We were lucky to catch up with Louise Baigelman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Louise thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

My parents raised me to love reading. I grew up surrounded by books: in a house where floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls. And I grew up between the pages of books: losing myself in imagination-stretching titles like ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ or mysteries like ‘The Westing Game.’ On vacations, we had daily “quiet reading time,” and on road trips, my sister would read aloud from our favorite series or we’d invent alliterative tongue twisters to pass the time. For our birthdays, my dad gifted us poetry: personalized verse and rhyme weaving in the prior year of our lives. Words were an enormous part of my world for as long as I can remember.

Besides encouraging me to read and write widely, my parents also messaged the importance of sharing opportunities and providing access for others. Through early service opportunities and experiences, I was drawn to the discrepancy between my own relationship with reading and that of those who didn’t have the same access, positive associations, or empowerment that it enabled. This became the seed of my lifelong quest to transform the literacy trajectory for underserved and underrepresented teens & adults around the world.

In middle school, I volunteered at a center for homeless mothers in Philadelphia, where I became passionate about educational inequity. In college, I majored in English and Psychology, and tutored reading at a local public school. I soon set my sights on becoming a teacher.

After graduating, I joined Teach for America and taught reading and writing at KIPP Lynn, a middle school north of Boston. There I had students who were 12-years-old, but reading at a 1st or 2nd grade level. I couldn’t find books to get them excited about reading — books that were compelling to their age and interests but also accessible at their lower reading levels… ones with characters they related to and language that they could practice with independently. Without the right books, my students were uninterested in reading, and I knew they would continue to fall further behind.

Storyshares was born to fill this gap… to create a new global library filled with just-right book choices to engage and inspire every single reader.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

As a reading and English as a Second Language teacher at KIPP Lynn, I supported middle school students who were anywhere from 2-6 years behind in reading. Their low literacy skills made it difficult for them to keep up in all of their classes. I knew that improving their reading skills was crucial for their ability to excel in school. But what books do you offer a 6th grader who is reading at a 1st grade level? The books written for their age group were too difficult to access. And my students wanted nothing to do with books written for a first grade level; stories like ‘Hop on Pop’ were not only boring, but embarrassing for them. I could not find mature, relevant books at lower reading levels, to meet my students where they were – and engage them as they practiced. I knew the lack of the right content was standing in the way of growth.

After leaving the classroom, I went to work at a family foundation in New York City. The foundation was interested in this same challenge for young adults with learning differences, who have similarly fallen behind in reading and who also lack choices at their intersection of interest and ability.

At the foundation, I led up a project to experiment with a new method for generating relevant, diverse, and accessible books for the tens of millions of teens and adults around the world who need them. We ran a writing contest, where we engaged a community of writers and educators, and provided them with the tools, guidance, and incentives to create this unique content.

The contest was a great success — with 600 story entries streaming in in just 4 months, many of which were high-quality and on-target for our readers. We knew that we were on to something, and we began developing a digital library / eBook publishing platform, to share the books with readers around the world and support educators who, like me, are seeking better books daily for their striving readers beyond the 3rd grade.

The following year, the foundation awarded me a seed grant to turn Storyshares into an independent organization focused on taking this solution to the next level. Since then, we have run 5 additional writing contests, and developed a collection of over 400 published books. In addition to our digital reading platform, we now produce paperbacks and eBooks, which we distribute through partner platforms including Amazon, Booksource, CommonLit, Google Books, Libby, and more. To date, Storyshares titles have been read for more than 300,000 hours by readers across the globe. We’ve been recognized by Forbes, the International Literacy Association, the Library of Congress, and Teach For America for our impact in the field.

Storyshares focuses on a large but unsolved problem using a unique and transformative model. For teens and adults who lack key literacy skills, their current choices for reading practice are either irrelevant and demotivating, or way too hard. And the current publishing field is rife with barriers to the creation of new, niche content, from underrepresented voices. Storyshares leverages a community crowdsourcing model to generate hundreds of new titles from diverse authors, which are relatable, intriguing, and easy-to-read for those who have fallen behind. We are reimagining the global library, so that readers like my KIPP middle schoolers can find choices they love – and discover the joy of reading.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Initially, I had a clear vision of the tool that needed to be built. It was anchored in my own experiences. What I didn’t realize was that other teachers facing this problem had their own visions & ideas around what would best engage & support their students. As a result, I initially invested too many resources into building out a platform that didn’t reach its full potential: it included some features that didn’t add value and lacked others that are now indispensable for teachers & students.
I have since realized that in order to build a platform that would truly meet the needs of those the platform served, I had to involve them at every step. I needed to let our users guide the product road map, and I learned that I should not have crafted the plan & product that I thought would work; instead I needed to build and test directly along the way.

I now make it a priority to continually seek feedback and ideas from our community. Storyshares runs pilot studies in school systems and works closely with teachers on the ground in order to model our product after their needs. We’ve developed a Young Adult advisory board, the goal of which is to ensure that our content is authentic to our target audience of young adult readers, and we’ve created an Author Panel from whom we encourage insights on ways to make our platform more user-friendly and appealing to content contributors.

I also rely on a village of experts, mentors, and friends, who represent a range of fields and perspectives to inform the growth of Storyshares. With an ever-growing team of diverse voices, I am able to continually integrate and respond to meaningful feedback around our learning solution: ensuring that it remains iterative instead of stagnant — and that it meets the need of the readers we set out to serve.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

At Storyshares, we are not selling a product, we are providing a solution to a problem that is massive and yet all-too-often overlooked and ignored. I’d love to take this opportunity to touch on this a bit more.

In the U.S. alone, 90 million+ teens & young adults lack critical literacy skills. 70% of all high school students need some form of reading remediation, and 20% haven’t developed even basic reading proficiency by the time they graduate.

The literacy landscape is especially bleak for African American & Hispanic-American students, as this staggering statistic shows: only 13% of African-American & only 16% of Hispanic-American 4th graders score at the proficient level. Students living in poverty, ELL students, & students with disabilities also suffer disproportionately from low literacy skills. In a society where income & race are often linked to educational opportunity, these students have less access to the support & resources they need so they continue to fall behind.

And still, this is only a glimpse of a larger problem still: illiteracy affects 774 million adults aged 15 or older around the globe & is a key influence in global rates of incarceration, health problems, poverty, teen pregnancy, gender inequality, etc.

Consider the amount of text you encounter daily: signs, menus, newspaper articles, the instructions on your medicine bottle. Imagine not being able to read any of them. Imagine not being able to read this. Given the prominence of reading in all aspects of life, it’s no wonder that a lack of this ability negatively impacts everything from academic performance to everyday communication.

This in turn affects our whole society. It is crucial that young adults read proficiently to lead fulfilling lives of continuous learning and civic engagement, and to then pass this on to their children.

So what do we do?

We know that meaningful practice and time-spent reading are essential for improvement. Teachers everywhere are seeking the right content to offer their struggling readers. But not enough of this content exists.

The Storyshares solution is transforming the way we look at the creation of this content, and is providing a pathway for millions of struggling readers to become life-long, avid consumers of the written word.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.storyshares.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/storyshares/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StorySharesLiteracy/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/storyshares/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/storyshares
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF74sp0cTwM&t=10s
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B077W9Y485