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Dear
Friends,
In describing the pattern of development of the Center
for Digital Storytelling's work over the last seventeen
years, I have employed numerous process metaphors: waves,
cycles, trends, phases. My perception was that as with
all social phenomena, we could predict with some certainty
that as one area of enthusiasm or interest diminished,
another would emerge, become dominant, and define the
focus of our work. We moved through a focus on local arts
(1993-96), dot.com technology professionals (1996-98),
education (1998-2002), and health/social services (2002-present)
in much this way, gradually supporting the adoption of
digital storytelling practices throughout the U.S. and
in locations around the world. During each of these phases,
I certainly had a strong sense of optimism, even as I
and my collaborators faced the innumerable challenges
of keeping our small non-profit alive. Ups and downs,
comings and goings.
Somehow,
the last nine months seem different from any period in
this history. There is the story of the recession; we
are of course affected by the economic downturn, more
each month as improvements in the civic and non-profit
sectors lag behind those occurring in commercial sectors.
Fortunately we have thus far been able to eek out an existence,
mainly by harvesting projects from the large number of
seeds that were planted during our expansion over the
last five years. But I am not talking about economics.
What I am sensing is that the role of our work is changing.
In
1993, we took a leap of faith about how digital media
would change citizen participation in media culture. We
evolved a workshop-based practice built around a new genre
of digital media communication, the digital story. We
were high-tech-meets high-touch. Our process was (and
has remained) one that privileged deep listening in the
conceptual phase and elegant simplicity in production.
But we knew that the "digital" in digital storytelling
would have less and less meaning; as every type of media
practice became digital, the significance of digital communication
toolsets as catalysts to popular creative expression would
diminish. The novelty would wear off.
The
United Nations International Telecommunications Union
estimates that there are more than 4 billion cell phone
users, meaning roughly two out of every three people have
a digital communication device in their hands. Eighty-seven
percent of adults in the U.S. own a cell phone, 67% of
American households have computers with internet access.
Facebook and MySpace have more than 300 million users
world-wide, about 40 million people have posted to a blog,
and 15 million Americans made a movie on a computer last
year (no doubt mostly on their own, without taking a class,
workshop, or accessing any particular special assistance).
Of course most people are not using the technology for
creative expression, but nearly every civic education
and policy entity on the planet accepts the premise that
digital communications expertise is the gateway to full
citizenship in the 21st Century. Even if we don't make
movies, we should know how to do so. This revolution is
decided; we have become a world of digital natives.
As
a result, our organization has had no choice but to put
less and less emphasis on our "expertise" in
the use of media technology tools, and more and more emphasis
on our skills in the craft of story-development and the
subtleties of effective group-process. These aspects of
our workshops—not the bells and whistles of the
latest hardware or software—give each and every
story the potential to surprise and move hearts. We have
deepened our ability to assist folks in making stories
that can serve as powerful tools for education and awareness-raising,
in making stories that can provide vibrant new ways of
understanding issues in the context of qualitative research
or evaluation, in making stories that can be presented
as calls to community or online action, and in making
stories that can shape opinions in a way that supports
progressive policy advocacy.
Our
rededication to a spectrum of uses of our practice has
been at the center of our planning for the last two years.
These efforts, along with the evolution of our core teaching
practices as represented by the revised “Seven Steps
to Digital Storytelling” in the new edition of my
book,
Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community,
is our response to the shifting environment for our work.
We are changing. Slowly, surely. But we imagine being—I
think we can say we will be—a very different organization
by the end of this year, when a whole new wave/cycle/trend/phase
will begin.
-JOE LAMBERT
Executive Director
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Stories-of-Health
The
recognition that personal stories can play a key
role in community health and well-being, healthcare
provision, and public health research and prevention
efforts has grown dramatically over the past decade.
We are expanding on multiple successes in these
sectors as we continue to develop our Stories-of-Health
program area.
"I
don't know when I lost track of what I wanted
in life and starting doing what is expected...
Waking up to stare at myself in the mirror and
realize that what I was looking at was not the
person I wanted to be." ~ Excerpt
from a digital story created by "K"
in a workshop sponsored by the Youth Foundation
and the Guardian Scholars program (Edwards,
CO: January, 2010)
In
January 2010, we coordinated two workshops (one
in Colorado, and one in California) as part of our
ongoing partnership with Guardian
Scholars programs,
which enable former foster youth to attend college,
often becoming the first in their families to pursue
higher education. Scholarship recipients from several
colleges in Colorado were recruited for a second
workshop sponsored by the The
Youth Foundation to come together and share
stories about the challenges of homelessness, alcohol
addiction, and facing racism and anti-immigrant
sentiments. The common theme of the Youth Foundation’s
efforts is jumping in to not only keep kids from
“falling through the cracks” but lift
them up through education, sports, and opportunities
that promote character development—like digital
storytelling. In Berkeley, we led our fifth annual
workshop with a group of sophomore and junior Guardian
Scholars from the California State University at
Fullerton. A selection of these stories will be
shared at the Fullerton program's annual banquet
in April.
