For the last eight years, Aaron Huey has been photographing life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, culminating in the August 2012 cover story for National Geographic Magazine. Aaron used Cowbird to help the Pine Ridge community tell their own stories directly, and you can find hundreds of their own, unedited voices on National Geographic’s website, as an embedded Cowbird collection. We hope this collaboration demonstrates a model that many other journalists and news organizations will adopt for other, different communities — using Cowbird as a way to give those communities a voice alongside the “official” account of their story.

Since 1996, Radio Diaries has given tape recorders to teenagers and worked with them to produce the award-winning Teenage Diaries Series for NPR. In 2013, Radio Diaries partnered with Cowbird and NPR on a contest to select two teenagers who will become part of the next generation of Teenage Diaries. To have your story considered, add it to Cowbird's Teens Saga by May 2013. Radio Diaries, a non-profit organization which was founded by Joe Richman, produces documentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and the BBC World Service. It has won every major award in broadcast journalism and produced some of the most memorable stories ever heard on public radio.

Sandy Storyline is a participatory documentary that collects and shares stories about the impact of Hurricane Sandy on neighborhoods, communities and lives. The aim of the project is to create a rich, living archive of testimonies about Hurricane Sandy and visions for the region’s rebuilding. By engaging people in sharing their own experiences and visions, the team behind Sandy Storyline is building a community-generated narrative of the storm. More than a dozen partners are involved in Sandy Storyline, including Cowbird, Occupy Sandy, Interoccupy.net, Housing is a Human Right and the MIT Center for Civic Media.

At the age of 23, Andrew Forsthoefel set out to walk across America with a sign that said, 'Walking to Listen.' He walked for 11 months, from East to West, wearing out five pairs of shoes before completing his journey. He then moved to Woods Hole, where he produced a full-length radio documentary, 'Walking Across America: Advice for a Young Man' with Jay Allison for Transom.org, a workshop and showcase for new public radio. Andrew used Cowbird to create stories from the audio and images he had gathered from the road that didn't make it into his radio documentary. He also blogged about his experience. This is Cowbird's first collaboration with Transom, which also hosts a biannual workshop where newcomers can learn how to make radio.

Cowbird is a global community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. We are building a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance. Cowbird was created over two years by Jonathan Harris, and first launched in December, 2011. These 25 stories represent the very best of Cowbird during our first year of life. Culled from nearly 50,000 submissions, they stand out for their beauty, their depth and what they teach us about human life — and storytelling. With few exceptions, they are told by non-professional writers and photographers — ordinary people communicating their experience of life through words, images, and sound.