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Re-Weaving the Community,
Creating the Future
Storytelling at the Heart and Soul of Healthy Communities
Barbara Ganley
The Orton Family Foundation
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Re-Weaving the Community, Creating the Future
Storytelling at the Heart and Soul of Healthy Communities
“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
—Rudyard Kipling
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Copyright © 2010 by The Orton Family Foundation
All Rights Reserved
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CONTENTS
Introduction
XX
I. The Story of Storytelling
XX
II. Why We Need Storytelling
XX
III. Storytelling in Action
XX
IV. Listening: The Transformational Moment
XX
V. Into the Future
XX
Appendices
XX
a. Story Circles
XX
b. One-on-One Storytelling: Story Interviews
XX
c. Solo Storytelling
XX
d. Publishing Stories
XX
End Notes
XX
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Introduction
The Orton Family Foundation’s Heart & Soul Community Planning approach calls for
nothing less than sweeping change: a bottom-up, across-the-board retooling of
planning in cities and towns across America. The singular times we live in demand
it. Citizens, increasingly, are calling for it as they reclaim their voice to shape the
future of the places they call home.
What do we mean by sweeping change? A community’s ability to envision
the future and embrace and absorb change instead of haltingly resisting it. Or,
worse, embracing it, no matter the cost. A truly open, inclusive and spirited process
in which townspeople, local government and the private sector come together. A
time when scores of residents of every town get involved, get to know each other,
claim a vision and share the responsibility for their futures. Big words. High
aspirations.
Yet the Foundation also understands that change, except in wartime or other
crisis, is rarely sweeping, but, rather, creeping: an incremental, hardly perceivable
accrual of decisions and actions leading—pretty much—in one direction. Real and
lasting change comes about when people’s hearts, souls and minds are engaged
enough to allow them to re-imagine the possible and change their behaviors. That is
why the Orton Family Foundation focuses its work—its learning, really—in small
cities and towns in the Northeast and the Rocky Mountain West, where we can
grapple with citizens shoulder-to-shoulder as they meet their particular
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circumstances, challenges and opportunities, engaging each other in the work of
understanding who they are as a community and who they might like to be in 25 or
30 years.
The change we, along with a multitude of other organizations and individuals
across the country and globe, seek, must come from residents in their villages,
neighborhoods and towns. How, then, to engender such change? To set the stage?
One way, we believe, is through story.
Over the last couple of decades a growing number of approaches have
demonstrated the success of fostering open, free and heart-felt conversation in the
public forum between people of differing interests. Social commentators such as
Scott Peck, Francis Moore Lappé, Alan Wolfe and Robert Bellah, have documented
that when people understand each other, there is an authentic foundation for
problem solving and consensus building related to proposed public action.
Practitioners such as Daniel Yankelovitch, John McKnight, Jody Kretzma, Joanna
Macy and Angeles Arrien have successfully put storytelling to work in a wide range
of civic and community applications.
Storytelling has proved its promise in the Foundation’s Project Communities,
where we get dirt under our fingernails working with residents, stakeholders and
leaders. From Golden, CO to Victor, ID; from Damariscotta, ME to the Borderlands of
Rhode Island and Connecticut; from Starksboro, VT to Biddeford, ME, over the past
three years story has built trust, torn down walls, and helped citizens come together
behind the values and vision they want to have steer change in their varied towns.
And yet story is not widely embraced as a keystone to successful civic
engagement, much less planning. Among the wide range of public planning
activities across America from neighborhoods and area plans, to comprehensive
plans and zoning regulations, providing an authentic, democratic voice to a truly
engaged public is essential. Storytelling, with sharing and listening, can be a way to
engage the heart and soul of people in a true and meaningful exchange of hopes,
aspirations and ideas. Threading storytelling through an entire planning process
and allowing the time for the exchange of personal stories may mean some extra
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time, but more often than not, that time will payoff in gaining understanding,
heading off wasteful conflict and forging lasting agreements. Storytelling brings civic
benefits in its own right whether linked to other public activities like planning or
not.
* * *
In her essay “Re-Weaving Community, Creating the Future” Barbara Ganley
eloquently and intelligently builds the case for the value of storytelling to both
community planning and community building; the latter, we believe, is a
prerequisite to forward-looking land use planning that sticks, because it reflects the
will and vision of townspeople. In making the case, Ganley acknowledges the work
and writings of many practitioners, activists and authors. The Foundation’s and
Ganley’s work around storytelling rests on the insights, experimentation and
success of many, many others before and with us.
In fact, the case for storytelling is as old as the earliest cave paintings. Story is
what distinguishes humans from all of our mammalian relatives, distant and close.
It is the glue that binds hearts, souls and minds, and it is the force that can heal
wounds between and among individuals and communities. It is the light that sparks
mutual understanding and respect, which in turn fuel positive, collective action.
Ganley, founder and director of Community Expressions and a leader of the
slow-blogging movement, has worked with the Foundation for the last two years
experimenting on the ground with how to weave storytelling into our Heart & Soul
Community Planning approach—how to use it along with other civic engagement
methods. In doing so, she has furthered our vision and mission: to help “small cities
and towns describe, apply and uphold their heart and soul so that they can adapt to
change while maintaining or enhancing the things they value most.” And she has
remained convinced, as have we, of the unique ability of story to set the stage for
healthy communities.
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In this essay Ganley explores both why story matters in its own right, but
also why it matters to a fragmented society and to increasingly fragmented
communities. She emphasizes the central importance of reciprocity to sharing
stories, and the transformative strength of listening, a trait in short supply these
days. She models the importance of listening by bringing many voices to her essay;
she has examined what scores of colleagues have said and done about telling stories
in community.
We are not suggesting that settling around a fire to share tales is a cure-all,
though it is great fun. We propose that in sharing stories and listening to one
another, residents take the first steps toward greater understanding—toward
“creeping” change. We propose that such understanding underpins community
members coming to know each other (and each others’ values) well enough to move
forward into a future—despite its many unknowns—with confidence and the surety
of purpose to maintain and strengthen a town’s inherent, unique character, its heart
and soul. In this impassioned and carefully researched essay, Ganley tells the story
of story and why it matters to each and all of us; to our individual as well as our
collective future.
William Roper, President & CEO
Orton Family Foundation
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I. The Story of Storytelling
If we can work and talk not in terms of dollars raised and acres saved
but in terms of lives transformed, our projects will, indeed, become
parables for another way to live on this earth.
—Peter Forbesi
We brought data. Lots of data. We all brought arguments based on the zoning
regulations, traffic stipulations, and planning requirements. And then we positioned
ourselves squarely on one side of the development line and the other—transform or
preserve the historic structures and surrounding lands. We challenged each other,
questioned one another’s numbers, hoarded information, lobbied this neighbor or
that until little neighborliness remained. Differences deepened into divides. Distrust
settled like a shroud over a community that had long prided itself on being friendly.
Not only did we lose the historic site, we lost one another.
Stories might have saved us.
Story did save a single, majestic tree. Or rather, a ten-year-old, with no
metrics, no data, armed only with stories, saved the tree. This young girl, hearing
that the towering cedar was slated to be cut down “to improve the view,”
approached the developer with the story of the tree as she knew it—how it was
enchanted and had protected children, how she herself had clung to its trunk and
sailed across the bay, entertained friends both real and imaginary beneath its
boughs, and retreated to its branches with a book when she needed a break from
the world of adults. The tree wasn’t just a tree, it was a center of life there. The
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developer, it turned out, had played within the cedar’s shelter as a boy. He told the
girl his stories and his daughters’ of growing up there, and then he spared the tree.
If the rest of us had slowed down enough to share stories about what really
mattered about that place—a 100-acre point in mid-coast Maine—what else might
have been saved? The character of the site? The undeveloped land beyond? Would
telling and listening to stories have helped us acknowledge each other’s
perspectives? Instead of drawing lines in the sand, could we have found common
ground? Instead of polarizing us, our differing views on that landscape’s future
might have led us to innovative solutions. Controversy but not conflict. Doubt but
not intractability. Tension, confusion and uncertainty are not necessarily bad.
Physicist Richard Feynman tells us “doubt is not to be feared, but … to be welcomed,
as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.”ii But without trust, all we
had was fear.
Documentarian and digital storytelling pioneer Daniel Meadows shares a
story about how one man saved his community’s local bus route. None of the
statistics; the reports; or the pleas from groups, organizations, and associations had
moved the authorities from their decision to eliminate the costly, seemingly
wasteful bus service. Then the bus driver stood up and told a story. He described his
route, how, yes, fewer people rode the bus these days, but how the route and the bus
itself were crucial points of contact for many. He told how the bus was more than a
bus—he brought milk to an elderly lady, checked in on shut-ins, talked with riders
