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Dear
Friends,
H1N1 has a narrative structure.
We are being told a story about how humanity addresses
contagion, responds with policy, attempts implementation,
and moves toward change as these actions succeed or fail.
As in all good stories, the successes and failures are
often surprises. Change happens in ways that the professional
classes of epidemiologists, health policy analysts, bean
counters, and on-the-ground providers could not have imagined.
Inside the narrative is a dominant tone, and that tone
is fear. What if ... and memories of global pandemics
that killed more than the wars of the twentieth century.
A kind of sobering fear that gets people to use disinfectant
and nagging parents to remind their kids again and again
to wash their hands. But there are also countless subtones,
as well as currents of other emotions like compassion,
concern, love, generosity, and perhaps most importantly,
trust. While we act/react from fear, my guess is that
we change as a result of a cocktail of fears and desires,
hopes and concerns.
I am sitting in a long, cramped tube filled with some
300 folks jetting from San Francisco to Shanghai. We are
sharing air, and not very good air, in a deeply intimate
way. Does everyone on this little germ box have a story
about flu at the forefront of his/her mind? The guy next
to me talks about how, on a trip to his home in Shanghai
with his son, upon arrival his son's slight fever gave
him and the boy a free express trip to quarantine and
five days in a local hospital. Chinese Public Health folks
do not mess around. But the guy said it wasn't so bad,
he got a week off from work, and the government paid for
everything.
Before I left the Bay Area yesterday, I found myself driving
one of our out-of-town colleagues to Walnut Creek. She
woke up sick with a severe sore throat, and because she
was without healthcare, she had to find a low-cost clinic.
Most of the East Bay clinics have cut their hours as part
of California budget cuts, and a hospital would have charged
a fortune, so we rushed her 20 miles inland. The caregiver
speculated that her symptoms might be H1N1, and so she
checked herself out of housing with one of our staff and
into a motel, to keep some distance from us and our families
until she could fully recover and safely take a flight
back home. Meanwhile, we went out and bought more disinfectant
for our office.
If that had occurred in any year prior to the current
H1N1 education campaign, I am not sure what would have
happened. I honestly do not think I would have gone to
the trouble, and I can guess that none of the rest of
us would have, either. But one case, one possible case
of the dreaded bug, made a whole group of us react with
what we considered the best interests of everyone at heart.
Something had changed.
Millions and millions of these kinds of stories are swirling
around the planet. They are going from person to person,
in phone calls and emails, texts and twitters. In the
current moment, information travels so fast that it's
as if racing with the bugs themselves, in a dance that
is proving nearly adequate to the task of prevention.
But even as stories are overheard at the market, and delved
into at the barbershop, they are also being pumped out
endlessly by the mass media. All the channels light up
with pandemic tales. Some are infused with intelligent
consideration, but most are sensational and overly dramatic.
Instead of calm and reason, there is endless noise, cross-chatter,
and blather.
In our public health work at the Center, we are convinced
that amid all the noise, all the fear-filled speculation,
the undertones of compassion need to find their way to
the fore. There might already be a few digital stories
that represent simple attempts at honest reflection about
the meaning of this bug in individual people's lives,
but there need to be more ’Äì not just about H1N1, but
about all the nuances of what it means to be sick or to
be well. These stories need to be part of what moves us,
educates us, motivates us to change, and part of what
motivates decision makers to appropriately prioritize
resources and services. Just as the stories coming out
of our public health efforts on the Labrador Coast of
Canada, in the rural areas of South Africa, and in the
neighborhoods of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Toronto,
we want these stories to engage the best part of our humanity
and help us make choices. Choices informed by wisdom and
gentle empathy, represented not by grand authority, but
by ordinary folks. Telling us how they have changed and
how perhaps, just perhaps, you might change as well.
With this flu, and with many other public health issues,
our hope is that stories will help to shift the narrative
from fear, which leads us to isolate each other, turn
away from suffering, and demonize certain populations,
towards reaction. We hope through listening that we will
be softened, and perhaps even changed, as the little bug
of story becomes a viral call for greater solidarity.
I look forward to hearing your stories.
-JOE LAMBERT
Executive Director
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With
this edition of our newsletter, the Center announces a move
away from "regional" programming and towards a
series of consolidated initiatives under which the majority
of our work will continue to evolve. For the next few years,
we will be focusing our efforts on the following five core
area:Stories-of-Health,
Silence Speaks (stories to fight
gender-based violence), Witness Tree
(stories
of place and environmental change),Immigrant
Voices, and Women,
Girls, and Leadership.
