Stories of Home: Supporting Sanctuary Space and Solidarity with Immigrants and Refugees
Amy Hill
Recognizing the need to support immigrants and refugees in the midst of the fear and xenophobia that have gained political currency in the past decade, 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 decolonizing storytelling and participatory media by engaging vulnerable immigrants and refugees in exploring their own unique narratives of “home” located in feelings, places, experiences, and material objects. Through storytelling, art-making, and video production workshops, we are creating safe spaces for participants to claim agency in sharing what is true for them, rather than sharing what they’ve come to believe general public audiences want to hear
Since the summer of 2017, we have held five workshops and collaborated with immigrant and refugee storytellers on more than 20 short videos. Working with thematic prompts, some storytellers partnered on story creation with local visual artists (view those stories here), and others were guided through hands-on arts activities to design visuals that bring their narratives to life in digital media, or created their stories in a fully virtual workshop held during the pandemic (view those stories here). In 2020, we worked with StoryCenter Artist-in-Residence Parul Wadhwa on a unique virtual reality (VR) project, to create immersive media stories by immigrant and refugee women, and in the spring of 2021, we supported Nepali women immigrants in sharing stories (view those stories here).
Public Engagement
In the fall of 2019, we brought a number of storytellers and East San Francisco Bay community members together for an in-person Stories of Home screening and Q&A session about the project, held in Oakland … and in the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021, we held similar events, showcasing stories and interviews with storytellers online (due to the COVID-19 pandemic). In the spring of 2021, we held two online screenings of work from Stories of Home VR. Thanks to the support of two of our participating artists, we have also published a book version of a number of stories (all proceeds support Stories of Home).
Read one storyteller’s reflections about the project in Ms. Online.
Special thanks to our community partners at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants’ Wellness in Action program, the East Bay Refugee and Immigrant Forum, and the California Film Institute, for their support. This project has been supported in part by an anonymous family foundation located in the San Francisco Bay Area; the East Bay Fund for Artists; and the California Arts Council, a state agency.
If you’re interested in making a contribution to further our work with Stories of Home, donate now.