about their lives, listened to their stories—how this sort of service provided far
more to residents than data about the number of passengers per week could reveal.
The bus was one strand of what kept the village intact.iii
One ordinary person with a true story made a difference. The bus driver had
located at the heart of community what Randy Hester calls a “sacred place”iv and
Ray Oldenburg a “third place”v that likely would not make its way into planning
documents, yet, if lost, could diminish the town. An essential truth was delivered
through the driver relating the human experience of that bus route. Story made
certain facts memorable: the board will long remember why that bus route lives on.
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“Through the transmission of story,” Daniel Meadows declares, “change can
happen.”vi.
Such storytelling can work magic, yet it remains on the fringes of planning for
the future of most towns. Some perceive story as too slow, too soft, too
unpredictable to be of real value. With experts such as Ed McMahon, Senior Resident
Fellow of Urban Land Institute, telling us we have forty years to overhaul our
planning approaches or face the loss of the rural altogether,vii many seek efficient,
scaleable, measurable solutions—now! On the face of it, we have all the tools and
knowledge we need to move effective land use planning decisions into action for the
future well being of our small cities and towns. Planners and community designers
are highly skilled; their tools stellar for data capture, analysis and even
visualization; scholarship abounds about the importance of civic engagement and
the effectiveness of participatory planning processes; the number of ways to
connect people to each other is unprecedented. So why do towns so often lurch from
crisis to crisis? Maybe because some fundamental assumptions go unchallenged.
Displays of information, code and legislation alone do not make a community
more livable. Data-driven design isn’t enough to pull townspeople together to make
decisions that will affect generations to come. Could Michael Pollan’s criticisms of
the professionalism of eating --“Thirty years of nutritional advice has only made us
fatter and sicker”viii-- be similarly lodged at planning? Have townspeople abdicated
responsibility for their future to officials and professionals? Where are those whose
lives are intertwined with the neighborhoods where they live? Have they gone
missing? Are we—most of us—asleep in the castle, waiting for a hero to rescue us?
As Anand Giridharadas declares, “Welcome to the Age of Metrics—or to the End of
Instinct… what we know instinctively, data can make us forget.” ix
Ecology’s basic principle is that everything is connected. Studies
emphasize that communication between groups and inclusiveness of decisionmaking processes are keys to community acceptance of planning decisions.x Yet
other studies, including Robert Putnam’s well-known Bowling Alone,xi report the
fraying of the community fabric through the loss of neighborliness and the straining
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of “weak ties.” Have we forgotten that “creating a future is different from defining a
future”? xii That “the built and cultural environments are secondary gains of how we
choose to be together”?xiii Have we forgotten that only by building bridges between
groups can we nurture our sense of belonging?
Belonging. It is an essential condition of human society, built on a triple helix
of trust (this place and these people will shelter and accept and value me),
responsibility (this place and these people care for me and I will in turn care for
them)xiv and collective efficacy xv (I will act if others around me also act). Reciprocity
is the DNA of belonging—I trust you because you trust me because I trust you. The
more we know that our neighbors and friends will participate, the more likely we
are to get off our duffs and lend a hand. The more connected townspeople are to
each other and their town, the healthier our towns will become.xvi To build that
shared sense of belonging, we need bus drivers looking in on people along their
routes; we need majestic trees with special meaning for people from all quarters.
Since the Age of Reason, we’ve been increasingly encouraged to trust
information more than each other—to replace myths and folklore with facts and
data. The more access to information we have, the more we turn to professionals to
help us sift and filter and decipher it, to collect, analyze and present it. We expect
rationality, numbers and logical plans to be the sole ingredients of good decision
making. We turn to outsiders’ expertise to help us make decisions, but not to our
own knowledge of the special character of our neighborhoods, rural towns and
landscapes. As E. O. Wilson cautions, “we are drowning in information, while
starving for wisdom.”xvii
From the dawn of community, wisdom has lived in stories, whether cave
paintings, fables, or religious texts. By illuminating the human experience of facts,
stories place the facts in context, helping them to blossom into a truth, not just
information.xviii But we can be downright suspicious of story, as a managing director
of the Rockefeller Foundation demonstrates in saying, “The power of metrics is that
it enables us to deploy our marginal dollar to the best problem-solver, not just the
best storyteller.”xix We educate the story right out of ourselves—or at least we try.xx
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We are not, however, creatures of statistics—few of us remember long
strings of numbers much less their relevance to our futures. We do remember story.
Long stories. Many stories. Facts alone do not bring us and hold us together in
community; only story brings a complete or accurate portrait of ourselves and why
things are the way they are. Planning documents build neither trust nor
participation. We need stories. We are hard-wired for stories. We are by nature
storytellers.
* * *
{Sidebar quotation} The value of information does not survive the moment when it
was new. It lives only in that moment. It has to surrender to it completely and explain
itself to the moment without loss of time. A story is different. It does not expend itself.
It preserves its strength concentrated within itself and is capable of releasing it even
after a long time.
—Walter Benjamin xxi
From childhood we pick up the patterns of culture and community—who and how
to trust, and how to act—as we listen to tales, parables and myths, and to family
stories, and learn to share our own. We ask our parents to repeat the stories of our
earliest days, of their earliest days and of where they grew up, of our grandparents
and ancestors and of how our families came to be, how they came to settle in this
country, this region, town, and home. We ask and ask some more, and the tapestry
of human experience begins to reveal its texture and details—the why and how of
people’s relationships to one another and to home.
Evolutionary psychologists explain that language arose to provide social glue
within large groups, that gossip makes us familiar enough with one another to make
community possible. xxii Because we learn by attaching the new information to the
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old, xxiii storytelling plays a crucial role in making sense of the world. Narrative
structure, its arc through time, calms the chaos of random moments of sensation
and emotion, and gives shape to what we feel and believe.xxiv Within a town, sharing
stories builds a common vocabulary rooted in that town. Pulling together the shards
of memory about the tree into story, the young girl voiced the tree’s meaning, its
relevance to her and to the community. Not just in the past, but right now as well
and in the future. As historian William Cronin notes, stories “provide the fables on
which we rely as we confront moral dilemmas and make choices about every
action.”xxv They convey cultural knowledge and the skills and processes necessary
for survival. They let us know where we fit into the world and how.xxvi
Whenever we run into one another in town and exchange our news
and views, however briefly, we strengthen the invisible threads of
relationships—yes, you live here, too, and have experienced the weather,
heard about the bear, met the new baby, thought about a proposed school
consolidation. I know you. You know me. The act of exchanging news and
views builds bonds and bridges because “it takes two to story.”xxvii It takes
telling and listening from equal, active halves of the whole. “Through stories,
we reach across the rifts,” Scott Russell Sanders tells us, “not only of gender
and age, but also of race and creed, geography and class, even the rifts
between species or between enemies.”xxviii Story is, therefore, vital to
belonging, to community. It just might be the missing piece of the planning
puzzle.
If storytelling is essential to strengthening community life, why is it so often
overlooked as a planning tool? Could it be that storytelling, in this Age of
Distrust,xxix has become so associated with the realms of entertainment, politics and
commerce, where it is used to manipulate us, that we no longer trust it to help tell
the truth?
We’re deluged with “stories” and “storytellers”. Turn on the television, open
the newspaper, fire up your browser—from folksy stories used by Madison Avenue
to hawk wares, to sensationalist tales of people’s private lives on reality television,
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to heart-felt accounts that politicians lace through campaign speeches, to personal
blogs narrating life’s details, we’ve got story. Just look at the proliferation of
storytelling in leadership and corporate workshops, in public-speaking seminars, in
doctoral dissertations on organizational culture and career advancement.xxx Skip the
slides and tell the story, we’re advised. According to researcher Christian Salmon,
whose Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind details the rising use of storytelling
since the 1990s as a tool of coercion, we have good reason to be wary of story.xxxi
Storytelling misused undermines serious planning efforts by inviting a
glossing over of reality, co-option by a few dominant voices, or crippling nostalgia
for an unrecoverable past. A story that is a superficial rendering of a complex issue
or a community-held value—“We love trees!”—over-simplifies the interplay of
factors leading to a community forest plan. Skeptics are right to worry about sittingaround-the-campfire-everyone-sharing storytelling masking self-congratulatorykumbaya planning lite, the sorts of approaches that make the people participating
feel good about themselves, but fail to bridge rifts or articulate clear values and an
inclusive vision.xxxii Likewise, if a single story drowns out the rest, if stories are
manipulative, if we spin around and around the same old stories that let us
rationalize or champion the way things are, they will undo us.xxxiii We’re seduced by
the good old days, and as Clay Shirky points out, “the bias for continuity leads to the
substandard.” xxxiv And so, stories can polarize us, separating us into gated
communities of thought and belief, allowing us to dismiss facts we don’t like, or