Stories-of-Health
"I
was clean as a whistle; no cancer anywhere. It
was, in fact all in the trash ... but because
of some policy, or perhaps it's greed, or maybe
just arrogance, I now have no prospects for any
medical coverage ... just take your good health
and all your healthy habits and just go away."
~ Excerpt from a story created by Skip Guarini,
Critical Condition, Rocky Mountain PBS
The
recognition that personal stories can play a key
role in healthcare provision and public health research
and prevention efforts has grown dramatically over
the past several years. We are expanding on multiple
successes in these sectors by continuing to explore
the therapeutic applications of digital storytelling
in a community mental health context; the utility
of stories as effective tools for training providers
and humanizing care; and the power of developing
and sharing stories that promote health equity by
addressing the socio-political factors contributing
to poor health. Some of our Stories-of-Health appeared
on Rocky
Mountain PBS as part of an outreach campaign
about Coloradans living without health coverage.
This fall, our Berkeley and New England offices
partnered with
First 5 of Alameda County,which distributes
California Tobacco tax funds that support the well
being of children from zero to five years old. As
part of their capacity building efforts, First 5
organized a cohort of parent-educators who work
in Alameda County non-profits to improve these organization's
parent education programs. These parent-educators
requested that the final report about the project
utilize mulit-media technology to tell their stories,
and we saw this as an extraordinary opportunity
to demonstrate the ways in which digital stories
can both serve as a source of qualitative data about
a program and support reporting needs for staff
and evaluators.
The stories told by the cohort contain richly-nuanced
information that helps explain how service providers
are motivated, how their relationships with clients
influence their work, and how best practices in
parent education are sustained. A final multi-media
evaluation report will present these stories together
with textual information in a web-based report and
power-point document that can be used for real-time
presentations. We anticipate that this project will
function to create a model for us to use in assisting
many of our partners with envisioning new ways to
effectively communicate information about their
programs.
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Silence
Speaks
"As
I watched and heard my voice telling my story, I realized
the voice was not that of a 53 year old woman, but that
of a young girl, the 19 year old who needed to be heard.
She has finally told her story. Her way. She is no longer
silenced. I found that experience to be very freeing.
Any leftover guilt, shame, or blame I was holding onto
was released with the screening of this video."
~ Participant in the Silence Speaks workshop, Envisioning
New Meanings of Disability and Difference (Toronto: July,
2009)
As
stories of global violence and conflict continue to proliferate
online, the importance of creating participatory media production
processes that defy legacies of exploitation, and instead
benefit storytellers in clear ways, grows ever more critical.
The Center's Silence Speaks initiative is tapping our expertise
in working with multiple languages and sparse technology
resources as it continues to explore how making and sharing
stories can support work in the development sector and human
rights arena. A key focus is on linking personal narratives
to clear policy agendas related to gender justice and women's
health in the global South. Much of this work has been pioneered
through our partnership with the
Sonke Gender Justice Network.
Continued work in Africa has been the focus of Silence Speaks
this fall. We recently completed a training for community
radio program staff from rural areas in South Africa, on
how they can share stories on air as the basis for call-in
shows exploring health, gender, and HIV. In early October,
we brought South African Amakhosi (traditional leaders,
or kings) together to talk about their pioneering efforts
to challenge notions of "culture" which violate
human rights. And later in the same month, we worked with
the Institute for Justice
and Reconciliation to create a model for supporting
collective racial healing from the wounds of the Apartheid
era.The powerful stories told in this workshop will be screened
in early December, as a kick-off to a local series of inter-racial
dialogue sessions to support one community in openly discussing
the past and deliberating the meaning of restitution.
Image from Cecyl Esau's story about his release
from Robben Island prison in South Africa, created
in Silence Speaks workshop with the Institute for
Justice and Reconciliation.
This
past July, in collaboration with the
Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference
project, our Toronto office delivered its first Silence
Speaks workshop.Survivors of violence from across
the city shared their stories. Many women who participated
in the workshop are actively involved in advocacy
on behalf of the disabled, as educators, crisis counselors
and community organizers.The workshop became an important
place for them to reflect on their own lives, take
time for themselves, and receive support from each
another.One participant who works as a phone crisis
counselor said that it was deeply moving for her to
hear women's stories face to face.The project plans
to share the stories broadly, as tools for raising
awareness about issues of violence faced by disabled/differently
abled women.