An
image from Joslyn Funez's story created at the
Guardian Scholar's workshops
Part
of our work in the health sector includes exploring
the ways in which digital storytelling can be employed
as a method of research and evaluation. Over the
past several months, our Berkeley office, in partnership
with our New England field representatives, we have
had the chance to build our knowledge in this arena
through a collaborative project with First
5 of Alameda County. First 5 distributes California
Tobacco Tax funds to programs that support the well
being of children from zero to five years old. The
project explored how digital storytelling can contribute
to professional development, through the telling
of stories about the workplace. Representatives
from community-based parent-education organizations
created stories as a way of assessing and documenting
their experiences of assisting parents in providing
rich, stimulating, and positive environments for
their children. The completed stories were used
as data in an evaluation of the Parenting Partnership,
a component of First 5 Alameda County's Community
Grants Program; they will be featured as an integral
part of the final multimedia report to be released
by mid-March. If you would like to be notified upon
release of the report, please contact Andrea
Spagat.
Finally,
in late January, we had the opportunity to implement
our new short workshop model with a group of Leadership
Fellows at the University of California at Berkeley’s
School of Public Health. These graduate students
created moving stories about how they have been
inspired to become leaders in public health work.
The ease with which this youthful group picked up
the technology and their dedication to the streamlined
process involving a set number of images and shorter
scripts allowed us to complete the workshop in one
and a half days. The students will continue to explore
in their coursework, and at an upcoming
conference, how digital media production and
other social media tools can enhance their practices
in community health promotion.
Top
Silence
Speaks
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 continues to explore how making
and sharing stories can enhance education and advocacy
for responsible development and human rights.
“My
name is Bahamboula Gertrude. I was a stonecutter in Kinkala
before the war. I helped make stones used for building
houses. When the war began they started destroying houses
instead of building them. Now my main job is tilling the
land, but if someone might call me to break stones, I
can do that too. So I am telling women in the Pool region:
you can use your strength to do anything that you want
to do.”
~
Excerpt from a digital story created in a workshop sponsored
by the United Nations Development Program’s Bureau
for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (Kinkala, Republic
of Congo; November 2009)
How
can supporting rural women in sharing personal narratives
about war contribute to individual and community healing
and transformation? How might such stories serve as tools
for the prevention of gender-based violence and HIV, in
post-conflict periods? These are the questions being explored
by the United
Nations Development Program’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention
and Recovery (UNDP-BCPR) through a partnership
with our Silence Speaks initiative. Seven women affected
by Congo-Brazzaville's civil wars between 1997 and 2003,
in which many thousands of people died, came together for
a four-day digital storytelling workshop. Their stories
of terror, loss, survival, and hopes for the future will
be shared at the local, country, and international level,
to promote dialogue about the lasting effects of war and
build peace.
Members of the Kinkala Women’s Agricultural Cooperative
sell
produceat a local market
Workshop
participant Florence Malanda, Head of the Kinkala Women's
Cooperative, said:
These
testimonials will help to raise awareness with all Congolese
people and populations around the world on the consequences
of war. We hope that UNDP's support will help other women
who are suffering around the world."
More
information about the project in Congo-Brazzaville.
The
role that South African men can play in confronting sexual
assault in South Africa was the focus of a training session
held in Cape Town in December 2009, to pilot a new Sonke
Gender Justice Network curriculum that presents digital
stories created through the Network's ongoing partnership
with Silence Speaks. The one-day training frames a set of
four stories as key case studies for understanding the provisions
of the country's Sexual Offenses Act and exploring how men
can best assist survivors in seeking justice. One participant
expressed these thoughts about the training as follows:
"I
was trying to categorize types of rape; for example, this
is big, this is small. But after I came to the training,
there's no big or small. Whatever counts as a rape, is
rape, and is bad."
Sonke
is currently in the process of finalizing the training and
will be integrating it into its core One
Man Can educational series on gender-based violence.
Excerpts from the stories used in the training have been
developed into short radio spots, which will be broadcast
by community stations throughout the country. More information
about Sonke’s
digital storytelling work.
Top
As
climate change becomes an increasingly urgent global
issue, The Center is working with indigenous communities,
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.
