One of the main reasons we feel we need this is that we get such enormous amount of essays from youth, maybe even 75% of the essays we're getting are now coming from minors under 18. And there are legal and liability issues once you get into publishing the work of minors. So, it's complicated.
We feel we have to be careful about what kids write in their essays and how they're identified: we don't identify their last names, first name only. We have to make sure we strip out their email address and phone number. A lot of kids do this as a school assignment and they habitually put their email and phone number in the text file so we have to strip those out. It requires a human being to do that work.
Our hope for the coming year is that we can put into place an efficient all-volunteer run system to review all these incoming essays. It is our hope is that we'll create something that's self-perpetuating and that we can keep doing for years and perhaps even decades to come.
Edwards has aired TIB essays on his radio program for last four years
JB: How does this all work logistically speaking? There are huge volumes of material to deal with.
DG: This very week, we've got a couple of volunteers in our office that are doing something that we've been putting off for several years, actually; and that is, going through boxes, and boxes, and boxes of essays that have been submitted to us in paper form. We stopped accepting essays in paper form several years ago, but some people didn't get the memo, and we continue on a weekly basis to get a handful of essays sent to us in the mail, and we don't have the staff resources to go through all of them.
So, we finally got some volunteers, and they're opening up all of those envelopes, and going through all of these, categorizing them, and putting them in folders. Seeing all of them arrayed, all the boxes of them, it's at least ten thousand essays, something about seeing them in the flesh, seeing them in paper, makes it palpable just how many people this project has touched. And by the way, we are planning on eventually getting volunteers to read through all those essays, and hopefully scan them, and get them into our website. But it's a very cumbersome, time-consuming process, and we don't have any funding to cover that particular work.
JB: How is the website set up and what's on there?
DG: It's a combination of instructions on how to write your own essay, and a mechanism for allowing you to submit it to us. The vast majority of it is a presentation of all the tens of thousands of essays that have been submitted to us by people all over the world. Those essays are catalogued and tagged with themes and age ranges, and what part of the country the person is from. You can spend weeks of your life just reading through these essays and connecting threads of them one to another.
There's also information for educators: there's downloadable curricula for middle school, high school, college, and adult education. There's information on how community groups can do events around "This I Believe" in their community. There's information on how you can sign up for our weekly podcast. The 1950s material is available there in text and audio form. Those are the highlights of what we have available on our website.
JB: What a vast undertaking! One of the major strengths of this project is the creating of a public forum, a commons, where views can be exchanged respectfully. I think that the need for that increases as we find ourselves more and more polarized and isolated from one another. Can TIB have a positive effect on public discourse?
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