make us complacent and hand over responsibility for our future to officials while we
blame them for outcomes distasteful to us. Any powerful approach applied
carelessly takes on a cynical cast and risks doing more harm than good. It isn’t the
approach itself that is the problem, but how some abuse it.
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II. Why We Need Storytelling
As people and advanced industries hunt the globe for locations, they will
not necessarily seek out those places that are the biggest, the cheapest,
or the most well favored by location. Instead, they will seek out a new
kind of geography, one that appeals to their sense of values and to their
hearts, and it is there that the successful communities of the digital age
will be found.
—Joel Kotkinxxxv
These are confusing times. Rural towns in the United States are becoming
increasingly diverse while paradoxically resembling one another more and
more.xxxvi As independent businesses and vibrant downtowns melt into the
repetitive sprawl of housing estates and chain-store malls, our sense of place and
space is transforming through virtual environments of computer and cell phone and
augmented reality. Our sense of community is, if not askew, then morphing into
something we have yet to grasp. We cannot therefore approach today’s reality as
though it were still, essentially, the same place as yesterday.
In a striking departure from previous generations, many Americans can now
choose where they want to live, not based solely on family support systems or
employment.xxxvii In search of “quality of life,”xxxviii some Americans can decide
where to settle based on personal lifestyle decisions—proximity to solitude in the
great outdoors, or to cultural, educational, commercial and/or recreational
amenities. In this time marked by “networked individualism,”xxxix we commute to
our lives by car or by computer, and live at ever-greater distances from work, family
and even friends. Those who have access to the internet and are so inclined, shop
for just about everything they need without leaving home, have social lives without
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actually being with people, and work from their kitchen tables turned away from
one another toward a world of their own liking.
Since the 1960s our cars, roads, malls and suburbs have been pulling us from
the hyper-local; now the emergence of online connections might further lure us
away from what’s happening on our street, our neighborhood, our town. We know
in a flash what is happening across the planet—perhaps better than what is
happening across the street, and more and more we know what is happening across
town via communication technology rather than a chance conversation on a street
corner or over coffee at a diner. No wonder sociologists are claiming that work is the
new neighborhood.xl
Sociologist Barry Wellman observes that “the broadly-embracing community,
nurturing and controlling, has become a fragmented, variegated and personalized
social network.”xli As a result, Americans are less dependent than we once were on
the local, practical story of survival—those tales of coping with climate and terrain
and the rhythms of life. We don’t necessarily know we are greasing the wheels of
community as we exchange jokes about the weather in passing. We might not
recognize that the one about Great Uncle Leo’s close call with the tractor is more
than a silly anecdote. Or that we ordinary people are storytellers. As we turn away
from traditional means of staying in touch with each other—from the dinner table to
the local newspaper, to the corner grocery store and post office and school—we lose
everyday, serendipitous exchanges of information and know-how. We lose shared
language as simple as a wave of recognition or a comment about the weather: the
small background stories, the heart and soul stories. Without that daily swapping of
stories, how do we tell our stories of what really matters to us about this town and
its future? If stories are the bones of community but fail to meet immediate needs,
how do we know they are important?
We might not even know our neighbors, because we do not necessarily need to
know our neighbors.xlii We rarely need to see them. And as our neighborhoods grow
more diverse, we become fearful of people we do not get to know through daily
interactions. If we do have front porches or sidewalks leading to each other’s
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homes,xliii we rarely use them. We head to a gym, or run or bike through our
neighborhoods for exercise. In our climate-controlled cars we are cocooned from
what’s happening outside as we plug into radio, iPod or phone, slap in a DVD for the
kids, who increasingly interact via text and voice rather than in person, “pinging
their posses”xliv but not necessarily meeting up with each other. “In 1969, 41 percent
of [American] children either walked or biked to school;” by 2001 only 13% did xlv—
they grew up knowing their towns from the vantage point of a car window or the
specific places they were carted to: school, church, store, skate park, library, playing
field, friend’s house. How do kids who no longer hang out in or explore their
downtowns and neighborhoods get to know the rhythms of a place ?
Increasingly, we treat even public spaces as private, remaining within our own
personal orbit through the tether of mobile technology, distanced from people
sharing our physical space in real time.xlvi When candidate Barak Obama gave a
speech in Berlin in July, 2008, a photojournalist caught the moment—we see Obama
on stage and the thousands thronged about him, a sea of cell phones and cameras
held high and clicking his photograph.xlvii They were capturing—and sending—the
Kilroy momentxlviii—I am here…we are here—you too are here even if you’re not
here.xlix In other words, even when we are together in place, we’re often also
somewhere else, focused on recording and transmitting the experience more than
experiencing it.
Humans are still highly social creatures, and we are in an intensely
collaborative, social, participatory era; we’re participating all right, just not
necessarily face-to-face. We join in via mixed-media communication technologies in
numbers and ways that boggle the mind.l We call and txt one another, Tweet
donations, one-click to sign online petitions, swap photos and mash-up and
broadcast work.li We play in YouTube bands,lii write stories together; scientists
collaborate from laboratories across the world.liii Stuart Butterfield, co-founder of
the photo-sharing site, Flickr, likens this phenomenon to the salons of 19th-century
Paris, where friends assembled in living rooms to create music.liv But today no one
has actually joined us in the parlor.lv
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In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky points out that “our social tools are not
an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”lvi Perhaps they
challenge our small cities and towns especially, communities that once depended on
close quarters, on neighborliness, on community connectedness for survival. Studies
show us the importance of friends to our health,lvii and how we seek strong bonds
with affinity groups, but—and this is what is confounding to the local—no matter
how distant those groups may be.lviii Because online connectivity lets us form, join
and leave groups with astonishing ease, we can, with equal ease, retreat into our
trusted tribes and silos,lix and, at the extreme, into willful ignorance and
fundamentalism, avoiding what is new, different, or what we do not understand.lx
We’re as good at tuning out what we do not want to see or know or interact with as
we are at tuning in what we do want. And what we do want can become narrower
and narrower the more we confine ourselves to echo chambers of thought and
belief. If we spend much of our social time online with people who share our
opinions, how do we form those weak ties across our towns? How do we get to
know those new neighbors?
How do we plan for the future of our communities when we spend so little
time in them or paying attention to them except when there’s a contentious issue on
the table with an impact that might affect our own backyards? To rouse us to get
involved, the issue must have personal relevance. Only when we come into contact
with the stories of fellow community members, will their views, their needs and
dreams have relevance for us too, opening us to the value of diversity and
community spirit—to the value of our neighbors being able to hang out their
laundry even if we do not like seeing their laundry.lxi How can we belong to our
community if we fail to recognize it as one we wish to engage with? We talk a lot
about resilient, diverse communities needing to build trust between groups, but
how do we come together if we’re growing farther and farther apart?lxii
Some towns believe that disconnects and divides will be eased by educating
residents and inviting participation through postings in the local newspaper or mass
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mailings, but studies show that we need to trust the person delivering the news
before we’ll act on it. lxiii We will not leave our warm homes and trusted groups for
the wider community just because experts, officials or activists wish it so.
{Sidebar Quotation} We believe we live in the ‘age of information,’ that there has been
an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow
sense this is the case, in many ways just the opposite is true. We live at a moment of
deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who
we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment, An age of
missing information.
—Bill McKibbenlxiv
Land-use and community planning efforts can exacerbate the trust problem
by contributing to the semantic gap widening between institutions and the public.lxv
Experts often use language the layperson finds confusing or distancing, even
alienating. Meaningful community development is often defined as “neighbors
working with neighbors to solve community problems defined by the community,
identifying local resources, and working towards self-sufficiency.” lxvi Just about
everyone agrees that “open channels of communication and opportunities for civic
engagement are … key underpinnings for vibrant, democratic communities.”lxvii
Pundits talk, too, about the essential roles of social capital and community agency—
our capacity for collective action. lxviii Many groups use some version of the
following recipe to foster inclusive civic participation: “Inform, Consult, Involve,
Collaborate, Empower.” lxix Transparency. Thoughtfulness. Honesty. Actual
implementation of the ideas solicited. Nice words. But what do they really mean?
Do they convey real meaning outside of documents? Have you ever heard someone
tell a good story piling on all those words?
Today’s youth, who will soon shoulder responsibility for the future, feel this
gap acutely. Young people often feel excluded from participating meaningfully
except in specifically youth-oriented projects.lxx As social scientist Jean Twenge
finds in her studies of youth: they “trus[t] no one, suggesting a culture growing ever
