The St. Louis Storytelling Festival, a University of Missouri Extension Community Arts Program, renews and celebrates an ancient art. Storytelling is an evolving, dynamic art form that allows families and communities to pass on their history and experiences to succeeding generations. In addition to year-round community-based storytelling activities, our annual Festival featured many world-renowned storytellers. In honor of the Missouri Bicentennial, our 2021 Virtual Festival celebrates Missouri’s past, present and future with “A Journey of Stories Across Missouri”. We will have several live virtual events, as well as on-demand video content aligning with Missouri Learning Standards and available from May 3 – May 14, 2021 for Community and K-12 audiences.
Your gift will not only help support this year’s special event, it will help to ensure that storytelling and other allied art forms can continue to build community in the future. More than 18,100 attended in 2019 (our last in-person Festival), and in 2020, our very first virtual Festival reached listeners from all across the U.S., Canada, and even Northern Ireland, India, Taiwan, and the continent of Africa! Funds this year are also used to include ASL interpretation for all of our virtual programming (both live and pre-recorded content).
Most importantly, your support will ensure that the costs to Virtual Festival listeners remains free or minimal so that people in the community can continue to learn and be entertained through this special opportunity.