Story Goals:

  • Build confidence, community, and skills of emerging disability rights advocates and leaders from Japan and the U.S.A.

  • Create a set of stories that these young professionals and college students with disabilities can share in their advocacy work.

Collab Solution: 

In the 9-week TOMODACHI Story Jam and Advocacy for Youth with Disabilities program, participants explored some of the barriers and challenges they have encountered in employment, education, social interaction, healthcare, and other aspects of society. Through sharing their stories, hearing from disability advocates, and connecting with their peers, participants learned new digital media skills, strengthened their voices, built a cross-cultural community, and deepened their commitment to leadership in advocating for people with disabilities. The stories are being shared through social media campaigns and by the participants on various platforms to address stigma and to advocate for disability rights.

Story Goals:

  • Engage community members in creating personal stories to raise awareness about the fragility of the ecosystem in the Greater Yamhill Watershed and encourage support for conservation efforts., community, and skills of emerging disability rights advocates and leaders from Japan and the U.S.A.

Collab Solution: 

We have worked with the GYWC to create stories by staff and volunteers. These stories will be shown on the organization’s website, and shared in public settings in an effort to garner support for conservation efforts.

Story Goals:

  • Support instructors with ongoing training and tools to incorporate 21st Century Literacy Skills into their curriculum through digital storytelling and podcasting.

  • Create a strong Digital Storytelling practice throughout the curriculum, with faculty and staff prepared to work together to implement this powerful tool.

Collab Solution: 

Our team has worked with HCC for 10 years. We have focused on how Digital Storytelling can be effectively integrated across the curriculum. Our  tailored workshops support faculty in adapting the methodology to enhance their courses and assignments.

Story Goals:

  • Gather stories from the community to include in an exhibition called Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest.

Collab Solution: 

Our team facilitated conversation about the ways members of the local population responded to the influx of the hippie culture into their state in the 1960s and ‘70s. The digital stories that emerged from the workshop brought the historical interpretation of the exhibition to life through the words of people who experienced those years for themselves.

Story Goals:

  • Empower youth through actively listening to them and assisting them to articulate personal stories of moments that have shaped them.

  • Teach youth storytelling, audio recording, photography, and video editing skills.

Collab Solution: 

Our team has delivered the summer digital literacy program with cohorts of girls participating in the PAGE program for nine years. Our work with these young people has validated their lived experiences and elevated their self-esteem while teaching them skills that will help them in school and future employment. 

Story Goals:

  • Support Vital Voices Engage Fellows in telling their personal stories about the challenges they have faced as women leaders and the factors that ignited their call to leadership.  

Collab Solution: 

In four online workshops across multiple time zones and continents, members of our team led 36 fellows through a six-week customized digital storytelling process to create stories about their work on a range of gender, educational, health, family, human rights, and environmental issues.

Story Goals:

  • Explore through rigorous research how culturally appropriate, personal stories about personal healthcare management and challenges can be effective as an intervention to promote health literacy and health behavior change among Somali and Latino community members with Type II diabetes.

Collab Solution: 

As part of a larger community-based participatory research project, some of the StoryCollab team facilitated Somali and Latino community members in a four-day, in-person digital storytelling workshop to create personal stories about challenges they faced or decisions they made related to their diabetes. The stories, told in Somali and Spanish, have been shown to patients as part of a clinical trial over several years. The results of the impact of the digital stories on diabetes healthcare management and outcome measures are forthcoming.

Story Goals:

  • To offer program alumni the chance to learn the storytelling, interviewing, and technical skills to develop individual podcasts focusing on local and regional social action projects they themselves initiated.

Collab Solution: 

Members of our team facilitated a customized 6-week online workshop, followed by a month of production time and individual support sessions with facilitators, culminating in a three-day, in-person workshop in Tirana, Albania. We repeated the program the following year in Rabbat, Morocco. Participant podcasts tackled some of the most important and challenging topics from around the world. The impact of climate change on women in southeast Asia. Disinformation and media literacy in Macedonia. A Pakistani project creating inclusive cultural events for deaf people. The integration challenges of refugees in Turkey. Impending global food security challenges. Young women from Ghana and Palestine overcoming the odds for higher education. Just to name a few.

Listen: YES Voices Podcast

Story Goals:

  • Build the institutional capacity to produce a professional and sustainable public-facing podcast to showcase their early COVID-19 qualitative research data, making it accessible and engaging for a broad, public audience.

