For 20 years, the national organization StoryCorps has been recording and preserving the experiences of folks from all walks of life.

Its mobile tour is making its way around the U.S., stopping in cities to add to its collection of stories.

Its latest stop, Lexington Time, perfectly to help the city celebrate its 250th birthday.

StoryCorps is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to recording, preserving, and sharing the stories of people from all backgrounds and beliefs.

They're committed to the idea that everyone has an important story to tell, and that everyone's story matters.

Their mission to help.

Help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all, one story at a time.

Usually what comes up is themes of family, community, meaningful relationships, work that you do and how you were drawn to it.

Career, work life balance.

People talk about the city that they're in.

We've heard that this is the 250th anniversary of the city of Lexington, and one of our hopes is to get people to talk about their city.

You know, how long they've been here, their history, how the past informs the present.

What do they want?

Lexington to look like in the future?

So I think that might be a distinct theme that I'm really excited to see come out.

Every month of our 250.

Lex birthday has a theme, and the theme for April is music, and the written word and the written word leads to the spoken word.

So the celebration of sharing stories through various art forms fits in well with StoryCorps recording the words and stories of our community members.

We, just sat down at a little table in the trailer with, two microphones and, just kind of had an open convo, like he had some questions set up in the beginning to just get to know me a little bit better.

But it kind of transformed into, you know, this, this shared experience.

We got to, like, get to know each other in a way, which is really cool.

And, you know, some people will bring somebody in to, you know, people that they know.

But it was cool to get to know somebody that that I didn't know and find shared experiences in that I talked a lot about, my experiences as a, as a queer person and as a trans person and just what it was like growing up, you know, and kind of how my identities helped fuel the work that I get to do now.

We have over 380,000 recordings from almost 700,000 people, all 50 states over the last 22 years.

So our claim to fame is we are the largest collection of human voices ever gathered.

And I also hear a lot.

I don't have a good story.

I don't have anything to say.

I want to challenge that and invite people to really think of any distinct relationship event in your life that shaped you into who you are.

Everyone has one of those, and I think it's really important to get that out, you know, not just for yourself, but for a wider audience or even people in your family.

I think that's super important, but also to serve as an oral history record of who we are as a country.

Where are we right now?

What are issues happening in your community on the larger scale that you're talking about right now?

I think especially for for marginalized communities, it's becoming more and more important, to share those experiences with people, because, those voices are often silenced and also because, you know, there might be, you know, young people who are figuring out their identity, you know, out in the world who might hear that story or might see that story and realize like, oh, I'm not the only person that feels this way.

People everywhere are interesting.

The quality of a story doesn't matter on where you're from or who you are.

And I think this mobile tour really exemplifies that.

And so I want to encourage you that we're here for a reason, because we find you interesting and we want to hear what you have to say.

So please take advantage of the opportunity.

The StoryCorps collection is archived at the Library of Congress.