Witness
Tree: Stories for a Changing Planet
"The
weather has changed dramatically in the last 10
years. If you're stuck in the house for a month
at a time because of the weather it certainly does
have an effect on your mental health." ~
AngajuKak (Mayor) of Rigolet, Dan Michelin, from
The Labradorian Newspaper
As
climate change becomes an increasingly urgent global
issue, attention to the preservation and distribution
of knowledge about the environment from the perspective
of holders of local wisdom is critical. The Center is
working with indigenous, land use, rural economic development,
and environmental organizations to use stories, geographic
information systems, and action-research processes to
address the impact of environmental degradation on community
stability and to support community action for sustainable
development. One of our first Witness Tree projects,
"Cows
and Fish",is a partnership with the Alberta
Riparian Habitat Management Society.
Back
in September, the Center ran a one-day Witness Tree
digital
storytelling workshop for Washington DC area students
who participated in the National Park Service's S.T.A.M.P.
(Students Teaching About Monumental Park Sites) summer
camp program. The workshop was part of the local PBS
station's community outreach activities in connection
with the Ken Burns documentary film, The National Parks:
America's Best Idea. To create their stories, students
drew from journals and photos taken during visits to
the Korean War memorial, Clara Barton National Historic
Site, Glen Echo Park, the Washington Monument, Shenandoah
National Park, and other local parks. Their work, which
reflects on the connections they see between their own
lives and history and nature, can be viewed here.
CDS
is very pleased to be working for the community of Rigolet,
in the Nunatsiavut region of Labrador in Canada. Rigolet,
a picturesque
community of 320 people, is located at the entrance
of Hamilton Inlet
in the Torngat Mountains District of Newfoundland and
Labrador and is the most southerly Inuit community in
the world. In May 2009, the
Rigolet Inuit Community Government was awarded a grant
from Health Canada’s First Nations and Inuit Health
Branch (FNIHB), as part of the Canadian government's
Climate Change and Health Adaptation in Northern First
Nations and Inuit Communities Program. In October, CDS
representatives visited Rigolet. During this trip, community
members were hired, workshop locations were secured,
and participant recruitment efforts were initiated.
In November, a CDS staff member returned to Rigolet
and led a community workshop and a session for students
in grades seven, eight, and nine. Additional workshops
and community screenings will take place in 2010.
Rigolet
from the Air
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Immigrant
Voices
"When
I was five years old, my mother took us four children
to Mexico to visit her parents. We spoke Spanish all
summer long and Spanish became my first language.
But after my first day back in school in the US I
left it behind."
~ Excerpt from a story created by Alicia Ramirez,
AFSC/CFIR workshop (Denver: October, 2009)
Migration
and mobility in the United States, Canada, and around
the world have myriad impacts on individuals, families,
communities, and institutions. CDS has linked with
grassroots groups and service organizations in several
regions to use digital storytelling as a method
for enabling immigrants to document their journeys
and explore related transformations in identity
and citizenship. One of our first Immigrant Voices
projects was made in conjunction with the
Service Employees International Union. We are
continuing to work with various partners to explore
story as a mechanism of negotiating difference and
change within communities and mobilizing communities
for immigrant rights.
In October, we spent a long weekend in Denver working
in conjunction with the
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and
Coloradans for Immigrant Rights (CFIR) to offer
a workshop for immigrants and immigration allies
as part of Project Voice. The stories will be screened
publicly in December, and we hope to broadcast them
on Colorado Public Radio. The workshop was taught
bilingually in English and Spanish, and all stories
will be and subtitled. This workshop is our second
held in partnership with AFSC; a pilot session was
conducted in Baltimore, with Somali-Bantu
immigrants in Baltimore.
American
Friends Service Committee and Coloradans for Immigrant
Rights workshop, Denver, CO
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"...I
grew up playing in Terrace Park, and I really
became more interested when my boys were here-they
had a wonderful after-school program and a summer
program ...The Parks and Rec. commission contacted
me a year or so ago and said, "We want to
rename Terrace Park 'Jewel's Park'..." ~
Excerpt from a story by Jewel Okawachi, Albany
Storymapping Project (Berkeley: July, 2009)
The
erosion of historic urban communities due to gentrification
and the current economic crisis is a focus of The
Center's work with community organizations and university-based
service learning groups. We partner with community
development specialists to link our work in storymapping
to asset-based models for community planning. Our
plan is to coordinate a series of intensive trainings
that will prepare college students to act as coaches
on local mapping and digital storytelling efforts.
