Dear Life Stories Learning Community:

As this year comes to a close, we want to express our gratitude for the opportunity to continue preserving, telling, and teaching stories about our shared humanity in an increasingly complex world. 

In 2025, we look forward to producing new interviews, releasing Season Three of the docuseries The Thread, premiering a new feature documentary, and bringing educational content to schools and communities — all grounded in the history and voices of our rich democracy.

We hope this excerpt from Darren Walker’s episode of The Thread provides a source of strength and hope during this holiday season.

This Fall, our team launched A Democracy Minute, curated clips from our past films and interviews on foundational principles of democracy, along with a learning resource to guide their use in schools. We want to thank PBS NewsHour Classroom for creating seven original lessons using our segments and the Center for Civic Ed for highlighting the peaceful transfer of power segment with their new lesson. 

Thousands watched and used A Democracy Minute via our Life Stories website, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts Channel. In January 2025, our next installment will launch exploring perspectives on American leadership with interview segments from Presidents, Senators, and Secretaries of State spanning over fifty years.

We know our interviews are invaluable for researchers and students by strengthening skills of perspective-taking and historical understanding, offering models of moral leadership, and insights on civic virtues, social awareness, and responsible decision making. We also know that shorter content is vital for classroom integration.

To meet this need, we launched The Collections, curated interview segments, each 15 - 30 minutes long with clearly marked thematic chapters. As King in the Wilderness launched our work in education, we started with our first bundle of 13 here with more collections being added in the future.

We are excited to share that we received a 2025 Gold Anthem Award in Film, Video, Television or Show: Education, Art & Culture for our series The Thread. Brought to you by the folks who host The Webby Awards, the Anthem Award celebrates mission-driven work of people, companies, and organizations worldwide who amplify voices that spark global change and social impact work. We are grateful for the recognition and celebration!

If you are in Boston this week, we hope to see you at our Friday workshop, "Critical Literacy and History Based Instruction for Social Justice." We will dive deeper into our work with The Thread, focusing on storytelling and narrative change. We will highlight Season 2 of The Thread, which explores themes of resilience, compassion, and profound insight from sixteen remarkable individuals. 

We will also explore Teaching The Thread, the companion guide for both educators and adult learners. And we’ll have a chance to hear from our partners at 826 Digital and their work with Write With... Life Stories. Their next batch of five fantastic lessons will be coming out in December with Tony Hawk, Katie Couric, Martin Sheen, Roz Chast, and Darren Walker.

Watch all the episodes here, with new segments premiering every Sunday!

We'd love to hear from you! Contact Fran Sterling, Director of Education at fran@lifestories.org.