"Back
in the day when the elders were younger every one
of them spoke Slavey. Then residential school came
to Deline in the 1920’s. The teachers were
really strict and they didn’t let our elders
speak Slavey. They hated our language… After
the elders stopped going to school they started
speaking Slavey again. They passed it on. But, now
parents aren’t doing that. But, mine did.
And I know I’m special because of that."
~ Excerpt from a digital story created by Mitchell
Naedzo in a workshop sponsored by Déline
First Nation and the Sahtu Renewable Resources Board
(Déline, Northwest Terriories, Canada, January
2010)
In
late January and early February, our Canadian staff
and partners led two back-to-back youth digital storytelling
workshops in the Sahtu Region of the Northwest Territories.
The first workshop was held in the community of Norman
Wells, situated along the Mackenzie River; the second
in Déline, on the shores of Great Bear Lake.
The workshops, sponsored by the Sahtu Rennewable Resources
Board, the Norman Wells Land Corporation, and Déline
First Nation, were part of the Region’s larger
program exploring stories about changes and continuities
in the Dene relationships with caribou and the environment.
Since the spring of 2008, the community of Déline
has encouraged youth to engage in dialogue with elders
and parents, through a program that utilizes storytelling
and new media. The program creates a mechanism for
transmitting knowledge from one generation to the
next and enhances the support that youth receive from
their elders.
Jordan Tobac from Fort Good Hope, NWT pointing to
the location
of his story "The Bridge" during the Norman
Wells workshop.
Following
the successes of a radio
documentary co-produced by Polar Radio and CBC
North Radio, the winter workshops were conceived as
a way for participants ages 14-19 to explore who they
are in their communities and to tell stories about
what is important to them. The stories revealed much
about what it’s like to be young and live in
the far north: they describe a first caribou hunt,
a family’s bridge building project, the experience
of becoming a community leader, a friendship discovered,
the loss of a home and discovery of a new one in the
north, the excitement of pushing boundaries, the joys
of going to the bush for the first time (or many times),
a moose hunt, the challenges of chasing ptarmigan
to a near fatal end, pride in speaking one’s
traditional language and more. Audio versions of some
of the stories have already been featured on CBC North
Radio as part of the "Listening to Our Youngers"
program. Students who had their stories broadcast
received CBC freelance payment. All the stories will
eventually be available for viewing online.
Top
Women
Girls and Media Leadership
The
Center's initiative 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.
"As
I was taking the pictures I started remembering things
from the past that had happened in that spot. When
I took pictures of the new things I remembered the
old ones. When I took pictures of the things I never
had seen when I first came to Canada it reminded me
of my home country and how much I miss it. If you
just look at the pictures, not knowing where they
came from they won’t really mean much to you.
But if you’ve lived through it, suffered the
pain and experienced the joy you get a sense of what’s
behind those pictures, the stories, the memories.
I hope for a brighter future!" ~
Excerpt from a story created at the Neighborhood Story
Project workshop in partnership with the Centre for
Community Learning and Development (Toronto, Ontario,
Canada: January 2010)
Our
Centre for Digital Storytelling in Toronto spent many
weeks last fall working on the Neighbourhood Story Project
at the Centre for Community
Learning & Development. CCL&D’s Immigrant
Women's Integration Project is an intensive training
with an emphasis on leadership development and community
engagement. Women from an array of cultural and geographic
communities came together over a period of six months
to create photographs, audio portraits, and digital
stories, as a way of sharing their neighbourhoods with
one another and exploring notions of community and identity.
In
the end, they mapped their work, creating a unique portrait
of Toronto that features sounds from Eid at the Canadian
National Exhibition, photographs of changing leaves
during a first fall in Canada, and stories of places
they care about in their communities—from the
ballroom dancing studio to subway to get to Walmart
nightshifts.
Image
from a story created at the Neighborhood Story Project
workshop (Toronto, ON: January, 2010)
Top
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Rocky
Mountain/Midwest Region:
My
first connection to Golden was through the courthouse,
where my name changed from Jordyn Scheller to Jordyn Komoras.