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more toward disconnection and away from close communities.”lxxi What message do
we send—that we trust numbers, ROI, quantitative data, but we don’t trust the
people with the numbers? Are we raising a generation that will trust neither
experts nor people from across town?
Out of urgency, some experts and officials may be guilty of drive-by
participatory planning; participation is great as long as it’s really rubber-stamping,
inclusiveness is OK as long as it leads to consensus. When a community is asked
what it thinks and believes and wants, are experts and leaders willing to listen, to
help them to act on it, to explain how their ideas intersect with data and expertise?
Do experts trust the people? Or would they rather inform them and then involve
them to carry out what they know is the best thing for the future? How do we build
partnerships between expert and layperson, between professional and local
knowledge based on trust?
Take a town that sees a need to give its youth recreational opportunities. It
plans to renovate and extend a park to include a playground for children, a skate
park for teens, and green space for everyone. Having heard that “projects that
connect young people productively with other youth and adults are now seen to be
the foundations upon which healthy communities can be built,”lxxii the town
approaches the youth for their ideas about the park. But, it turns out they do so only
as a conceptual gesture. The plans and budget are already essentially set and even if
the kids come up with decidedly doable, innovative designs, their ideas will become
posters to decorate a park bulletin board, videos on YouTube, not realities. Their
involvement amounts to an empty exercise. As a consequence, they won’t soon get
involved again, they won’t believe that their voices matter, they won’t trust the local
community. Neither will their parents.
{Sidebar quotation} First, we see what we have—individually, as neighbors and in this
place of ours. Second, we know that the power of what we have grows from creating
new connections and relationships among and between what we have. Third, we know
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that these connections happen when we individually or collectively act to make the
connections—they don't just happen by themselves.
—John McKnightlxxiii
What if before any plans are drawn or budgets built, any data about the pros
and cons of a park are unveiled, the community comes together for a What Does the
Park Mean to Us event to celebrate parks and the prospect of one, an event that
opens with sharing of positive personal experiences in town green spaces? In small
story circles people swap park stories, planners and developers and activists and
fellow townspeople alike, and through that storytelling emerges the specific
qualities of a park—the kinds of experiences and feelings that people value, from
skateboarding to feeding the birds to sitting on a bench taking in the view.lxxiv
No one is making suggestions at this point; everyone is sharing experience,
getting to know one another from places that matter to each person. Youth notice
their views being heard and they in turn hear adult perspectives through story, not
declaration of position or plan, not through an adult’s invitation to contribute to a
plan. That the gathering is celebratory and positive in tone gives people a chance to
make connections and to be playful with their dreams before turning to the
potentially challenging business of planning. Chances are that the town will get a
better park, and the people will feel the benefits of in-person, participatory
democracy as the seeds of trust are sown. People have to be given the chance, and
have it mean something, to use their imagination and heart, to tell what they value
about this park in their own way, using their own words.lxxv From these individual
voices brought together begins to emerge the surprising, messy, vibrant story of
community.
{Side bar quotation: “Stories can accomplish what no other form of communication
can,” Will Rogers writes. “—they can get through to our hearts. In our world of
information transfer, data exchange, and media impressions, where we have become
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callused by so much communication, stories have the power to speak to us about what
truly matters.”lxxvi}
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III. Storytelling in Action
There is no way to build community…Community is the way.
—Lee Cruzlxxvii
In October 2009, Victor, Idaho (population around 1,000) filled Pierre’s, its historic
theater, for a first-ever citywide storytelling event. People came out to hear three
longtime residents tell stories about what they found special about Victor. They
came to enjoy digital storieslxxviii made from interviews with residents, young and
old, from all points of the community compass. They came to meet one another and
get their first taste of story circles. The ninety or so people, one attendee
commented, represented the widest spectrum from the small city that she had seen
together in the fourteen years she had lived in Victor.
The event was about sharing and listening, not about solving problems or
tackling issues or taking stands. There was no get-things-done, we-need-answers
rush-rush tone. Many people turned out thanks to a troop of Boy Scouts that had
volunteered to help with the digital stories and invitations. Hailing from families
across town, the Scouts asked the people they knew, and since those people trusted
the boys that the evening would be worth their while, soon one family told the next
told the next about joining in on the fun. It was a case of collective efficacy in action.
It was about trust—first gaining the Boy Scouts’ trust, then the Scouts spreading the
trust—and the value of cross-community social events.
Victor’s storytelling evening led to good will, new connections, volunteers
signing on to participate in Envision Victor’s Heart & Soul Planning Initiativelxxix and
the inception of the First Annual Victor Wave Day, when everyone would wave to
each other the way one of the evening’s storytellers recalled had been common
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some years ago. Where had the waving gone, people wondered, and how could they
bring it back?lxxx These small outcomes, focused as much on fun as future planning,
boosted community spirit and energy for collective action.
{Sidebar} Weave Community Storytelling Approaches Into Planning Processes:
 To support belonging by building trust and responsibility
 To engage the full community across weak ties
 To hear what really matters
 To identify and encourage local capacity
 To offer create solutions to current challenges
 To envision the community’s future
 To enjoy being a community
That is the first step toward creating a culture of community collaboration and
collective responsibility, and of participation in taking next steps. To engage more
people, especially those less likely to participate, to facilitate inter-group socializing
and to describe and acknowledge the community’s experience with place will take
additional storytelling gatherings like this one and theme-based storytelling focused
on a specific issue or location, such as a working waterfront, proposed commercial
development, or traffic-calming measures. It will take some smart marketing based
on understanding local demographics, as Victor’s Scout Troop so aptly
demonstrates. It will also take one-on-one storytelling and solo storytelling as well
as the publishing of stories as described in the Appendix, and a weaving in of
complementary processes such as facilitated dialogue, asset-mapping, arts and
small-action projects,lxxxi offering an effective jumping off point for communities to
engage with potentially contentious issues.lxxxii One storytelling event does not bring
a town together over its divides, but it’s a start.
What distinguishes the storytelling I advocate is that it is by, with, and for an
entire community. As much about the give-and-take of the social storytelling
moment as about the stories themselves, community storytelling builds
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relationships as it compiles information, knowledge, values and know-how. It
honors the individual’s as well as the town’s story by bringing diverse voices into
juxtaposition, highlighting differences, opportunities, concerns, gaps, and
similarities—the patterns of a community that single stories or quantitative data
might miss. It spreads across town through effective marketing (e.g. a Scout troop)
and a combination of no-tech and high-tech group, one-on-one and solo storytelling
methods.lxxxiii It involves social media and sitting next to each other on folding
chairs. It brings in outside experts for advice and training and technical expertise
while townspeople take charge and retain ownership. Above all it is flexible, the
town adapting the storytelling particulars to meet its capacity and goals. It is today’s
small community acting and reflecting, boldly and collaboratively, imaginatively and
responsibly—together.
Philosopher Pierre Levy urges us to extend our knowledge far beyond our
individual consciousnesses by engaging in reciprocal apprenticeships in which each
person is both expert and apprentice to the other.lxxxiv To foster such collective
intelligence and belonging, the story circle lies at the heart of community
storytelling.lxxxv We sit in the circle on equal terms—no one’s at the head, no one’s at
the tail. Everyone has something to offer. Everyone has something to learn. As, one
by one around the circle participants share their stories, they sow the seeds of trust
that make bonds and bridges possible. It resembles what we do around the dinner
table, at hunting camp, a church social, a book group meeting, lunch with friends and
colleagues. Not everyone will wish to attend group storytelling events, and there are
many other ways for community members to contribute their stories, as outlined in
the Appendix, but as much as possible, I encourage towns to anchor their projects in
inter-group, communitywide story circles. Round-the-circle storytelling greases the
gears of connectedness, sustains relationships, keeps one another up-to-date, and
passes along the lessons we carry from the past and learn along the way.
There are as many storytelling projects as there are communities, but a
combination of community-wide, small-group, one-on-one and individual
storytelling opportunities will weave a richly textured picture of the community and
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its values while building social capital. Each of the approaches offers singular
benefits; together they can bring about change.lxxxvi
Story circles lead to the discovery of shared interests, which, Margaret
Wheatley claims, “changes people’s relationships for the better. If we recognize a
shared sense of injustice or a shared dream, magical things happen to our
relationships; we open to each other.”lxxxvii Victor, Idaho experienced this
phenomenon repeatedly during the early months of the Orton Family Foundation’s
Heart & Soul planning project. One longtime resident’s description during that first
story-sharing event of his water-witching skills led a young woman, newly moved to
