Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Louise Baigelman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Louise thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I first noticed a problem fourteen years ago in my classroom, as a Teach for America corps member. I was a reading teacher, working with middle school English learners at KIPP Academy Lynn. My students cared about all those things middle schoolers do. But they were newcomers to the country — and to the language — and many of them couldn’t read.

One of my students was Ruth. Ruth was brilliant. She had recently moved to Lynn from Haiti – so she was in 6th grade, but she was reading at a first grade level. Ruth’s reading challenges impacted her ability to succeed across all of her classes and subject areas. And they impacted her self esteem: making her feel embarrassed, unmotivated, insecure.

So I knew my most important job was giving Ruth and her peers the ability to read, in order to learn. But the books written at a first grade reading level were, of course, written for first graders. So Ruth would not read books like, “My Baby Puppy.” At age 13, would you? I couldn’t find choices to offer Ruth that were relatable and representative; books she could read — and wanted to read.

It was this insight that planted the seed that grew into Storyshares. Because as it turned out, this was not a niche problem. In fact, today, it is the norm: according to the most recent 2023 Nation’s Report Card, over 2/3 of students in the 4th grade cannot read proficiently. And as students move into middle school and high school, this problem only grows.

I wondered: what are we doing to support those decades of students who have moved past 3rd grade, without yet being able to read? Because school does not end in third grade. We can still transform young adult students into readers. To do so, we just must think about it differently.

So Storyshares started with a question: could we inspire a love of reading and improve literacy skills among older striving readers, by providing them with new choices for engaging and culturally relevant titles at any and every reading level? And this question led to another one: could we source this new kind of book from global authors, by providing them with the tools, guidance, and incentives to do so?

To test it, we launched a writing contest, which — amazingly — brought in over 600 stories in 4 months. I knew then that we were on to something.

We grew from there, developing the one-time contest into a unique crowdsourcing model: bringing together a community of diverse authors, and providing them with the awareness, guidance, tools, and incentives to craft new content for this unmet market.

To date, we have engaged 3,000 authors from 180 countries, with whom we cultivate strong, long-standing relationships. We provide them the opportunity to become published, to share their voices towards a more authentic and inclusive global library.

Our growing collection now includes over 500 original titles, filling key gaps in classrooms around the world in a nimble and responsive way. This model led to Storyshares debuting the first ever Decodable Chapter Books in late 2023: phonics-focused series for teenagers who are working to strengthen their foundational literacy skills. It also led to the creation of professional learning materials and workshops for educators, who seek guidance as they work to support the students who have fallen behind in reading. Since then, we have created three original decodable chapter book series for older students as part of the Storyshares library collection, and even more series for partner organizations to align with their own curriculum and intervention programs.

We hear daily from teachers who are witnessing this transformation in their classrooms: students who were previously totally uninterested in reading, are now finishing their first book. And then asking for another one. And sometimes, even feeling inspired to write their own.

At Storyshares, we are addressing one of the most pressing issues we face today – literacy – by empowering and inspiring millions of students to learn to read, beyond elementary school.

Louise, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a teacher at heart, and I grew up surrounded by books.

I sometimes joke that in my childhood home, any walls my parents could turn into bookshelves, they did. Growing up in this reading-rich environment made it all the more striking to me when I encountered the lack of access to education — and to books — for students in communities just 20 minutes from my house, in West Philadelphia. As a middle and high school student, I had the opportunity to volunteer in programs where the students were far behind, even as early as Kindergarten. I was immediately drawn to the field of educational equity: how could we provide these children in underserved communities with the kind of access and skills that would enable them to thrive, in school and beyond? How could we fill some of these crucial gaps, which painted a bleak picture for their life trajectories? Wasn’t this a problem we could solve?

I went to Cornell University for my undergraduate studies, where I majored in English and Psychology. Upon graduation, I moved to Boston where I became a teacher through Teach for America, working with students in Lynn, Massachusetts; while also attending graduate school at night to receive my Masters in Education from Boston University.

As a teacher, I saw those early inequities that struck me as a child even more vividly. My middle school students at KIPP Lynn were newcomers to the US, having just moved from countries like the Dominican Republic and Haiti. My students were wise beyond their years, but they couldn’t read proficiently, and as a result, they couldn’t excel in any of their classes. I scoured bookstores and libraries, and searched endlessly online, but I couldn’t find any books that would engage my students, ones that were readable at their much lower reading levels.

When I left the classroom, I had the opportunity to pilot a solution for this large (and growing) problem as a program manager at a family foundation in New York City. The results of that experience are where Storyshares was born, setting me on this pursuit and defining my entire career.

