The Great Thanksgiving Listen

Thanksgiving is a time to gather around the table with those closest to you to reflect – hopefully with gratitude – on the year past.  It is a time of celebration, and also a time marked by the joys of tradition.

Connect360 encourages you to add a new tradition to your holiday this Thanksgiving:  to sit down and interview an older member of your family.  Get to know their thoughts and memories, so that they may be preserved for future generations.

StoryCorps is an organization dedicated to the preservation of our stories.  They “do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters.”

The stories gathered by StoryCorps are archived in the Library of Congress so that they may be preserved and used to educate future generations.

Earlier this year, the StoryCorps app was born.  It is available for both iOS and Android devices.  This app enables users to record, archive and share an interview of someone close to them.  To build the popularity of the app, as well as to generate many more stories for archival, StoryCorps has launched the Great Thanksgiving Listen.

With the Great Thanksgiving Listen, StoryCorps is asking U.S. History teachers across the country to give their students a Thanksgiving weekend assignment, of interviewing a grandparent or other elder member of their family. Initially, this project is focusing on 10th and 11th grade U.S. History students, with the hope that a new group of students will participate each year and record interviews with elder family members; but anyone can participate.

Just download the app and sit down with someone close to you, someone older than you, someone who has a story that inspires you.  Ask insightful questions, and listen intently to their story.  Share it with those who will appreciate it, and archive it for posterity.

A great story is something that we can all be thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving from Connect360 Multimedia.

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