The Story Pharmacy Fellowship

In the fall of 2025 the Stanford Storytelling Project, in collaboration with the Life Design Lab, will begin development of a new public resource: a large, curated collection of stories that have helped people meet significant challenges in their lives.  The stories will be organized by conditions they helped meet—loneliness, heartbreak, exhaustion, e.g.—and they will be shared by and reflected upon by the person the story helped. The goal of the pharmacy is to help people experience the way stories can nourish and guide us, even become companions for navigating our lives. 

The project will be largely developed by students taking part in a new year-long fellowship focused on designing resources for care.  After taking a new course offered in fall, Story Pharmacy Fellows will, in teams, collect and design vehicles for sharing stories that have helped people navigate significant challenges in their lives.  For interested students, check back here in July for the application to join the inaugural 2025-2026 Story Pharmacy Fellowship.

For a preview, read the fall course description below:

To create sustainable, positive change in the world we need to cultivate both our own capacities and the kind of shared resources that can help us all through hard times. In this class, students will have the opportunity to do both by helping to design and build a Story Pharmacy—a public, curated collection of stories that can help people meet specific challenges—from loneliness and self-doubt to anxiety and heartbreak. Students will learn how to “design for care”: how to infuse presence, empathy, and courage into each step of collaboratively developing a resource for well-being. They will first explore how stories (anything from parables and poems to family tales and films) can nourish, guide us, or become important companions in challenging times. They will then learn foundational principles of narrative medicine and design thinking and skills such as interviewing for story, data-documentation, and experience design. Students will experience the impact of witnessing and being witnessed and will come away with new tools, frameworks, and models to apply to future projects aimed at building a more connected and caring world. By application.