Students and community residents will work together
to share the resulting stories in meaningful ways.
A model for a successful program can be seen in
the continued digital storytelling work at the University
of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Over
the summer, we worked with a team of local and visiting
volunteers to begin storymapping projects in the Bay
Area communities of Albany and Alameda. The focus in
Albany was on capturing stories of residents about growing
up in the area in the 1920s and 1930s. The Albany
Historical Society assisted us in assembling a fabulous
group or residents who had on average lived for well
over 70 years in the community. The stories touched
on education, parks and recreation, traditions of family
life, the joy of a boy and a fireworks stand, getting
a driver's license, an important local church, and fishing
along the shores of the San Francisco Bay. Visit the
map here.
The focus in Alameda was on capturing stories of residents
living in the neighborhoods adjacent to the de-commissioned
Naval Air Station. Over the dozen years since the base
closing, the neighborhood has gone through significant
demographic change, and is the focus of massive development
discussions that would change this unique Bay Area community
profoundly. Working in conjunction with students at
the BASE Academy, a social justice leadership and community
arts charter school in the neighborhood, we were able
to capture a half dozen stories. Work will continue
over the year to expand this project as a prototype
for the UR Hear community based learning project.
As an outgrowth of these pilot projects, we are also
pushing forward the Field Guide to Storymapping, a new
Cookbook-like publication of the Center for Digital
Storytelling, we are scheduling for the Spring.
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Women,
Girls & Media Leadership
The
sharing of women's personal stories ‚ of struggle
and challenge, of steps forward, and, most importantly,
of survival and success ‚ has the power to change
lives and communities. CDS' work with women and
girls from marginalized communities supports them
in accessing and engaging with media and technology
tools, to explore issues of representation, develop
their own content, and challenge gender oppression.
We are collaborating on projects that focus on gender
equity, violence prevention, and workforce preparation,
with an emphasis on preparing youth and adult women
storytellers as mentors and leaders in their communities.
Recently, the Center has worked with
Latinas Y Que in San Leadro, California to implement
an after-school curriculum, and worked with Deaf
Women Against Violence Everywhere and Metro Toronto
School for the Deaf on the
Deaf Women and Girls Project.
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Northern
California/Pacific Northwest Region
The Center's Berkeley office continues an exciting range
of work. As we move through the fall, we're finishing up
a number of curriculum and documentation projects with the
Children's System of Care
in San Francisco. This effort has included the creation
of three curricula, a short video that introduces our workshop
process and explores the ways in which it aligns with the
goals of mental health and substance abuse programs, and
various manuals to facilitate CSOC's future digital storytelling
work.
Southern
California Region
The
Center's Southern California Region office facilitated a
workshop this September in Monrovia, CA with staff from
Southern California Edison International. Eleven Southern
California Edison employees got together to enhance their
corporate communication skills and create corporate stories
with a human voice. Most of the stories will be used internally,
and some with external appeal may be further developed for
use on the Southern California
Edison website.
Rocky Mountain/Midwest Region:
In
December, our Rocky Mountain/Midwest Regional Office will
embark on a long-awaited project with the Orton
Family Foundation, which, through its Art and Soul initiative,
is helping the town of Golden, CO to participate in
Golden Vision 2030. The
project will engage a broad spectrum of the community to
more deeply explore the city's character, strengths, and
opportunities for change. This process will help residents
develop a vision for Golden's future, which will inform
a Vision 2030 Plan and citizen-driven action steps. Digital
storytelling will play a key role in helping to distill,
capture, and share the values and aspirations of local residents,
for inclusion in this Plan.
Canadian
Projects: Toronto Office
CDS Toronto has launched a local wordpress site, storycentre.wordpress.com,
which highlights projects carried out in the region over
the last year. Visit the site to watch recent work by Toronto
residents, including stories from Silence
Speaks participants, Settlement workers at NorthYork
Community House, newcomer youth from
Kipling Collegiate Institute and more.
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In
This
Issue
The
Listening Post
Program
Initiative Updates
Regional
Updates
Workshop
Schedule
Featured
Story:
"Beauty"
by Richard Cowling
View
Richard's Story
Richard
created his story at Nurstory, a workshop held in collaboration
with the University of Colorado College of Nursing. (Denver,
2009).
