Life Stories Institute
Human stories deserve a lasting home.
Life Stories Institute invests in technology that captures, organizes, and preserves human stories—keeping the people who live them at the center.
Mission
We build and fund the infrastructure that lets a life's record survive the century it was made in.
A family's history is usually held in fragile places: a shoebox of photographs, a voicemail nobody can bring themselves to delete, a story told once at a kitchen table and never written down. The Institute treats that material as worth the same care an archive gives a manuscript.
Our work runs on two tracks that meet in the middle. We develop technology and license it commercially through products such as Reflections, and we make the same capability available for cultural, educational, and community use at free or low cost. Commercial licensing funds the work; the community track is the reason for it.
Licensing our technology is not the same as owning a story. Institutions and customers license software. Families keep their stories.
Stewardship
What we commit to, plainly
Families own their stories
The people who live a story own it. Our products hold material on their behalf; ownership never transfers to us by using them.
Material can leave
Anyone can take their recordings, transcripts, and documents elsewhere. A story is not a hostage to a product, and portability is a design requirement rather than a courtesy.
We do not train on your stories
Personal and family stories held in our products are not used to train models. They exist to serve the family they came from.
Local storage wherever possible
We keep material on a household's own device or storage wherever the work allows it, and we say so plainly when a step needs to run elsewhere.
Our work
Three initiatives carry the mission: a commercial product, a community project, and a collaboration on everyday companionship. Each one tests the same question — whether technology can hold a story without taking it.
- 01Commercial product
Reflections
A storytelling product that helps people capture and organize personal and family stories, so a life's record holds together instead of scattering across drawers, drives, and memory.
Read about Reflections - 02Community project
After Pride
A community project led with Demetrius A. Bady that serves LGBTQIA+ people 50 and older, preserving lived experience and making storytelling accessible to those whose histories are least often recorded.
Read about After Pride - 03Collaboration with Mental Foundation
Companion Experience
Everyday companionship built around a person's own routines — conversation, a game of chess late at night, and staying close to family — with technology kept in service of human relationships.
Read about Companion Experience
Founding people
- Elliott Jobe
- Founder
- Works to a single mandate: build the infrastructure for human memory, and build it so the people it serves stay in charge of what it holds.
- Demetrius A. Bady
- Chief Narrative Officer
- Thirty years of television writing, producing, and documentary work, alongside a BA in American Cultural Studies from the University of Michigan.
Every person is a book. The world is the library.