Every historic event is made up of millions of personal stories.
Truly Raw Stories preserves the human experience behind history—and highlights the people turning lived experience into meaningful change.
The human side of history deserves to be remembered.
History books record what happened. News headlines capture the moment. Neither can fully preserve what it felt like to live through it.
From pandemics and natural disasters to social movements, migration, conflict, political change, innovation, and community action, every major event leaves behind personal experiences that may never appear in an official record.
Some stories are hopeful. Some are heartbreaking. Some are ordinary moments made extraordinary because of when and where they happened. Together, these voices create a richer understanding of history than statistics and timelines alone ever can.
Preserve
Collect first-person accounts before important memories, details, and voices are lost with time.
Connect
Connect individual experiences with the larger moments, places, communities, and themes to which they belong.
Humanize
Look beyond public events and official narratives to reveal how history changed real lives.
One global crisis. Millions of different realities.
Truly Raw Stories began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when one historic event was unfolding across the world—but no two people were living the same story.
Families were separated. Healthcare workers carried extraordinary burdens. Teachers reinvented classrooms. Essential workers kept communities running. Parents navigated uncertainty, and children grew up in a world unlike anything previous generations had known.
Those experiences deserved to be remembered not only through official timelines, but through the voices of the people who lived them.
A living archive—and a platform for meaningful work.
Preserve what people experienced.
The archive brings together first-person accounts from defining events, movements, crises, migrations, disasters, and periods of change. Stories may be shared through writing, guided questions, photographs, audio, or video.
Show what people are building.
Truly Raw Stories also highlights grassroots initiatives, organizations, social enterprises, and changemakers working to create practical change—and helps make their human story easier to understand and discover.
Christine Troyano
Christine created Truly Raw Stories to preserve the lived experiences behind the events that shape our world.
Her professional background spans social services, housing, public assistance, and education. For more than two decades, she has worked with people navigating uncertainty, major life transitions, and systems that often fail to reflect the complexity of real human lives.
After moving internationally and teaching students across countries and cultures, Christine witnessed the early effects of COVID-19 through the lives of her students before the pandemic transformed daily life worldwide.
During lockdown in Bali, Indonesia, she began developing questions that could help people document their experiences and created Truly Raw Stories as a place where those stories could be preserved through writing, photographs, and video.
That original COVID archive has since grown into a broader mission: preserving first-person stories from the defining moments of our time with dignity, context, and care—and helping meaningful people, projects, and solutions become easier to discover.
Every contributor remains part of the process.
Stories are handled with care. Contributors remain in control of their identity, words, images, video, and contact preferences. Editing is intended to improve clarity while preserving meaning and voice. Truly Raw Stories does not invent stories or guarantee publication, funding, partnerships, introductions, or other outcomes.
History belongs to everyone.
Whether your story concerns a global crisis, social change, migration, community action, or another defining moment, your perspective is part of the record.