1000+ Stories

By popular demand, The Story Exchange today reactivates its project to collect and share the stories of women entrepreneurs around the world.

In 2012, we launched our original “1,000 Stories” project in partnership with Babson College. To better understand the needs of women entrepreneurs and to give them new media exposure via our site, we issued a global call to women with businesses, social enterprises and non-profits to share their experiences with us. 

Women from 50 countries and industries crisscrossing the global economy responded, and in November 2015 we reached our goal of collecting 1,000 stories. An immensely diverse set of women told us why they started companies or organizations — and what they hoped to achieve. Their individual submissions were published on our site, and we tapped them regularly to identify interviewees for articles and videos.

Numerical goal met, we analyzed the entries as a group and published a package of articles detailing our findings. The result was a uniquely deep look at why women start companies, how they view success, their top challenges and their most inspiring role models. We also published an online interactive map to help readers explore the many stories.

The results of our 1,000 Stories journey were so rich — and the women’s voices and contributions so powerful and important — that we decided to extend the project out into the future. So today, we relaunch the project as 1,000+ Stories with an improved questionnaire.

We again invite you to tell us your stories — so we can tell them to the world!