About
Life Stories Institute invests in technology for capturing, organizing, and preserving human stories. The mandate is infrastructure for human memory — durable, understandable, and answerable to the people whose lives it holds.
People
Founder
Elliott founded the Institute with one mandate: build the infrastructure for human memory. That means treating a family's recordings and documents as a long-lived collection rather than app data, and holding the engineering to the standard the material deserves — ownership with the family, material portable on request, and no use of personal stories to train models.
Chief Narrative Officer
Demetrius holds a BA in American Cultural Studies from the University of Michigan and brings thirty years of television writing, producing, and documentary work to the Institute. His long interest in history — who gets recorded, who gets left out, and what a culture loses when a generation goes unasked — shapes how we define the mission and choose the work.
He leads After Pride, our community project serving LGBTQIA+ people 50 and older.
Operating model
The Institute develops storytelling technology and licenses it commercially through products such as Reflections. That commercial licensing funds the engineering.
The same capability is available for cultural, educational, and community use at free or low cost — the reason the commercial track exists. Licensing technology remains distinct from owning a story: customers license software, and families keep their stories.
Our stewardship principles apply across both tracks without exception.
Organizational status
We describe our structure precisely rather than favorably. Elliott Jobe holds an existing California nonprofit, Mental Foundation, and the Institute collaborates with Mental Foundation on the Companion Experience.
The formal relationship between Life Stories Institute and Mental Foundation is not finalized. Life Stories Institute does not independently hold 501(c)(3) status, and no executed DBA arrangement is in place between the two. We will state the arrangement here once it is settled.
Contact
We're establishing our published points of contact and will list them here once they're confirmed, rather than post an address that goes unread. Until then, this site is the record of what we do and how we do it.