A community that feels heard feels healthier.

Learn more about custom digital storytelling workshops for public health intiatives with StoryCollab.

Digital storytelling in public health combines important issues with storytellers' lived experiences. Stories bridge knowledge gaps and foster deep community connection. Digital storytelling:

  • Builds trust through shared humanity and authentic voices, making complex health topics understandable and less intimidating.
  • Encourages participation and can inspire behavioral change more effectively than traditional data-driven approaches.
  • Offers an accessible, low-barrier way to disseminate crucial health information, particularly in underserved communities.
  • Motivates individuals to seek preventative care and advocate for community well-being, fostering lasting change.

Previous Public Health Collabs

Nurse Narratives Initiative: Ballad Health, the Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement, ETSU College of Nursing, and the ETSU Research Corporation

A comprehensive initiative designed to cultivate empathy and compassionate healthcare, improve patient experience, recruit and retain nurses, reduce burnout, and build community across a regional health system. The initiative includes a a series of digital storytelling workshops for nurses, nursing faculty and students, and patients; a collaborative development and implementation of a Framework for Empathy in Nursing curriculum that integrates the stories and other reflective, narrative activities; community-wide story screenings; Listening Sessions; and a documentary film. (*The Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement.)

Mayo Clinic & Rochester Healthy Community Partnership

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) project, Somali and Latino community members created first-person stories about challenges they faced, support they received, or decisions they made related to their diabetes management. The stories were then shared in a controlled, longitudinal clinical trial to determine their impact on viewers’ personal diabetes care management.

The Indiana Department of Health

The Maternal Health Innovations project has gathered community members from across Indiana into 6 online workshops to create digital stories that capture the vast ranges of birthing experiences to better understand healthcare disparities and improve maternal health outcomes through education and advocacy. Following the series of workshops, storytellers will participate in a maternal health task force to share the stories during conferences and online story screenings. StoryCollab will develop a Toolkit and Discussion Guide to share the stories more broadly with maternal healthcare professionals and in schools of nursing, medicine, and public health. Finally, we will create a GIS StoryMap utilizing the stories and maternal health data that will offer unique insights into the patterns, contexts and relationships between relevant healthcare outcomes, the experiences of local community members, and other demographic and economic factors that make up the region’s maternal health stories.

Join our free digital storytelling webinar for public health organizations. You'll learn about StoryCollab's approach to first-person digital storytelling:

  • Participatory media creation is grounded in first-person narratives surfaced through group
  • collaborative processes.
  • Digital stories, podcasts, films, and storymaps created in our processes are shared to inform, educate, advocate and build leadership and community.
  • Our workshops are accessible to individuals at all levels of experience as storytellers and digital media creators. We are skilled at adapting our methods various literacy levels and multiple languages.

We would love to know more about how digital storytelling might help your organization or agency better serve your community.