But it wasn’t only my name that was different. This
was the start of a new life for me here in Golden. I still
remember shaking as I nervously looked up at the judge
when he asked me, “Do you want this man to be your
new father?” Answering yes was simple. ~
Excerpt from a digital story created by Jordyn Komoras
in a workshop sponsored by Golden Vision 2030 (Golden,
Colorado; January 2010)
This
January, our Denver office embarked upon a long-awaited
project in partnership with the Orton
Family Foundation,
which, through its Art and Soul Civic Engagement Initiative,
is supporting the town of Golden, Colorado's Golden
Vision 2030. The
project is engaging a broad spectrum of the Golden community
in deeply exploring the City’s character, strengths,
and opportunities for change, through a process that will
help residents develop citizen-driven action steps as part
of a Vision 2030 Plan. Digital storytelling will play a
big role in helping to distill, capture, and share citizens’
experiences and input -- the project began with a workshop
at Golden High School, where students created stories
about how they connect to Golden and why the city is important
to them as a place. The workshop also served as a training
to prepare the students to go out into the community and
help elders share their own stories.
Image
of the storyteller and her father, from Jordyn’s story,
created
at
the Golden Vision 2030 workshop (Golden, CO: January, 2010).
East Coast Region
Since June 2008, as part of our extensive work in the realm
of higher education, we have been leading a series of workshops
with Swarthmore College’s Information
Technology Services (ITS) to build capacity
for digital storytelling practices among faculty. This January,
we returned to Swarthmore to encourage faculty to take our
methods to a new level. ITS invited us to run a Facilitator in Training (FIT) workshop for faculty members who
are beginning to use digital storytelling with their students
in the English Literature, Creative Writing, Modern Languages,
and Dance Departments, as part of the Study Abroad Program,
and at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.
The Director of the Language Resource Center and staff from
Communications and Academic Technology were also trained.
The FIT workshop will increase capacity among a growing
community of digital storytelling practitioners at Swarthmore.
We will return later this year to continue our training
collaboration with the college.
Top
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FEATURED STORY:
"DEAR JODY"
BY
SASHA CHARLES
 
Former
foster youth Sasha Charles created her digital story at
a workshop taught in New York City by the Center and sponsored
by the Hunter College School of Social Work, as part of
the project Preparation
for Adulthood: Supervising for Success. Her story, and
others created through this collaboration, are being shared
as tools for training social workers on the needs of young
people in the child welfare system.
We
are proud to announce that Sasha's story has been selected
to appear in a program of young women's shorts, as part
of the upcoming San Francisco
Women's Film Festival (Friday, April 9, 4 pm; Ninth
Street Independent Film Center, 145 9th St.)
PARTNER
THANK YOU:
City College of
San Francisco
For
nearly two years, our colleagues at City College of San
Francisco worked hard to put together the new textbook,
Foundations for Community Health Workers. We
thank them for including a case study of some of our Silence
Speaks work in South Africa, in a chapter entitled, "Using
the Arts to Promote Community Health."
DONOR
THANK YOU:
PIXAR Animation Studios
We
would like to extend our warmest appreciations to our local
supporters at PIXAR, whose generous contribution of four
G5 Power Macs and one Sony flatscreen monitor will greatly
assist our ongoing database, post-production, and story
archiving work.
SUPPORT
US
We
are always seeking volunteers and donations. Visit our website
to see our wishlist
of current needs, or make a contribution via Paypal
to our scholarship fund, which enables low-income individuals
to participate in our open workshops.
INTERNSHIPS
We
offers four kinds of internships: Archive Internships,
Programmatic Internships, Administrative Internships,
and Post-Production Support Internships. Visit our website
to learn more about these positions or to apply.
NOW
AVAILABLE:
Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community,
3rd Edition
 
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 "Seven Steps
of Digital Storytelling" (formerly Seven Steps)
and a new interview with Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner from
Patient Voices.
NOW
AVAILABLE:
An Updated
Digital Storytelling Cookbook
In
conjunction with the release of the third edition of Digital
Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community,
we have updated our basic digital storytelling handbook,
the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, used in all
of our workshops. The new version includes the reimagined
"Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling.
ALSO
AVAILABLE:
Silence Speaks DVD
A
selection of stories from our first-ever compilation DVD.
Thanks to the generosity of a number of our Silence Speaks
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 Discussion
Guide for use in facilitating learning dialogues about
the stories. Visit the Silence
Speaks website for more information.
2010
dates:
March, 18-20
May, 20-22
July, 22-24
September, 23-25
October, 21-23
December, 9-11
Workshop for Educators
2010 dates:
March, 29-31
June, 21-23
August, 9-11
Denver
2010
dates:
March, 13-15
April, 22-24
May, 13-15
June, 9-11 (Part of an FIT workshop from June, 7-11)
July, 15-17
August, 11-13 (Part of an FIT workshop from August,
9-13)
Facilitator in Training
2010 dates:
June, 7-11
August, 9-13
Standard
Workshop
2010 dates:
April, 1-3
June, 4-6
September, 9-11
2010
dates:
April, 16-18
July, 16-18
Victoria,
BC
Standard
Workshop
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