Blogs

This May, the Seattle DStory Collaborative is going to offer a workshop for local non-profits.  Staff of community organizations will create their own personal narratives and learn how to use this powerful medium for advocacy and education.   Co-led by Creative Narrations' Natasha Freidus and Antioch University's Elizabeth Burke and Sue Woehrlin, this workshop marks the first of its kind in the area. Download registration form and more information here. Contact us if you have questions.

“With Silence Speaks, I am not interested in “collecting stories” just for the sake of creating an archive of stories; I am interested in critically examining the ways in which the process of sharing and listening to stories can lead to specific changes across multiple levels of human experience and influence." Amy Hill, Silence Speaks, The Center for Digital Storytelling.

Read more  in Amy Hill's interview at Global Voices Online. In it, she discusses a workshop with women survivors of war in the Republic of Congo. Amy is a longtime colleague and continued inspiration for us at Creative Narrations.

 Since a Creative Narrations training with Sea Mar Community Health Clinic in 2008/9, Sea Mar health educators have been using digital stories at the Washington statehouse, in the clinic waiting room, and to outreach for their diabetes and tobacco programs. When their funder, the Washington Association of Migrant and Community Health Centers, caught a glimpse of their work, they invited Sea Mar and Creative Narrations to present at their statewide Learning Congress in December of 2009 and to begin a Train the Trainer cohort. In January of 2010, nine individuals representing five organizations from across the state joined forces. Our "trainers to be" created powerful personal stories revealing how tobacco had touched their lives...from quitting smoking when becoming pregnant to losing loved ones to tobacco related diseases. Their next step is to look at how best to implement digital storytelling in their communitiies. We'll post their stories in a few weeks.

For a while now, we've been excited about the potential of digital stories to complement and augment "traditional" online journalism. Well, it's finally happening. Take a look at yesterday's New York Times, where a digital story produced by Brenda Manuelito and Carmella Rodriguez of nDigidreams is the video component to an article on health care issues among Native Americans. Brenda's brother's story, told in his own voice, drives home the issues described in the article, putting a real face to the reality of health care for American Indians.

Brenda Manuelito participated in a Creative Narrations Train the Trainer Digital Storytelling workshop at the Univesity of Arizona's College of Public Health in 2006. Since then, she has beome a tireless advocate for digital storytelling, zigging and zagging across the West to present at Native American and health care conferences. Way to bring these stories to a mainstream audience Brenda, congratulations!