Storytelling & Community-Driven Development

How Communities Can Use the Power of Stories in Planning and Problem-solving

January 25, 2005

Madelyn Blair • Pelerei, Inc.

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Purpose

To show how story can be used to help a community develop by learning what they already know and are to apply it to the task at hand.

To speak to the type of story that will energize the community rather than simply inform it.

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“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when we are afraid of the light.” - Plato

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Language & Social Constructionism

• We are born into language before we are born into life.

• We must find the unsaid of our unique existence in the already said.

• Our identity exists within language and only comes alive in stories.

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“We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused.” -Meg Wheatley

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Living Stories

• Think of a time when you saw a new way to do your work and it was so compelling that you tried it yourself.

• At your table, tell a 3 minute story about this time.

• Rules

– Listen to the other stories as they are told. Don’t comment during or at the end of the story.

– After a moment, offer a name for the story that was just told.

– If you are the teller, select or create a title for your story.

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Tashkent, 2000 - Islam and the Foundations of Civil Society

• Seminar for 30 scholars conducted by the Center for Narrative Studies

• Purpose– Introduce them to a narrative method of

searching their own collective memory.

– Discover where and how people had kept

their voices alive in the face of oppression.

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Lessons: Stories and the Individual

• The quest for personal identity is a story of stories.

• Our identities come alive through telling and retelling our stories.

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Lessons: Stories of the Community

• Stories are told and retold in response to real community needs, desires, dreams, and nightmares.

• Stories are what the community needs to know it knows (and what it is trying to forget it knows.)

• Stories can die out, and they can be silenced.

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Lessons: Stories and Culture

• Stories and their exchange create our relationship reality.

• The genre of the stories told generates culture and vice versa.

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Open or closed?

• Locked pattern of interpretation or reality?

• Tradition or another possibility?

• Self-fulfilling or self-energizing?

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Bourella and Finding Social Energy

• “A vivid imagination compels the whole body to obey it.” Aristotle

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Why Appreciative Inquiry works

• It builds relationships enabling people to be known in relationship, rather than role.

• It creates an opportunity for people to be heard. • It generates opportunities for people to dream, and to

share their dreams.• It crates an environment in which people are able to

choose how they contribute.• It gives people both discretion and support to act. • It encourages and enables people to be positive.

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“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” Meg Wheatley

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Story & Narrative - More

• Exploring the Story: Narrative Techniques to enhance Appreciative Inquiry

• Introduction to Organizational Storytelling

• Storytelling Outside Organizations

• Storytelling Inside Organizations

• The Washington Story: how national story is constructed and deconstructed

• Feb 10-11, May 18-19, Washington; March 22-23, London

• May 17 & June 23, Washington

• April 22, Smithsonian Institute

• April 23, George Mason University

• April 24, Washington

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Madelyn Blair301-371-7100

Mblair@pelerei.com

Thank you