Local nonprofit Story Chain was recently awarded a $3,000 grant from the Ohio United Methodist Church-based program All In Community. Pictured in the Story Chain offices at Yellow Springs United Methodist Church are Story Chain Director Jonathan Platt and the Rev. Latoya Warren, the church’s pastor, who worked together to write the grant. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
Story Chain makes connections through voice
- Published: December 17, 2024
For a decade, local nonprofit Story Chain has worked to connect loved ones who can’t physically be together through the power of the voice. In recent weeks, Story Chain has received some financial support that will enable that work to continue.
The News spoke last month with Story Chain Director Jonathan Platt and the Rev. Latoya Warren, pastor of Yellow Springs United Methodist Church, which houses the nonprofit’s offices. Though the nonprofit and the church are separate entities, they recently partnered up to pursue a $3,000 grant to benefit the mission upon which Story Chain was founded in 2014: recording the voices of incarcerated parents as they read stories to their children.
“We received the grant at the right time,” Platt said, noting that Story Chain intends to begin new programs in Pickaway and London correctional facilities next year.
Warren said the grant was awarded by All In Community, a program of the United Methodist Church’s East and West Ohio Conferences that aims to “restore hope and support healing in lives involved in the criminal justice system.” To Warren’s mind, Story Chain’s work aligns well with that mission.
“As a church, we just want to come alongside people and help them walk this journey that is life,” Warren said.
Warren said that, though the local Methodist Church and Story Chain are not official partners, she and Platt have become friendly simply by virtue of sharing space — and that inspired them to put their heads together about ways to collaborate.
“Churches and nonprofits often share a similar financial struggle,” she said. “So when I came across this grant, I brought it to [Platt] and said, ‘How can we make this work?’ And God blessed us with the $3,000.”
Platt said the nonprofit needs around $15,000 to begin and complete a program in an area prison or jail. With the funds from the grant and a fundraiser launched this spring, Platt said Story Chain is more than halfway to funding another program.
Since its founding, Story Chain has run successful programs at Dayton Correctional Institution, and in Greene, Montgomery and Clark County jails.
The eight- to 10-week programs, run by Platt and volunteers, typically include helping between four and 20 incarcerated participants choose a book to read, giving the participants voice training and coaching in reading aloud, recording and editing the participants as they read, and delivering mp3 players with the recorded stories, along with a copy of the chosen book, to family members.
“We’ve served more than 500 clients at this point — and about 1,200 family members,” Platt said. “We spend a lot of time working on the voice, reading aloud over and over, and by the time we’re done editing, the recordings sound like audiobook quality — [the participants] become professionals at this.”
Platt said he and regular volunteers — in particular, he name-checked local residents Pat Peters and Mayor Pam Conine as longtime Story Chain supporters — enjoy not only the end product of delivering a completed recording to a loved one, but of interacting with participants.
“We do a lot of fun exercises, and what’s exciting to me is that [participants] get to learn about someone who has maybe been their bunkmate for a year in a way they’ve never experienced,” Platt said. “It’s fun, it’s playful — it’s joyful.”
Volunteers begin working with program participants by listening to them read aloud for about 20 minutes to start with, Platt said, and having a conversation with participants about why they chose a particular book or story.
“We begin with positive feedback, and then get into working on how fast they read, or maybe they stuttered,” Platt said. “And [participants] keep doing that over several workshops, because we want them to get used to reading out loud — which, a lot of times, is something they’ve never done before.”
Over the last several years, Story Chain has expanded its efforts to meet the needs of others who might benefit from the nonprofit’s services. In 2020, Story Chain launched the “Strength-In-Place” program, which provided the nonprofit’s typical services, conducted remotely, to those who were separated during the pandemic.
“We just thought it was a great idea to do the same thing we’re doing in prisons, having adults read to their older parents who are isolated in senior homes,” Platt said. “Later, there was a demand for older people to read to their grandkids — a lot of them were worried they might not see them again.”
After Story Chain began working with elder care facilities, Platt said volunteers became aware of another way they could serve. As they met residents who were grappling with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and other memory loss disorders, they found those residents were eager to record themselves reading to loved ones before they lost the ability to do so.
“There was one man who read a whole novel to his grandkids who weren’t even born yet,” Platt said. “And now his voice is always going to be there for them, even if they don’t meet him.”
Another aspect of Story Chain’s work is in training its volunteers to do the work of voice coaching, recording and editing. Much of that training takes place in Story Chain’s offices at Yellow Springs United Methodist Church. Looking ahead, Platt said he’s recently presented a proposal to Emerge Springs — the village campus of Emerge Recovery and Trade Initiative — with the goal of training some of its residents to do the work Story Chain provides.
“We want to train the trainers,” Platt said. “And with enough funds, we want to pay them for this work.”
Ultimately, the work that Story Chain does, from Platt’s view, is not only about connecting people, but — particularly for incarcerated participants — about intervention and an acknowledgement of their humanity.
“The mothers and fathers who are in there — they’re still mothers and fathers,” Platt said. “We always find the magicality in the voice.”
Warren agreed, and said the reinforcement of humanity resonates with the church’s overall mission.
“The church is about letting people know that they’re not thrown away,” Warren said. “There’s a foundation of nonjudgment — that no matter what, we, as the church, love you.”
For more information, or to support Story Chain, go to http://www.story-chain.org.
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