The Story Share Initiative (SSI) was a 2-year project conceptualized by The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) that culminated in December 2019. Under the umbrella of CAP’s Oral History Project (OHP) we collaborated with StoryCorps (https://storycorps.org/) to best gather personal histories as a means to bind people together and remind them of the complex ways in which oral traditions represent and preserve their societal values, identities and meanings.

In 2018 by collaborating with StoryCorps through webinar sessions, encompassing all the knowledge and training necessary for conducting interviews in a new hybrid format. During these semi-structured sessions, our teams interacted; discussed and compared best-case practices and ways to improve the existing oral history collection. In the same year, we managed to conduct a total of 441 oral history interviews in greater Punjab and Sindh. As a result, we gathered personal narratives on various aspects of culture, such as literature, arts and heritage. From cities to smaller towns, our teams went out into the field to conduct interviews in Karachi, Hyderabad, Jamshoro, Mirpurkhas, Hala, Sukkur, Shikarpur, Khairpur Rawalpindi, Lahore, Gujranwala, Chinot, Faisalabad and Multan. This allowed us an opportunity to expand our archive by also digitizing over 1000 images from private collections during this period and as a result produced 40 animated videos for young children, which were disseminated on various media channels