town and from a decidedly different social group, to plan to contact him about
learning how to dowse. In so doing, two traditionally isolated groups were
connected, and preconceived notions dispelled. During another Victor story
sharing, a young man and an elderly woman from seemingly opposite points on the
community compass, discovered a shared love of the old stone buildings in town.
That discovery helped to establish common ground that will serve them well, if, in
the future, they find themselves at opposite sides of an issue.lxxxviii
At a small, inter-group story circle hosted by two newly trained story
facilitators, one host was openly delighted by a story an elder told about how years
ago she routinely baked some forty-five loaves of bread a week to feed her large
family. The next day, the facilitator found a loaf of freshly baked bread in her car, a
gift from the elder. Now bread and story connect the two, foster mutual
understanding and begin to draw their groups together.
Story circles also identify local capacity that has gone untapped because it is
not recognized as such. Youth, for instance, are often relegated to the sidelines
because their abilities and the stake they have in their town’s future are
overlooked.lxxxix Who knew that those Boy Scouts not only could use digital movie
making tools—that surprised no one—but could bring people out for an evening of
storytelling in town? What other skills and interests go unnoticed because a
professional or expert does not hold them? We might discover things in ourselves
and in our neighbors we never took to be assets—one man’s knowledge of the
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workings of the town clock or the rancher’s understanding of the local wildlife
crossings or the forager’s mind map of the locations of wild edibles: this sort of local
knowledge comes out in story, and through group storytelling becomes known to
townspeople.
{Sidebar Quotation} Groups give rise synergistically to insights and solutions that
would not come about without them.
—Brown, Collins & Duiguidxc
Over time such storytelling paints a detailed, complex portrait that residents
will recognize and yet find revelatory, the same way we seem to see our town anew
when a friend or relative comes to visit for the first time.xci Or how we understand
what makes our town special to us when we have to explain it to authorities who
might not grasp its nuances, as happened in Damariscotta, Maine during a planning
charrette. After months of story sharing, dialogue and conversation among
themselves, the townspeople began to trust their knowledge of their town. They
worked together, across groups, to modify the view of their town and solutions
offered by the outside experts and thereby retained a central role in a process
driven by outside experts.
In this hurry-up era, stories are both more natural and more difficult to wrest
from the blur of life. An effectively bold storytelling initiative takes effort and
creative leadership. It takes careful planning: mapping the community’s
demographics including its formal and informal groups and the people who act as
bridges between these groups, and discovering how and where the community
comes together, be it through sports or celebration events, small coffee klatches or
town wide annual meetings. To encourage full participation takes designing a mix of
storytelling processes and then moving the stories to action. The most challenging
part of storytelling is revving up its rusty engine, familiarizing a community with its
pleasures and productiveness. It takes slowing people down enough to listen.
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IV. Listening: The Transformational Moment
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is
also what it takes to sit down and listen.
—Winston Churchill
During a recent storytelling training, the story-sharer sat among a group of eager
volunteers learning to conduct story interviews. xcii The older man tipped back in his
chair and slowly moved into his story of coming to the valley as a boy, how those
early years had shaped his love for the woods, the mountains, the wide wild spaces
of the valley. His story was simple, straightforward. It was the telling that drew
them in: his voice, his facial expressions and his body language radiated a deep
affection for his town and its people; his sense of humor, that warmed up as he grew
at ease, invited them into his story. The volunteers were riveted. And the more they
leaned forward to listen, responsively, to the twists of his tale, the more he seemed
to light up and remember. The trainees were so caught up with the story and the
teller that they forgot they were there to practice interviewing techniques.
After the story-sharer left, one of the volunteers exclaimed that she had a
confession. She had always dismissed the man as someone with hardened, inflexible
views at the opposite side of the political spectrum, but now, after sitting with him
and hearing his story unfurl, she would never shut him out again. He loved this
valley and cared for its future as much as she did. She still disagreed with him, but
now she could talk with him across that gap and withhold judgment. Furthermore,
she would listen more carefully in general. Here, in his presence, sitting in a circle of
fellow listeners, she learned two of in-person storytelling’s greatest lessons: how it
leads to both self-understanding and to empathy.
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{Sidebar Quotation} Somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell
is not nearly so important as the telling itself.
—Henry Miller
She learned that we listen through the scrim of our own experience. The
Center for Narrative Studies calls listening “a dynamic of expectancy”;xciii old stories
we’ve heard and our own stories become a filter through which we hear the new.
Maxine Greene says that in our dealings with one another we must remember “that
each of us achieved contact with the world from a particular vantage point, in terms
of a particular biography. All this underlies our present perspective and affects the
way we look at things and talk about things and structure our realities.”xciv If we
listen with our own subjectivity acknowledged—something that becomes
particularly possible when we are in each other’s presence--we will break through
to a ‘receptive listening space’ where we come face to face with our own patterns of
thinking and believing and communicating.xcv We will then accept what we have
heard; we will feel how others’ stories brushing up against our own build bridges
that will move us past prior assumptions, past fear and distrust.
That training group learned that listening, really listening, builds empathy
and a movement toward trust,xcvi but it can also bring surprise. Once we open
ourselves to another’s story, we allow for the possibility that “however certain our
expectation, the moment foreseen may be unexpected when it arrives.”xcvii Even if
we’ve heard the story, know the teller or the place, hearing it within an intentional
gathering brings things into new focus, deepening our understanding. There’s
something about being out of the comfort of our own surroundings or in the
presence of people with whom we do not ordinarily tell stories, of hearing our own
voice and experiencing our stories being received. We never know when we might
just save a bus route. We never know when we might discover common ground or
be confronted by our own assumptions. We never know when we’ll learn a new
truth. By pulling a single experience from the stream of life, storytelling gives us a
chance to turn it over and over in our hands, and have it teach us again and
differently.
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{Sidebar quotation} We don’t need more public hearings. We need much more public
listening, in processes where we come together and commit to staying together long
enough to discover those ideas and issues that are significant to each of us.
—Margaret Wheatley xcviii
During a story-circle in Maine a new resident of the small, seacoast town told
a story about how his neighbor, without being asked, kept a close watch on his
house when the newcomer was away. The telling of the story—and the naming of
his wonder and delight in the presence of this neighborliness, so palpable during the
sharing—brought home to the longtime residents sitting in that circle a local trait
they had taken for granted. Then something else happened; they spent the next
several minutes marveling over other instances of neighborliness that each had
experienced. In so doing, they connected with each other and named what they
valued while inviting the newcomer deeper into the community. Instead of checking
off “neighborliness” on a values survey and moving on, in an interactive story circle
the storyteller receives immediate feedback from his listeners’ body language, facial
expressions and verbal response. He may be asked to explain, provide additional
clarifying detail to the story—“what exactly makes this a neighborly community in
your experience.”
More than a general concept, neighborliness was named by the Maine
storyteller and his listeners as a particular kind of interaction, something to be
fostered in the future by efforts to encourage everyday neighbor-to-neighbor caring,
such as block parties, clean-up days and online community gathering spots like
Front Porch Forum.xcix Specifying in detail a universal value as it is actually
experienced by residents will help a town to recognize and tend the value. Doing so
in a group setting builds the good will and spirit necessary for people to invest the
time and effort into future participation; to nurturing or protecting that value.
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Having a place named and described through someone’s experience in it
secures the name for us and connects us to that place. As Terry Tempest Williams
tells us, “If we don’t know the names of things, if we don’t know bighorn antelope, if
we don’t know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don’t know sage, pinyon, juniper, then …we
are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we
enter a place of true desolation.”c Naming ensures our sense of belonging to the
place, and prepares us to shoulder responsibility for its safe-keeping. Good
storytelling is a process of naming that moves us past generalities, past the first
thing we think of, the dull “malling” of language and image and insight.
The Maine story circle also illustrates how stories beget stories—when we
hear someone’s tale, we are reminded of our own, and we in turn offer our story.
The newcomer’s tale of neighborliness prompted stories from his listeners and
theirs led him to discover a new story--someone remarking that the town clock
winder showed real community spirit led the newcomer the next week to collect the
story of that clock tender, a digital story shared several weeks later at a
communitywide story sharing event. The new resident’s sense of belonging
increased, as did the scope of his participation. The viral impact of group
storytelling—story leading to story—pieces together a mosaic of specific
community assets as well as areas under threat or needing developing--as actually
