PEOPLE AND STORIES - GENTE Y CUENTOS INC

People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos (P&S/GyC) is dedicated to opening doors to literature for new audiences. Through oral readings and rigorous discussions of enduring short stories, we invite participants to find fresh understandings of themselves, of others, and of the world. Our programs, offered in English and Spanish, use oral readings and structured dialogues of complex short stories to invite participants to connect their own varied life experiences to the universal themes found in great literature. For over 50 years our program methodology has been working to remove obstacles to the rewards of reading, especially for adults and young adults who identify as not having the skill, confidence, or motivation to read independently.

Our Founder, Sarah Hirschman, was born in Lithuania into a Russian Jewish family and educated in France and the United States. A reader fluent in several languages, she was always interested in the reception of literature by groups of different cultural backgrounds. After a five year stay in Colombia and work with urban community groups and development projects, she started People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos in Spanish in 1972 in Massachusetts. She developed a now patented methodology that has effectively connected more than 40,000 lives to literature, with trained coordinators conducting programs in both English and Spanish.

Today, our programs continue to reach youth, adults, and seniors in diverse social service agencies-including residential treatment facilities, prisons, shelters, adult education programs, libraries, senior centers, and alternative schools-on local, regional, and national levels.