NEW
Library Project
People & Stories / Gente y Cuentos enjoys a thirty-year history of connecting basic readers, nonreaders, and at-risk audiences with the rich world of fiction. The program began in Spanish in a housing project in Cambridge, MA, when founder, Sarah Hirschman organized a group of Puerto Rican women for a Gente y Cuentos pilot series. Programs in Spanish continued in community centers in Trenton, New Jersey, and in a barrio outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1981 enabled the project's expansion to Florida, Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico. The program in English, People & Stories, began in 1986 in New Jersey under the sponsorship of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, whose support has been continuous. The project became a non-profit corporation in 1993. The California Humanities Council supported an expansion to California in 1996, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council in 1999 began the program in Philadelphia, where the program continues. The New York Humanities Council is currently sponsoring programs in English and Spanish, offered in collaboration with the Westchester Library System, Ardsley, New York. The scope of the project has grown to include participants in prisons, homeless shelters, residential treatment centers, learning centers, and libraries among other community groups in diverse urban locations such as Jersey City, Union City, Camden, Newark, New Brunswick, Elizabeth, Trenton, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York.
People & Stories Participants - Martin House Learning Center