experienced. Being in that slow, relaxed, congenial space of group storytelling gives
townspeople the time to reflect rather than to react, to reacquaint themselves with
each other and what matters, and begin to look to the future with shared
anticipation.
We must come into contact with views other than our own or we become
petrified, both fearful and fossilized. As we lean in to listen, we extend our capacity
to encounter difference without being threatened by it. We begin to recognize
others as not all that different from ourselves. We do not remain indifferent to those
who share their story with usci-- empathy is possible, so we are willing to risk the
vulnerability of telling our own stories. We move past simple platitudes of position
into the deeper complexities of context, cause, and connection. We learn to enjoy
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one another. We begin the journey to where we welcome what Vera John-Steiner
calls “a shared language, the pleasures and risks of honest dialogue, and the search
for a common ground.” cii
{Sidebar Quotation} The challenge is increasing and deepening trust by engaging
directly with others to create culture that works for all of us.ciii
—Frances Moore Lappé
In listening to and telling stories, we are learning to understand the grammar
of connection. When we sit together, we have the story, the teller and the telling to
learn from. We respond as much to the language, the tone and rise and fall of the
voice, the body language as to the words and details chosen, the scenes narrated, the
arc of the story. When we listen intently, with humor and empathy, our focus shifts
from what separates us to what unites us. We begin to understand why things are
the way they are, and grow able to thrive on what a recent study found necessary to
a healthy rural community: “both consent and dissent, and both trust and
distrust.”civ Community storytelling, focused as much on listening as on telling, gives
us unparalleled views into our own hearts and bridges to the hearts of others. Only
then will we break through our own walls. Only then will we trust. Only then will we
engage with potentially contentious issues.
{Sidebar Quotation} A great story is never told once; it is shared again and again. If
your community members share great stories about their involvement in the
community, the stories will travel far and wide and encourage new and unknown
people to dip their feet into your waters.
—Jono Baconcv
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V. Into the Future
This is a time for reflection and absolute boldness. This is a time to
experiment without sacrificing any discipline. This is a time when we
must allow what we care about most to guide everything we do.
—Peter Forbescvi
Weaving community and building the future requires more than the details of
history, geography, and demographics; it requires more than considering the values,
needs and desires of the various groups and individuals within a town; it above all
demands community members coming together to discuss, weigh, deliberate,
synthesize and act on its realities and dreams. We must improve social interaction
between groups for the long-term health of our communities, and we must
acknowledge that real participation in our diverse, shifting, digital-era towns
presents challenges.cvii For towns to be resilient to the stresses and able to seize the
opportunities of our time, not only enduring but prospering, demands healthbuilding as well as problem-solving approaches.
It is also important to keep in mind that “if you’ve seen one rural community,
you’ve seen one rural community.”cviii Local context calls for each town to mix its
own brew of approaches and strategies to plan for the future.cix Accordingly, some
communities such as Victor, Idaho will gravitate to action projects: its plans for a
Neighborhood Emergency Readiness Program, a new Visual Gateway to the town
and the restoration of Pierre’s, its historic playhouse.cx Another town will focus on
the arts, such as Starksboro, Vermont with Orton’s Art & Soul Civic Engagement
pilot projectcxi or Ukiah, California’s community with its theater project.cxii Others
want to get right down to the business of decision-making.
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The good news is that storytelling is showing signs of life in communitybased efforts. Healthcare, education and economic development initiatives are
incorporating storytelling to improve their reach and effectivenesscxiii; nonprofits
and foundations are featuring the individual’s story on their websites to give life and
shape to the impact of their programs.cxiv A story museum is planned for Oxford,
England.cxv Master story interviewers such as Studs Terkel, Ken Burns, Ira Glass and
multimedia series such as StoryCorps,cxvi and the New York Times’ One in Eight
Million,cxvii with their constellation of local story projects, bring everyday people’s
lives into our homes.
In our own towns, we might find energized groups of local-history buffs
collecting the stories of town elders to form an archive of the way things were.
Organizations such as The Vermont Folklife Center and Appalshopcxviii offer training
in ethnographic story capture, archiving and radio broadcast. Affordable voice
recorders, cell phones, and digital cameras, free online editing applications and doit-yourself publishing venues promote the individual and grassroots efforts of
citizen journalists and community story-catchers. Online or mobile participatory
story tours such as Tracklines’ walkumentaries and The Murmur Project invite us to
add our location-based stories right into the landscape, and Orton Family
Foundation’s Community Almanac gives us an online space to upload and share all
manner of multimedia story about our communities.cxix
It is time to try storytelling out in the data-driven, expert-dominated world of
land-use planning. Not to replace good data, surveys, interviews, dialogue or action
projects, but to build the bones of community, to tend to its lifeblood, its heart and
soul, its uniqueness. As a participant in Damariscotta’s storytelling remarked,
“Drilling down on the specifics of the community with stories is valuable if you want
to maintain the uniqueness. It wasn’t so much the common values that were
interesting, but the unique gems that nobody had exposed before. You want to
uncover those things that make a place unique.” Another townsperson said, “I felt
that the stories were worthwhile. Those of us that did the interviews felt that not
only did you really get to understand what people thought, but you got to know
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them better. It makes you feel better about your community.”cxx One of storytelling’s
assets is its flexibility, how it can wrap around and in between other, more timesensitive, action-planning processes, intensifying their benefits by linking data to
the personal, by translating the charts and maps and designs through group
narrative, by going out deep into the community via story interviews even when
controversy arises, by establishing and nurturing new connections,cxxi good will, and
collaboration.
We’ve set an ambitious agenda as the clock ticks: to shift the culture of landuse planning in order to save the character of small cities and towns across America.
Paradoxically, to meet that tight deadline will take a slowing down, a savoring,
sustained effort and creative leadership far more than any one-time blitz or any one
approach.cxxii There are no shortcuts. This is not triage. Nothing could be more
natural, explains Richard Kearney: “Telling stories is as basic to human beings as
eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what makes our life
worth living.”cxxiii In the face of the pressures on our small towns, it will take courage
to add slow narrative to quick and sure data-driven processes as we work together
to identify sacred places, to develop important community assets and to strengthen
relationships. It is hard to try something that seems so, well, traditional. Yes, this is
slow community in fast, plug-in-and-play times. What a radical notion.
It’s risky to put ourselves out there, to share and to connect. We’ve been
disappointed so many times before. And yet we must take risks. How else can we
create a shared future in these tumultuous times? Have power over our story?
How can we do it without imagination and daring? Without curiosity and empathy?
Without wisdom? Without story? What else can stitch together the cloth of
community, dropping away the excesses of our times to see a better future, which
otherwise can seem too vast, too incomprehensible, and just plain out of sight for
most of us to concern ourselves with? In Writing at the End of the World, Richard
Miller contends that in our universities, we spend considerable time and energy
teaching about the ends of worlds but very little about the creation of better
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worlds.cxxiv Community storytelling helps release us from the shackles of the past—
nostalgia and rancor both—while allowing us to honor and learn from it.cxxv
{Sidebar Quotation} We start with the skill of relationship building, the story of self.
Then we develop the skill of motivation or the story of us. Third, the skill of
strategizing, or the story of now. And fourth the skill of action.
—Marshall Ganzcxxvi
The community that saved a tree but lost itself? Not here. Not anymore.
Here, instead of our positions tearing us apart, our stories transform positions into
the connective tissue. In the end, as the poet W. B. Yeats asks us, “What do we know
but that we face one another in this place?”cxxvii It is time to shake off our fear and
face one another. It is time for story.
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Appendix
Note: What follows is a general overview only and not a guide to storytelling methods.
See the Orton Family Foundation Website for Additional Storytelling Tips, Methods,
Examples and Resources: http://orton.org/. Also see the Foundation’s paper,
Storytelling As Told in Our Heart & Soul Towns.
Story Circles
In the spirit of sitting around a campfire, swapping tales, a story circle is a gathering
of people sitting in small circles of chairs to share personal stories about place and
community. Participants divide into groups of six to eight, a size small enough to
allow people to get to know one another comfortably and to ensure that each person
has ample time to tell a story and for the group to respond. They can be designed for
any mix of participants: members of a single group, people interested in a theme
such as local foods, neighborhoods, two or more groups brought together such as
long-time residents and newcomers, or an entire town.
The circle configuration invites everyone in on equal terms—while a
facilitator will help move things along, there is no hierarchy here, everyone
participates by being present, by listening as well as by telling a story. Participants
share their stories, one by one around the circle, on the topic set for the gathering.
After everyone has a chance to share, the group responds to the stories and then
identifies the values found within the stories.
At the beginning of a project use story circles to:

