Our Mission

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. Now in its 50th year, our program methodology effectively removes 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 participants include men and women who are incarcerated or engaged in re-entry, residents in halfway houses and homeless shelters, recent immigrants, and low-income seniors in residential settings. By and large, the individuals we serve are reading at or below a 5th grade level, have not completed high-school, or are economically disadvantaged. A critical bridge, People & Stories / Gente y Cuentos provides hope and skills for moving forward.

Our extensive and multicultural bibliography inspires lively, structured dialogues that help readers challenge their assumptions, communicate across cultural, class and ethnic differences and know first-hand the transformative power of literature.

Our History

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 methodology that has effectively connected more than 40,000 lives to literature, with trained coordinators conducting programs in both English and Spanish in various parts of the United States as well as in Argentina.

Read more about Sarah’s award-winning life and the history of People & Stories in this Town Topics article . And, enjoy a tribute to her legacy in our Spring 2012 newsletter

In 1981, the project expanded to include programs in Florida, Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico. The program in English, People & Stories, began in 1986 in New Jersey, and the project became a non-profit corporation in 1993.  People & Stories continued to expand by serving regional audiences with programs throughout New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.  

In 2005, People & Stories / Gente y Cuentos developed Crossing Borders with Literature, a program model that invites suburban participants to join programs, forging connections that cross municipal, socioeconomic, racial, and cultural lines. In 2010, with the collaboration of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project expanded to include Story Talk / Cuentos y Plática, a youth initiative that reached at-risk young adult audiences across the country, including sites in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Washington. And in 2015 we initiated a new NEH project called Reading Deeply in Community / Leyendo a Fondo, en Comunidad, working nationally with librarians to take the program to sex trafficking victims, Latino library patrons, adults in re-entry, enrollees in adult literacy classes, and low-income seniors -- among a wide range of participants -- in California, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and beyond.

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

P&S/GyC is a 501(c)3 non-profit - EIN Number 22-3260895