We all want our kids to embrace diversity with confidence, compassion and curiosity.
Story Starters’s Family Conversations Program is a 8-week guided program that includes curated books, conversation prompts, family and parent events, and weekly support to help families build lasting habits at home. Click the link below to learn more about our upcoming cohorts.
Families Receive
A bundle of 6 books
5 parent guides full of research, resources, family activities, and booklists to help parents get started
2 family events and 2 parent workshops
A network of current families and alumni to lean on and learn from
FAQs
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Our Family Conversations Program is for parents and caregivers with children ages 3–8 who are ready to build habits of meaningful, anti-bias conversations at home.
If you are a caregiver looking to nurture thoughtful conversations at home, Story Starters offers structured, supportive programs that meet you where you are. While our program highlights the ages of 3-8 we a a program for families, we welcome older and younger siblings to be part of the fun!
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Research shows that children begin noticing race as early as 6 months old and start forming racial preferences and biases between ages 2 and 4. By elementary school, many of these ideas are already deeply shaped by what children see, hear, and experience in the world around them.
We start young because these early years are a powerful window for helping children make sense of difference with curiosity, compassion, and confidence—before misinformation or bias has a chance to take root.
Talking openly and age-appropriately about race does not create bias; it reduces it. When caregivers name what children are already noticing, provide language for fairness and kindness, and share high-quality, picture books, children develop healthier, more inclusive ways of understanding themselves and others.
Starting early isn’t about having “big” conversations—it’s about building small, frequent habits that grow with your child and strengthen their ability to navigate our diverse world with empathy and clarity.
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Our program engagements are designed to be meaningful, structured, and flexible enough to fit into busy school and family lives.
Family Conversations Program: This is an 8-week guided experience that includes curated books, conversation prompts, family and parent events, and weekly support to help families build lasting habits at home.
Many participants choose to continue with alumni opportunities, follow-up coaching, or multi-year cycles of support. Story Starters offers programming that is time-bound yet multi-session—designed to spark your beginning and support you as you continue your journey.
Where we’ve been
Story Starters has led community-wide programming in Newton, Needham, and Melrose, Massachusetts - as well as nationwide online programming. We have partnered with the following institutions to offer cohorts exclusively for their community members:
Barnert Temple Preschool (Franklin Lakes NJ)
Bowen Co-Operative Preschool (Newton, MA)
Burr Elementary School (Newton, MA)
Mason-Rice Elementary School (Newton, MA)
Spruce Street Nursery School (Boston, MA)
Temple Ohabei Shalom (Brookline, MA)
Ward Elementary School (Newton, MA)
Mason-Rice Elementary School, Newton
“Story Starters is truly a remarkable program. Providing meaningful, intentionally scaffolded meetings while simultaneously building a sense of safety and belonging created the conditions for our participating Mason-Rice families to begin to build their toolkits to engage in conversations about topics like race and inclusivity in a developmentally appropriate manner. We are so grateful that families in our school community had the opportunity to take part in this meaningful, collaborative learning experience.”
—Jacob Bultema, Principal
Temple Ohabei Shalom, Brookline
"Story Starters is truly the gift that keeps on giving for any progressive-minded parent who wants their child to learn truths about the world with developmentally appropriate empathy and sensitivity to others' experiences. And this is more important right now than ever before in our world. I participated in the Story Starters program last year as both an educator and a parent. My son was especially excited about the events in which he heard stories read by their authors in person, which for him truly made the words on the pages feel more alive and powerful. This program generated many conversations in our family that continued for months after the experience ended. The framework of vocabulary and shared language we began using last year, when we were participating in the Story Starters program, has helped our family navigate discussions around many recent current event topics, and my son who is now six years old remembered and referenced books and language we learned in the program last year. The other night he asked to read a book we received during the program a full year ago, and was able to approach it with even more nuance and a new perspective, because he already had built that foundation a year ago."
—Anna Goodkind, Director of Early Education
REFLECTIONS FROM PARENT WORKSHOPS