I’m thrilled to share that The Story Collider is being recognized by The Anthem Awards this year for our work fostering diversity and inclusion in STEM through storytelling!

The Anthem Awards are a new initiative of the Webby Awards that celebrates purpose and mission-driven work from people, companies, and organizations around the world. We are proud to be among this group of inaugural winners, which were selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and include the 1619 Project, the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, The Moth, CNN, and many more.

The Story Collider has won a Bronze award for Best Strategy in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, for our strategy of leveraging personal storytelling about science to shift perception of who can be a scientist or have a voice within science. (Read more about the philosophy behind our work in this 2020 paper published in Frontiers in Communication.) We have also won a Silver award for Best Collaboration in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for our work with The Scientist Spotlights Initiative and Boise State University’s Micron School of Material Science and Engineering.

The Scientists Spotlights Initiative is a community of students and educators that promotes diversity and inclusion in science through stories and other curriculum supplements. In a 2016 study published in Life Sciences Education, several scientists behind this initiative found that students who listened to Story Collider stories (and read other biographical stories about scientists) came away with a less stereotyped view of scientists and expressed more interest in science than students who were not assigned this work — and they even got a better grade in the class! It speaks to the incredible power that stories have to show us what’s possible and challenge our ideas of whom science belongs to. Ever since this study, we’ve been proud science education partners to The Scientist Spotlights Initiative, which is funded by the SEPA Program at the National Institutes of Health.

We have also been proud to collaborate with Boise State University’s Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering since 2017. This collaboration centers around the power of telling a story, and found that many students identified more as materials scientists after they wrote their stories. The impact was even more pronounced for those students who had been historically marginalized in this field — before writing their stories, 58% of women students identified as materials scientists, and afterward, 86% did. Dr. Eric Jankowski, Boise State Associate Professor of Engineering and the President of The Story Collider’s Board, shares more in the video below.

I’m so grateful to The Anthem Awards for this recognition, to our very deserving collaborators for their tireless work, to all of our storytellers for their transformative work, and to the whole Story Collider team, who continues to place DEI at the forefront of all that we do.

Thank you!

Erin Barker, Executive Director