The notion of passing along the dare to care-- at the heart of Herstory’s mission and work--  is deceptively simple.  The pedagogy and way of life that has grown up around it, touching thousands, is multi-faceted and profound.   

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Our training program began informally, in 2004, when a handful of workshop members began to work with our founder to articulate tools that would exchange a collective study of what creates empathy in a reading stranger for more conventional approaches to narrative practice.   Little did any of us know, when the facilitators began to work in the jails and with women writing in Spanish, that almost 20 years later we would have a formalized training institute, in partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University and the national Coalition for Community Writing, creating an ever expanding network of workshops in the schools, in the jails, and in the community,  reaching out locally, nationally, and even beginning to reach out nationally.