Celebrate community

Invite the full community to participate

Foster bonding, build trust

Highlight common ground

Gather values
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In the middle of a project use story circles to:

Reach out to groups that have yet to participate

Bring groups together from across community divides

Continue to celebrate the community

Focus on specific values, themes and issues that have emerged
Late in a project, use story circles to:

Keep planning processes grounded in the actual community experience

Diffuse tension during challenging meetings

Celebrate community

Continue to engage the full community

Gather more, detailed information about values

Acknowledge and reflect on accomplishments
One-on-One Storytelling: Story Interviews
Story interviews offer the intimacy of one-on-one storytelling, one teller, and one
listener paying full attention to the story, the telling and the teller. This method is
particularly valuable for engaging people at the edges of the community, or those
who cannot or will not participate in story circles. Connections are forged as tellers
feel listened to, valued. Some people will wish to be interviewed by a trusted and
known person. For others, being interviewed by someone from a different part of
the community offers real opportunities for trust building between groups. If the
interviewer is a townsperson and not an outside professional, tendrils of trust build
as the local interviewer comes to know the storyteller through voice, story and way
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of telling. It can be the first step to participating in new ways, drawing people from
all the point of the community compass into the heart of the town.
Story interviews are pointedly about story—the narrative of an experience
with community values--rather than just about information. A trained community
member sits down with a fellow townsperson to listen to and record that person’s
story, and then together, the two explore what the story reveals about what matters
about this place and community. With the story sharer’s consent, the storytelling
session is recorded on audio and/or video, edited, sections perhaps transcribed,
published and then gathered with other story interviews for further synthesis,
comparison, and integration into other planning approaches.
Story interviews reveal richly textured insights into community values,
issues and perspectives. The stories live on beyond the moment of storytelling to
spark discussion and further comparative study and they build enduring
connections between the people of a town. The process of conducting, capturing,
editing and publishing a story interview has a profound impact on the interviewer
through close contact with storytellers and their personal stories of place and
community. The time spent together builds trust, empathy, and understanding
between listener and teller, and thus can aid in the process of strengthening
community bonds and building bridges, one by one. There’s nothing quite like being
in the presence of someone telling their story; there’s nothing quite like having
someone make the effort to ask for your story and then come listen to it and then
publish it.
Solo Storytelling
Not everyone will attend a story circle or grant an interview. But everyone can be
invited to contribute to the storytelling by sending in a story or posting it online.
Solo storytelling opportunities offer the greatest degree of freedom for the tellers by
allowing them to share on their own terms in whatever media they choose and from
where they live. Another advantage is that the story itself is preserved and viewable.
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The drawback to the storyteller producing the story and delivering or
posting it is that the teller does not necessarily also become a listener. And has no
particular, specific listener. Who is listening? Do listeners pay full attention to our
radio stories, or do they catch it through one ear as they drive, make lunch, work on
something else? Do they skim our newsletter story? Who is responding and
reaching out over that gap between people to set those first seeds of trust? Will you
learn something from reading such a story and from creating one’s own?
Absolutely. But this sort of storytelling on its own does not necessarily build a
sustained sense of belonging. It is an excellent complement to the other storytelling
processes.
Publishing Stories
Stories continue to work their magic long after the telling is done by spreading
through the community. They can be placed right into the heart of town: in local
newsletters or pasted to community bulletin boards, recorded and broadcast on
local radio or as podcasts, videotaped and screened at town events, on local
television, or on a community website or YouTube channel, or Orton Family
Foundation’s Community Almanac. Stories find homes in the tangible spaces of
town—visual stories (photographs of earlier times or today, paintings and
drawings) can grace the library, fill a purpose-made kiosk on Main Street, be posted
to a bench at the bus-stop, located as a Heartspot.cxxviii They can be clustered and
compared according to theme, location, era; they can be integrated into other kinds
of planning events and community activities, bringing along their compelling human
element as they remind professionals to listen deeply to the people and the people
to listen to one another before taking sides or making decisions. As they become a
part of the landscape itself and part of what the community shares when it gathers,
stories show the community’s values playing out in the town, a daily reminder of
where the community of where it is and where it wants to go.
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ENDNOTES
Section I: The Story of Storytelling
Peter Forbes, The Great Remembering (San Francisco: Trust for Public Land, 2001),
32.
ii
Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 28.
iii
My retelling of a story told by Daniel Meadows, former creative director of Capture Wales, at
an international digital storytelling retreat in Ukiah California, 2006. Capture Wales website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/galleries/pages/capturewales.shtml
iv
Randy Hester defines sacred places as “those places—buildings, outdoors spaces, and
landscapes—that exemplify, typify, reinforce, and perhaps even extol the everyday life patterns
and special rituals of community life, those places that have become so essential to the lives of
the residents through use or symbolism that the community collectively identifies with those
places.”
Randy Hester,“Subconscious Landscapes of the Heart,” Places 2, no. 3: 01-15-1985
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/608645gj.
v
Ray Oldenburg describes third places: “Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a
public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than
informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to
be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second…
The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a
playful mood, which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a
radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home
in the psychological comfort and support that it extends…They are the heart of a community's
social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the
American social landscape."
Ray Oldenburg, The Project for Public Spaces,
http://www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/roldenburg.
vi
Daniel Meadows, from the personal notes of the article’s author taken during his keynote at
First Person: The International Conference of Digital Storytelling, 2006
vii
Ed McMahon, Senior Resident Fellow, Urban Land Institute, Orton Trustees Meeting
conversation, July 17, 2009 and email, March 2010.
viii
Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food (New York: Penguin, 2008), 81.
ix
Anand Giriharadas,“Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?” New York Times, November 20,
2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/us/21iht-currents.html.
x
Cornelia Butler Flora and Jan L. Flora, “Social Capital,” Challenges for Rural America in the
21st Century (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2003), 223.
xi Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
xii Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2008),
76.
xiii Ibid., 30 and 75.
xiv
Ibid., v.
xv
“In a landmark 1997 study, epidemiologist Felton Earls and colleagues showed that “collective
efficacy” — the willingness of neighbors to intervene on behalf of the common good — best
i
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explains reductions in urban violence. Believing one’s voice matters—efficacy-“influences trust,
views of the decision-making process, and involvement.” James Ceronsky, “Ceronsky:
Democracy on New Haven” in Yale Daily News, January 12, 2010.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/opinion/staff-columns/2010/01/12/cersonsky-democracy-newhaven/
See, too, Sandra T. Marquart-Pyatt and Peggy Petrzelka in “Trust, the Democratic Process,
and Involvement in a Rural Community,” Rural Sociology 73, no. 2, (2008): 252 and on
“perceived collective efficacy,” 268.
xvi Ibid. The authors write: “…complexity of trust, the reciprocity of links between individual,
officials and processes can lead to committed civic engagement.” 252.
xvii
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), 269.
xviii
Henry David Thoreau is credited with saying, “A fact that may some day blossom into a
truth.”
xix
Anand Giridharadas, “Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?” in The New York Times,
November 21, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/us/21iht-currents.html.
xx
Elizabeth Daley writes: “Since the Enlightenment, the intellectual community has valued the
rational over the affective, the abstract over the concrete, the decontextualized over the
contextualized.” “Expanding the Concept of Literacy” in Educause Review, 38 no. 2 (Mar-Apr
2003): 35.
xxi Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Part 2, 1931-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2005), 732.
xxii
Robin Dunbar, “Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective” in Rev. Gen. Psych 8, (2004): 104.
xxiii
James Zull, “What is ‘The Art of Changing the Brain?’” in New Horizons for Learning,
http://www.newhorizons.org/neuro/zull.htm.
xxiv
“Every life is in search of a narrative,” Richard Kearney explains. “We all seek, willy-nilly, to
introduce some kind of concord into the everyday discord.”
Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2001), 4.
xxv William Cronin, “Caretaking Tales, Beyond Crisis” in The Story Handbook - Language and
Storytelling for Land Conservationists, ed. Helen Whybrow (San Francisco, CA: Trust for
Public Land, 2002), 88. This article and many of his other noteworthy writings are available
for download (pdf) from his website:
http://www.williamcronon.net/writing_downloads.htm.
xxvii
Kearney, On Stories, 45.
Scott Russell Sanders, “The Most Human Art” ” in The Georgia Review (Sept/Oct 1997),
reprinted in Utne Reader, http://www.utne.com/1997-09-01/TheMostHumanArt.aspx.
xxix
Scholars and pundits discussing the “Age of Distrust” include Pierre Rosanvallon and Arthur
Goldhammer in Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008) and David Brooks, “Politics in the Age of Distrust” in New York Times,
Opinion, January 21, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22brooks.html.
xxx
See, for example, Kathy Hanson’s blog, A Storied Career: http://www.astoriedcareer.com/.
xxxi Christian Salmon, Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind (New York:Verso Books,
2010).
xxxii
Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007),19, and Block, Community,
35.
xxxiii Margaret Wheatley writes: “Yet the mechanistic story has created roles for all of us that
are equally deadly. It has led us to believe that we, with our unpredictable behaviors, our
xxviii
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passions, our independence, our creativity, our consciousness—that we are the problem
rather than the blessing.” Finding Our Way, 20.
xxxiv
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, (New
York: Penguin, 2008), 250.
Section II: Why Storytelling Matters
xxxv
Joel Kotkin, The New Geography, (New York: Random House, 2001), 188.
Jeffrey S. Sharp and Domenico M. Parisi, “Devolution: Who Is Responsible for Rural
America?” in Challenges for Rural America in the 21st Century, eds. David L. Brown & Louis E.
Swanson (University Station, PA: Penn State UP, 2003), 359.
xxxvi
Joel Kotkin writes, “As today’s technology allows work to be distributed anywhere,
locational choice becomes more elastic. The growth of a given jurisdiction or region now
depends increasingly on the decisions of specific groups of individual entrepreneurs or workers to
locate there. These individuals – investors, engineers, systems analysts, scientists, creative
workers – are increasingly what one analyst has called “very sophisticated consumers of place.”
To them, the world is essentially a vast smorgasbord in which various locales compete for their
affections and attention.” Kotkin, The New Geography, 7.
xxxviii
What does this term even mean? The Global Development Research Center has compiled a
list of definitions and indicators of QOL: http://www.gdrc.org/uem/qol-define.html.
