Where the stories start.
Story collections are the engine behind everything SparkPoint publishes — organized drives to listen to our neighbors on a specific question, at a specific moment. Some are open right now. Others became the films, talks, and columns already in the Story Hub.
Grounded in Participatory Narrative Inquiry — story work that leads somewhere.
SparkPoint's StoryLab collects, stewards, and learns from community stories ethically. It isn't about awareness alone — every collection follows the same three-step cycle before it ever informs a program or partnership.
You share, in your own words
Every collection opens with a real question, not a multiple-choice survey. You tell it as a story — whatever shape fits what actually happened to you.
Responses are anonymized and read together
Identifying details are stripped out and your story is combined with everyone else's. Community members — not just SparkPoint staff — are trained to help find the patterns.
What we learn goes back to the community
Patterns become published stories, public summaries, and real changes to SparkPoint's programs and partnerships — not a report that sits in a drawer.
One shoot, two outcomes.
These stills are from the Helene: One Year of Healing shoot — interviews filmed with residents across the county. The same conversations did double duty: highlighted in the finished film, and separately anonymized into SparkPoint's story database through the PNI process above. Reading 140+ of those anonymized stories together is what led to Community Connectors.
Read what came of it