"I
care deeply about the lives of women and in the possibilities
within all of us for healing - and feel particularly blessed
by the lessons I have learned from the women who have shared
their lives with me ...The story came to me from inside
myself as I struggled with describing the nature of nursing
and what it meant to me. It felt as if it emerged as a discovery
of the relatedness of various aspects of who I am as a person
and a nurse"
New
3rd Edition:
Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community
The
Center for Digital Storytelling is proud to announce a new,
third edition of our textbook, Digital Storytelling:
Capturing Lives, Creating Community. The third
edition includes a revised version of our "5 elements
of digital storytelling," an updated interview with
Amy Hill of our Silence Speaks initiative, and new interviews
with Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner from Patient Voices. The
3rd edition will be available in December.
Pre-order
your copy of the 3rd edition.
Now
Available!
Silence Speaks DVD
A
selection of stories from our first-ever compilation DVD.
Thanks to the generosity of a number of our storytellers
and partner organizations, we have put together a collection
of twelve digital stories by a diverse group of women and
men from across the United States who share their experiences
of domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, and sexual
assault. The DVD also includes a Faciliation Guide for use
in guiding discussions about the complexities of these stories.
Visit the Silence Speaks website for more information or
to
order a copy.
Southern Regional Meeting
December 15, New Orleans
CDS
a gathering to engage and discuss the work of our Center
in the Southern Region of the United States. This will be
a great opportunity to learn about our work in education,
public health, community development, and organizational
development. Participants will also be able to connect with
partners from community and academic organizations across
the South to discuss potential partnerships and collaborations.
From 12:30 pm - 2 pm, there will be a Tour of iWitness
New Orleans (7th Ward and Central City) with MondoBizarro
Theater
Members, followed by a discussion and presentation, 2:30
- 5:30 pm, with Joe Lambert, Founder and Executive Director,
Berkeley CA, and representatives of Digital Storytelling
work from throughout the South.
International
Day for Sharing Life Stories, May 16, 2010
The Museum
of the Person Network and CDS will announce plans in
December for the theme and focus of the 2010 International
Day for Sharing Life Stories. The discussion is focussing
on stories about connected to gender and identity, with
a specific focus on human rights issues for girls and women.
Please continue to share stories at
Ausculti.org, and join our mailing list by e-mailing:
internacional@museudapessoa.net
Seeking:
Archive Intern
The
Center is looking for an Archive Intern to begin immediately.
The Archive Intern will assist our Archive Manager with
basic archiving tasks such as media organization, research,
file duplication, and the transfer of data to archive hard
drives. This intern may also assist with data entry related
to the archive, maintaining workshop participant records,
preparing short written descriptions of past projects for
inclusion in the archive, writing descriptions of digital
stories, and tagging and posting stories to our Story Theater.
Experience with Mac operating system and basic data management
is required. Some proficiency in Filemaker Pro is desired.
Interested candidates should e-mail a resume and a brief
cover letter to: patrick@storycenter.org.
Be
Our Friend on Facebook!
Visit the Center
for Digital Storytelling Facebook page to stay up-to-date
on our projects in between newsletters and become a fan
to help spread the word
about our work.
Workshop
Schedule
Story-to-Go:
One Day Digital Storytelling Workshop
This winter, the Center introduces an innovative workshop
model that squeezes the Standard Three Day workshop
into one day, to assist storytellers from first-timers
to seasoned experts in designing and producing a two
to three minute digital story. All the elements of
our three-day workshop are present including an overview
of the "Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling,"
the Story Circle, and tutorials in assemblingand editing
the still images, video, and music that illustrate
a teller's story. To help participants do all this
in a single day, we will provide specific preparation
instructions, and two creative writing prompts.
Knoxville, TN
2009 dates:
December 14, 8:30
am - 5:30 pm
Instructor: Joe Lambert with members of Carpetbag
Theater Digital Storytelling
New
Orleans, LA
2009 dates:
December 16, 8:30 am
- 5:30 pm
Instructor: Joe Lambert
Berkeley
Standard
Workshop
2009
dates:
December 3-5
2010
dates:
January 28-30
March 18-20
May 20-22
Workshop for Educators
2010 dates:
March 29-31, 2010
2009
dates:
November 19-21
2010 dates:
January 21-23
February 11-13
April 22-24
Los
Angeles
Standard Workshop
2009
dates:
December
11-13, 2009
Washington,
DC
Standard
Workshop
2010
dates:
January 14-16
April 1-3
June 4-6
September 9-11
Standard
Workshop
2009
dates:
November 20-22
2010
dates:
March 26-28
Victoria,
BC
Standard
Workshop
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