Social Justice
Guiding efforts to build solidarity, challenge oppression, and mobilize concerned citizens to take concrete action on a range of important local AND NATIONAL issues.
Case Studies
With good reason, many LGBTQIA+ individuals in India are still reluctant to speak out publicly, for fear that they will be ostracized, harmed, or discriminated against in educational and workplace settings, and within their own families. While social media can provide safe spaces for these communities to gather online, efforts to publicly educate and advocate on queer issues are still in short supply across the country. The Rainbow Stories project brought together ten amazing LGBTQIA+ individuals from states in East and Northeast India, to participate in an intensive performative digital storytelling workshop in Kolkata.
The current era is a confusing one, for trans and nonbinary youth in the U.S. On the one hand, significant gains have been made in creating supportive family and community environments where young people can explore and express their transness. On the other hand, the experiences of trans and nonbinary youth have been weaponized by a hyper-conservative Republican Party intent upon fanning the flames of the culture wars, as laws banning gender-affirming care and appropriate health services for trans and nonbinary youth have been proposed and passed in numerous red states. Within this divisive climate, the Trans Teen and Family Narratives (TTFN) Project has developed a resource for families to use as they explore how best to support their trans and nonbinary young people.
Over the past two years, StoryCenter has been honored to play a role in an innovative program in the Rio Grande Valley of Southern Texas. The project called Historias Americanas, was a three-year intensive for K-12 educators, designed by project partners, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the Museum of South Texas History. The intent was to improve the quality of American history education in the Brownsville and Edinburg school districts by building on student and community knowledge and shining a light on the cultural wealth of the area. Local history was melded with the broader history of the United States to fill in faces that were blatantly missing from textbooks.
It has become abundantly clear that the people being harmed– communities of color, migrant populations, people living in poverty– are being hit from multiple sides. Communities of color are more likely to live near polluting power plants or industrial centers, meaning we can only truly combat racism if we’re also fighting for cleaner air and water. … It’s also clear that the people causing harm– polluting the air and water, discriminating against communities of color, neglecting schools, restricting access to reproductive healthcare, legislating against transgender rights–are often the same. The movement pushing to restrict abortion access is made up of the same people who don’t want their children to learn about racism or LGBTQ rights in school, join unions at work, or welcome immigrants into their communities.
New Orleans in the popular imagination tends to be represented by images of Mardi Gras or the enduring legacy of Hurricane Katrina. Less attention is devoted to the devastation that’s happening in the city’s backyard. There have been so many cases of cancer, so much inexplicable illness and death, that the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans has become known as “Cancer Alley.” This corridor is home to more than 200 petrochemical plants and refineries. The roots of many of the African American towns in the area go back hundreds of years. There is a palpable sense of history in the area, yet these communities are under assault by an ever expanding petrochemical industry, as well as a state government that facilitates the construction and pollution of plants and refineries.
Recognizing the need to support immigrants and refugees in the midst of the fear and xenophobia that have gained political currency since the 2016 election, StoryCenter and Wellness in Action (a program of the East Bay nonprofit Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants) are partnering on Stories of Home. Together with other Bay Area networks and organizations providing services and advocacy for newcomers, we are refining new models for storytelling and participatory media to engage vulnerable immigrants and refugees in exploring their own unique narratives of “home” as place, experience, and feeling. Through storytelling, art-making, and video production workshops, we are creating spaces where relationships are formed, bridges of solidarity are built across diverse cultural contexts, and community engagement for immigrant wellbeing and justice takes shape.
In the United States, many people believe female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) is not an issue. Western media have long focused on the notion that FGM/C occurs in “other countries,” with an emphasis on “African communities.” However, as the recent ruling on the case against Dawoodi Bohra doctors in Michigan for performing FGC on two minor girls demonstrates, FGC is both a global AND domestic issue, affecting communities outside AND within the United States. Within the United States, the CDC estimates that half a million women and girls are at risk of undergoing FGC. Sahiyo United Against Female Genital Cutting understands that FGM/C continues because it is viewed as an acceptable social norm, and works to build a cadre of women’s willing to speak out against the practice, as a way of supporting communities in advocating to end the practice.
The Women’s Foundation of California’s Women’s Policy Institute (WPI) is striving to increase the number of women and trans people who are actively engaged in public policy so that they can have a greater impact on the fundamental conditions that affect their lives, families, and communities. The WPI understands that storytelling forms an important part of the process of amplifying the voices of historically marginalized groups during the policymaking process, galvanizing community support for particular policies, and raising the awareness and consciousness of legislators as well as potential allies and supporters.
The rich legacy of the civil rights movement was commemorated across the country in 2013, which marked the 30th Anniversary of the historic March on Washington. To honor the work of activists in the 1950s and 60s, several groups in the City of Denver, CO developed a project to encourage awareness and present-day engagement with civil rights issues, as part of StoryCenter's All Together Now initiative.
Despite increased attention within the public health field to the need to refrain from stigmatizing teen mothers, prevailing views continue to suggest that these young women cause a whole host of social problems. In an effort to reframe public conversations about young moms and sexuality, health, and reproductive rights, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst School of Public Health initiated the “Hear Our Stories” project, in collaboration with StoryCenter and several other MA and national organizations.
While community support services for survivors and witnesses of violence are widely available in the United States, specific attention to the country’s diverse cultural and linguistic needs continues to be in short supply. Asian Women’s Shelter (AWS), based in San Francisco, CA, has for more than 20 years provided survivors of violence and their communities with vital programs that address domestic violence and human trafficking. AWS works with survivors from across the Bay Area, United States, and Pacific territories, paying particular attention to the cultural and linguistic needs of immigrants and refugees from West, South, Southeast, and East Asia.
The fervor in the United States over the "War on Drugs" and the development of punitive "crime reduction" strategies in the 1980s and 1990s created mandatory minimum sentencing laws that dramatically increased prison populations across the country- at the local, state, and federal level. In California, the "Three Strikes" law of 1994 created mandatory sentences for any third felony conviction, leading to people receive sentences of 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pizza or for any number of other non-violent offenses. Experiences of incarceration, re-entry into society, and the obstacles facing those who have served time are critical stories that must be documented, in the country that leads the world in imprisoning its population.