, I see photography as a path toward personal and community transformation. I have worked with organizations across the country to document community issues such as urban revitalization, HIV/AIDS, and food security. My images have been published internationally in books, magazines, newspapers, annual reports, and other formats. I earned a master's degree in environment management/social ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environment Studies, where I taught inner-city youth to explore their environment through photography. Since then, I have trained youth and adults to explore themselves and their community through photography. I was recently selected as an artist for the Arizona Commission on the Arts' Residency Roster. My work can be viewed at www.joshphotos.com.

For more about our work see What We've Done.