Image of the 1500 Stories logo

1500 Stories is a collaborative art, digital storytelling and civic engagement project aimed at sharing stories of economic inequality in the U.S. It has begun in the Silicon Valley. The project will develop a web-based collection of audio and video stories and visual arts about what it is like to live in different class/economic positions. It will culminate in a 5-mile long public art installation and civic engagement experience several years from now. The project is a collaboration between the California History Center, the Euphrat Museum of Art, and the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action as well as students and community members.

One of the goals of the project is to foster empathetic connections among people through the experience of listening and being heard; another is to break the silence in the U.S. around class and economic position through the idea that everyone, no matter what their socioeconomic status, has a story to share.

Graphic illustrating economic inequality in the U.S., with most of the people at the bottom

The title is inspired by a poster by Stephen J. Rose depicting the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. and the fact that by 2013, the poster would need to be 1500 stories tall to capture the richest 1%. To think about this another way, right now the 20 richest individuals in the U.S. own more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans combined (Collins & Hoxie 2015). Rising economic and class inequality places the common good in increasing jeopardy. Social science scholarship demonstrates the ways in which increasing inequality contributes to political polarization (Voorhels, McCarty & Shor 2015), diminishes economic growth (Bernstein 2013; Dabla-Norris 2015), weakens social bonds and wellbeing (Pickett & Wilkinson 2011), and undermines democracy (Gilens & Page 2014; Krugman 2014). Yet, in many ways, class and economic hardship remains invisible in the U.S. Quantitative data is not enough to break the silence around class. The humanities provide important tools for breaking through this invisibility through empathy-generating strategies such as storytelling, dialogue and the arts. These strategies do not just raise awareness—they reestablish the common good by building direct connections among people and providing the grounds for building trust across difference.

Please visit the 1500 Stories website to learn more about the project: https://1500stories.org/

If you are interested in doing storygathering for the 1500 Stories project or are a De Anza student that cannot make any of the face to face trainings, please take the online training: How to Conduct Interviews for 1500 Stories

You can also find the training for taking documentary photographs for the project here: How to Take Documentary Photographs for 1500 Stories

And finally, if you would like to edit your own audio documentary for the project, you can find a full training designed for people with no prior experience here: How to Edit an Audio Documentary for 1500 Stories