I have been incredibly fortunate to receive recognition from some of the most prestigious voices in the industry, including Forbes, the International Literacy Association, the Library of Congress, Teach for America’s Social Innovation Award, and the Milken Penn GSE Business Plan Innovation Award.

Today, as literacy reforms sweep across the country and everyone is focused on the goal of “grade level reading by 3rd grade,” Storyshares is uniquely positioned to lead up the efforts aligning the Science of Reading with best practices in cultural relevance and social emotional learning for those millions upon millions of students who have gotten past the 3rd grade, but still haven’t learned to read. We are confident that we can scale our impact to transform the outcomes for these older striving readers who have, so far, been underserved and overlooked.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

With a small team and an even smaller budget, we had to be lean and “scrappy” as we initially set out to build clientele and develop an internal revenue stream to sustain and grow our work and impact. As a result, we have largely developed our customer base in an organic and bootstrapped way. We started with the relationships and networks we already had among our team: connecting with colleagues, friends, and mentors in the space to reach the schools, educators, and companies who were seeking a new approach to support middle and high school students with lower literacy skills.

As we refined and expanded our solution, these conversations began to yield powerful results – giving us early traction in charter schools and public districts, and enabling us to scale up from there.

Now, as we grow our team and our solution set, we are no longer pushing a boulder up a large hill; instead, we are seeing the boulder start to roll on its own, picking up weight and force along the way. With some recent recognition in the media and growing positive press, new customers are finding and reaching out to us at an inspiring rate. We still identify and pursue new schools, districts, and curriculum companies, but in parallel, these individuals and institutions seek out our resources or collaborations through our website, often citing a podcast interview they heard or a recommendation from a teacher in a nearby school – as the driving force behind their inquiries.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The Storyshares journey has been defined by a series of pivots. We have had what is perhaps an atypical progression in our work: with one thing leading to another once we identified the initial problem and solution, and then new problems, and new solutions, along the way.

We started by hosting a global writing contest, to see if we could bring together a community of authors from around the world, to provide them with the incentives and guidance to craft new stories that would engage and support this unmet market of readers. That first contest exceeded all of our expectations: resulting in hundreds of story submissions in just a few months. And it became a proof point, for a new kind of publishing model: one where we could crowdsource diverse and relevant stories specifically targeted to the older students who were still reading at much lower levels.

From there, we had new challenges to tackle: how would we publish and distribute these new books, to ensure that they would reach the students who need them? And so we developed a small editorial team, and a digital library platform, and we set out to connect with schools and teachers who were serving students that needed a new kind of book in order to practice and improve their skills. Books that they could read, and wanted to read — choices that would light a spark and inspire a love of reading.

Since then, we have developed a collection of over 500 original titles, which we provide to students and classrooms in school districts across the world. Our books are all tagged by both reading level and interest level, ensuring that each student can hone in on choices that meet them exactly where they are – a matrix of age, skill, and topic.

As the Science of Reading movement began to spread around the country, we developed a brand new kind of book within this model: books that enable older students to practice even the most foundational phonics skills in an engaging and culturally relevant way. This was a challenge, as “decodable books” have always been written for only the youngest students, those who are just beginning their journey into reading. But where we landed resulted in the creation of a brand new product category, and Storyshares launched the world’s first ever Decodable Chapter Books in late 2023. Since then, we have sold thousands of copies of the new titles, resulting in dramatic revenue growth during the first half of 2024: more than 15 times higher than our total revenue from all of 2023. We now sell our titles in both eBook and paperback form to support students in all 50 states and 180 countries around the world.

And we didn’t stop there. As we began to work more closely with educators and school districts, we learned that the right kind of books were only a piece of the larger puzzle. We needed to find a way to align them with the reading intervention programs for middle and high school students, and to train teachers who had intended to teach literature, but who soon discovered that they needed to teach literacy, first. So we developed teacher resources and professional learning series, giving educators much-needed support as they worked to serve the >68% of students in grades 4-12 who were still not reading proficiently.

At the same time, we began connecting with other education platforms and curriculum companies, to custom-create new series that introduce scaffolded skills and practice in line with the intervention programs and scopes and sequences being used in classrooms. This model, where we build curated collections for other programs, has enabled us to dramatically grow our reach, expand our collection, and ultimately, transform the outcomes for more of the students we seek to serve.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.storyshares.org
• Instagram: @storyshares
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StorySharesLiteracy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-kraft-baigelman-0b108788/
• Twitter: @storyshares