The School Project that Inspired a Mission

So let me give you a bit of background information on how this idea came to be.

We are three students from Northwest Prep Charter School, a project based school in Santa Rosa, California. Each of us were impacted by the North Bay Firestorm of 2017.

For those of you who don't know what the North Bay Firestorm of 2017 is, let me explain. On the night of October 8th 2017, the North Bay community experienced major devastation as wildfire ripped through the many northern counties. Many of us were at a loss for words and not knowing what to do or where to go. Those three weeks that we spent without classes kind of felt like floating in air with no real place to land. When we returned to school three weeks later we were met with support from those around us, and slowly we began to recover. Having a structured environment to come back to was a very key part in recovery. It gave us something else to put our minds on, we had goals to achieve and for many of us that gave us meaning again.

Meanwhile, one of our teachers, unbeknownst to us, reached out to the StoryCorps Organization.  Soon after, the organization came to our school, recording students, staff, and community members as they talked about their fire experiences.

To learn more about Storycorps press here to visit their website. We were very fortunate for them to come and record our stories.

While StoryCorps coming to our school helped us recover from the fires, it also formed the basis for a school wide project.

You see, being in a project based school means that our teachers are always looking for inspiration, and StoryCorps mission statement, to create community bonds, healing, and archives for the future by facilitating interviews, provided that inspiration. So, as we prepared for StoryCorps to come, our entire school also began to learn how to execute a good interview. Once we understood how to interview it was our task to conduct an interview of someone we knew; this interview did not have to be about the fires.

After StoryCorps left, and our school completed the project they inspired, the teachers selected a small team to pass on the good will.

Signing up for the StoryCorps elective, a few of us students got together and started a community on the StoryCorps database exclusively for Firestorm stories. We would now like to pass on our knowledge to help you get your stories heard. We encourage anyone who was affected by the North Bay Firestorm to take part in creating history.

This is the second phase of the StoryCorps project. Our goal is to reach out to other community members and Firestorm survivors. We want help you get your stories out there. We’ve created this website to help you record and publish an interview of your first hand accounts of the Firestorm to the Library of Congress. Your interview will be added to our archive along with others. This process will help record history, and we hope it will help in your healing process. This will forever be a part of local and world history and we want everyone to be able to hear your story. For the steps to recording an interview please visit our Record an Interview page.