Collab Solution: 

Members of the StoryCollab team helped the UCR research group develop a theme and stylistic identity for their podcast, learn all of the skills and audio tools to create a professional podcast, and provided operational guidance and the technical expertise to publish the episodes on a professional hosting platform.

Listen: Healthy Disruptions Podcast

Story Goals:

  • To help fellow employees identify and share first-person, personal stories about their experiences with the U.S. healthcare system and UHC customers, in a professionally produced podcast.

  • Create stronger personal bonds among team members and foster a corporate environment that encourages trust, sharing, and support among coworkers.

Collab Solution: 

Working with UHC leadership, we designed and implemented a workshop for 25 employees focusing on fundamental storytelling elements and narrative interviewing techniques. Working in teams, they edited those interviews–interspersed with narration–into ten podcast episodes to be heard by their fellow employees.

Story Goals:

  • Train faculty and students from the Communication Studies and Storytelling Department in podcast storytelling and audio skills to be able to develop a new podcast that can showcase their storytelling work both locally and nationally, as well as be shared to support the larger efforts toward student recruitment and institutional fundraising.

Collab Solution: 

Members of the StoryCollab team facilitated ETSU’s collaborative development of a podcast title, communicative purpose, and content themes. Each participant produced their own segment as part of a cohesive podcast. We also provided ETSU with the technical expertise to develop a sustainable plan for publishing episodes and a collaborative approach to maintaining a consistent voice across episodes.

Listen: Cory Howard's podcast episode - Plaque Story

Inspire Change Through

Collabs

The StoryCollab team draws on the power of story to help a wide variety of organizations and agencies truly connect with their audiences. We listen to the kind of projects you want to make. To the stories you want to tell. To what isn’t being said. And to the stories that emerge. We want you to take pride in those stories and for the storytellers to feel transformed by the process.

CLIENT COLLABS

UMASS, Boston’s Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) and the TOMODACHI Initiative:

TOMODACHI invests in the next generation of Japanese and American leaders through educational, cultural and leadership exchanges, and is led by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and the U.S. Japan Council.

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Florida Youth SHINE

Florida Youth Shine is a youth-led organization that empowers current and former youth in foster care to become leaders and advocates within their communities.

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Greater Yamhill Watershed District

Greater Yamhill Watershed District is dedicated to helping the local Oregon community be stewards of the lands, waters, fish and wildlife in the Yamhill and Chehalem Valleys.

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Houston Community College System

Houston Community College is the second largest community college system in the USA, and offers affordable education for academic advancement, workforce training, career development, and lifelong learning.

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New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors

New Mexico History Museum is located in Santa Fe, and strives to tell stories based on the diverse lived experiences of the people in New Mexico over time.

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PAGE (Partnership for Appalachian Girls Education

PAGE (Partnership for Appalachian Girls Education) is an educational nonprofit that engages adolescent girls through participatory adventures in literature, science, oral history, and multi-media to help them think creatively and critically and reach their personal goals.

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Vital Voices Global Partnership: Vital Voices Engage

Vital Voices is a non-profit foregrounding women’s voices in leadership positions. The organization works to advance women’s public leadership in 185 countries, investing in women taking on the world’s greatest challenges – from gender-based violence to the climate crisis, economic inequities, and more.

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Mayo Clinic & Rochester Healthy Community Partnership

Mayo Clinic is a top-rated, nonprofit American academic medical center focused on integrated health care, education, and research. Rochester Healthy Community Partnership is a community-academic partnership with a mission to promote health and well-being of the community through community-based participatory research (CBPR), education and civic engagement to achieve health equity.

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Kennedy Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program (YES)

Kennedy Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program was established by the U.S. Congress and Department of State to foster human understanding and open, sustainable relationships across U.S. and international Muslim communities.

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University of California Riverside, School of Medicine's Center for Health Disparities Research & Center for Healthy Communities

The goal of the Health Disparities Research Center at UCR is to build capacity in community-based research across all of the communities we serve. The center brings together broad interdisciplinary approaches including environmental, biomedical, and social science methods to study health disparities.

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UnitedHealthcare Internal Sales and Readiness Teams

UnitedHealthcare is one of the largest healthcare organizations in the world. Their Sales and Readiness teams provide internal training materials and services to various departments within the organization. 

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East Tennesee State University

East Tennessee University is a public research university serving 14,000 students from 71 countries and all 50 states.

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