Before

Pick your weekend and make it an occasion. Recruit your group of teenagers and elders. Partnering with schools, libraries, youth groups, care homes, and congregations are great options.

Get the free StoryCorps app and their Great Questions list, print the questions on paper, and hand them out in advance.

Set the event up in Plurality. Invite folks to Volunteers to sit with anyone nervous about the technology. Print your flyer and invite folks to attend.

During

Start with easy ground: where they grew up, what the house was like, what their parents did. The good stuff arrives once somebody has warmed up telling you something safe.

Then use the questions that do the work. What was the happiest moment of your life? What are you most proud of? Is there something you've never told me? How do you want to be remembered? And the one that ends most StoryCorps interviews: is there anything you want to say to me?

After

Give folks the file that day and make sure it's saved somewhere that isn't one phone. Uploading through the StoryCorps app puts it into the Library of Congress archive, which is a startling thing to be able to tell an eighty-year-old about their own voice.

Ask permission separately for anything you want to share publicly, and treat a no as final. What was recorded belongs to the pair who made it.

Then hold a listening night a few weeks later. Three or four short excerpts, played to a room over coffee, with the pairs present. Photograph the room and invite folks to record any other Moments.