xxxix Barry Wellman, “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism” Digital Cities
II: Computational and Sociological Approaches eds. Makoto Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar,
and Toru Ishida. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2002), 11-25.
xl
Eric Dahlin, Erin Kelly, and Phyllis Moen “Is Work the New Neighborhood? Social Ties in the
Workplace, Family and Neighborhood” in All Academic Research, 2006:
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/4/5/1/pages104515/p104515
-1.php
xli
Wellman, “Little Boxes, Glocalization and Networked Individualism,” 11-25.
xlii
Putnam, Bowling Alone, 115.
xliii
The New Urbanism champions the front porch and sidewalk in Seaside, Florida and the many
planned communities that have followed in its wake. To read more, see
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl
and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000).
http://www.radicalurbantheory.com/misc/subnation.html
xliv
William J. Mitchell, Me+++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004) 32.
xlv
Jan Hoffman, “Why Can’t She Walk to School?” in New York Times, Fashion, September 9,
2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html.
xlvi
Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 85.
xxxvii
Jae C. Hong, Associated Press, “Crowd greets President Obama in Berlin in July
2008” in The Guardian, July 25, 2008,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/jul/20/obama.afghanistan.
xlviii
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here for an explanation of the Kilroy
phenomenon during World War II.
xlvii
In a keynote address, “The Internet 1992-2009, A Love Story” at Northern Voice 2009, Stuart
Butterfield explored the new participation. See http://www.video.ca/video.php?id=1733677811
xlix
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Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions, Eun Ja Her, Lee Rainie, “Social Isolation and New
Technology” in Pew Internet and the American Life Project, November 4, 2009:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/18--Social-Isolation-and-New-Technology.aspx.
li
A stunning example is the Red Cross’s ability to raise 10 million dollars via Twitter in the days
following the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Jonathan Daniel Harris, “Red Cross Raises $10 million
for Haiti through Mobile Fundraising” in Huffington Post, January14, 2010:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/14/red-cross-raises-4-millio_n_423910.html.
lii
See the Youtube Mash-up Symphony: http://www.youtube.com/symphony.
liii
Gary M. Olson, Ann Zimmerman and Nathan Bos (eds), Scientific Collaboration on the
Internet,(Cambridge, MA, MIT Press: 2008).
liv
Butterfield, “The Internet 1992-2009, A Love Story”
lv
David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined:A Unifeied Theory of the Web, (Cambridge,
MA: Perseus Books, 2002) xi-xii. Also see his website: http://www.smallpieces.com/
lvi
Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 107.
lvii
Tara Parker-Pope “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life” in New York Times, Health, April
21, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21well.html.
lviii
See University of Toronto Education Scholar James Paul Gee’s Situated Language and
Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling, in which he explores the power of what he calls
“affinity spaces,” the informal learning spaces where we congregate to learn from one another out
of shared interest. (New York: Routledge, 2004).
lix Margaret Wheatley writes: “At first glance, the World Wide Web seems to be a source of
new communities. But these groups do not embrace the paradox of community...We are
responding to our instinct of community, but we form highly specialized groups in the
image of ourselves, groups that reinforce our separateness from the rest of society.”
Wheatley, Finding Our Way,49.
lx
See James P. Carse’s The Religious Case Against Belief, for a discussion of “ordinary ignorance
(a mundane lack of knowledge, such as ignorance of tomorrow's weather or the reason why your
stove is malfunctioning), willful ignorance (an intentional avoidance of accessible knowledge),
and finally higher ignorance (a learned understanding that no matter how many truths we may
accumulate, our knowledge falls infinitely short of the truth).” While ordinary ignorance is
common to all people, Carse associates the strongest manifestation of willful ignorance with the
most fervent (and dangerous) of believers. (New York: Penguin 2008 ).
Margaret Wheatley also discusses our resistance to know one another. Wheatley, Finding Our
Way,49.
lxi
Lyman Orton, owner of the Vermont Country Store and founder of The Orton Family
Foundation spearheaded a movement to change Vermont legislation on drying laundry. See “The
Right to Dry”: http://www.orton.org/news/release/vermonters_free_to_air and
http://www.righttodry.blip.tv/#1735675.
lxii Pippa Norris, “The Bridging and Bonding Role of Online Communities” in Society Online:
The Internet in Context, eds. Phillip N. Howard and Steve Jones, (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage:
2003) 31-42.
lxiii Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” 1374.
lxiv
Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (New York: Penguin, 1993) 9.
lxv
Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at New York City’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art, quoted in Pamela LiCalzi O’Connell “One Picture, 1000 Tags”
New York Times, Arts March 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/arts/artsspecial/28social.html
l
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Nelda K. Pearson, “Relying on Ourselves: The Spirit of Rural Community Development,”
.in NHi Shelterforce Online 121, Jan/Feb 2002.
http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/121/Pearson.html.
lxvii Marquart-Pyatt and Petrzelka, “Trust, the Democratic Process, and Involvement in a
Rural Community,” 250.
lxviii
Luloff and Bridger, “Community Agency and Local Development,” 209.
lxix International Association for Public Participation, “IAP2 Spectrum of Public
Participation,” 2007:
http://www.iap2.org/associations/4748/files/IAP2%20Spectrum_vertical.pdf
lxx See John P. Kretzmann & John L. McKnight’s Building Communities From the Inside Out: A
Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets, where they argue, “The unique
energy and creativity of youth is often denied to the community because the young people
of the neighborhood are all too often viewed only in terms of their lack of maturity and
practical life experience.” (Skokie, IL: ACTA Publications, 1997), 29.
lxxi
Jean Twenge, Generation Me (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 36.
lxxii Kretzmann & McKnight, Building Communities from the Inside Out, 29.
lxxiii
John L. McKnight “Community Capacities and Community Necessities” in What We Need Is
Each Other. YES! Magazine, August 3, 2009 http://www.yesmagazine.org/peoplepower/handmade-homemade-community.
lxxiv
See Appendix, for description of story circles.
lxxv
Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978), 2.
lxxvi Will Rogers, The Story Handbook, 1.
lxvi
Section III: Storytelling in Action
James Ceronsky, “Ceronsky: Democracy on New Haven” in Yale Daily News, January 12,
2010. http://www.yaledailynews.com/opinion/staff-columns/2010/01/12/cersonsky-democracynew-haven/
lxxviii
The term “digital story” has as many definitions as uses. We use the term here to denote
multimedia stories. See The Center for Digital Storytelling, a pioneer in the movement, and Joe
Lambert’s Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community for a comprehensive
discussion of digital storytelling: http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html. Victor, Idaho’s stories
can be found here: http://www.communityalmanac.org/Victor-ID.
lxxix
Envision Victor’s description reads; “Envision Victor seeks to implement a new kind of
planning in our City, a process that is focused on engaging our citizens, bridging our divisions,
and honoring our shared values, in order to realize a vibrant and enduring Victor for years to
come. The first phase of the project will last two years, but we hope it will continue well beyond.
We envision a community we can all call home, a community in which all residents can live and
work in harmony and respect for each other. This community will offer healthy economies, strong
businesses, vital and cohesive neighborhoods, and extensive recreational and cultural
opportunities. It will preserve our City’s friendly, hometown atmosphere, and its powerful
history.” Envision victor Website: http://www.envisionvictor.com/about.html.
lxxx
To See the Victor Wave Day movie: http://www.communityalmanac.org/VictorID/WaveDayMovie!.
lxxxi Innovators are exploring approaches that identify crucial participants to bring together
within the paradox of community and to meet calls for “sustained public deliberation.”
(Sharp and Parisi, “Devolution” 360). Jim Kent’s Discovery Process, for one, identifies the
networks in town, finding the places where people congregate, often those third and sacred
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places, and examining the ways in which individuals and groups within a community
interact. From there they identify the key people within the full community whose reach
feathers throughout the constituent groups. (See James Kent Associates, “Discovery Process,
http://jkagroup.com/methods/discovery.html). Organizations such as Everyday Democracy
(http://www.everyday-democracy.org/en/index.asp) and Public Agenda
(http://www.publicagenda.org/) focus on bringing people together over issues that matter
to the people by employing inclusive conversation and facilitated dialogue techniques.
lxxxii See The Change Handbook for a comprehensive summary of conversation-based
techniques: Peggy Holman, Tom Devane, and Steven Cady, The Change Handbook, Second
Edition (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007).
lxxxiii
See Appendix for descriptions of our storytelling methods.
lxxxiv
Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence, (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1997)12.
lxxxv
See Appendix for a brief description of a story circle.
lxxxvi
See Appendix for a brief look at story interviews and individual storytelling.
lxxxvii Wheatley, Finding Our Way, 108.
lxxxviii Communities coming together out of shared interest, from The School of Everything in
England (http://schoolofeverything.com/ ) to the School of Sustainable Living Arts in British
Columbia (http://slas.ca/ ), both designed to bring people together to learn from one
another, places where you can seek teachers or share knowledge. The growth of the zipcar
(http://www.zipcar.com/) and community-owned bicycles (i.e. in Montreal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIXI ) underscores the growing sense that we need to share
our resources and our local expertise.
lxxxix
John P. Kretzman and John L. McKnight, Building Communities from the Inside Out, 29.
xc
Brown, Collins & Duiguid “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning” 40.
xci
Outsiders have historically enabled us to see ourselves from a fresh though sometimes
controversial perspective, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously did following his travels to the
United States in 1835 and 1840; his Democracy in America (1899 Henry Reeves translation) can
be read online: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html.
Section IV: Listening: The Transformational Moment
xcii
See Appendix for summary of story interviews.
The Center for Narrative Studies, “Story as the Shape of Our Listening” Key Writings:
http://www.storywise.com/Key_Writings/Key_Writings-Listening.htm.
xciv
Greene, Landscapes of Learning, 2.
xcv
The Center for Narrative Studies, “Story as the Shape of Our Listening” Key Writings:
http://www.storywise.com/Key_Writings/Key_Writings-Listening.htm.
xcvi
Kearney, On Stories, 62-63.
xcvii
T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (New York: Harvest Books, 1964)
xcviii
Wheatley,Finding Our Way, 53.
xcix
From Front Porch Forum’s website: http://www.frontporchforum.com/ “Our mission is to
help neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood. Common sense and a
growing body of research tell us that well-connected neighborhoods are friendlier places to live,
with less crime, healthier residents, higher property values, and better service from local
government and public utilities.”
c
Qtd in Beatley Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home and Community in a Global Age,11.
ci
John Doe, Speak into the Mirror, A Story of Linguistic Anthropology, Chapter 13 (U of
America P, 1998) http://www.uwm.edu/~wash/mirror13.htm
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cii
Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaborations (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 204.
Frances Moore Lappe, Getting a Grip: Creativity and Courage In a World Gone Mad, (White
River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008) 87.
civ Marquart-Pyatt and Petrzelka, “Trust, the Democratic Process, and Involvement in a Rural
Community” 271.
cv
Jono Bacon, The Art of Community (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2009) 172.
ciii
Section V: Into the Future
cvi
Forbes, The Great Remebering, 89.
Pigg & Bradshaw, “Catalytic Community Development,” 389.
cviii
Daryl Hobbs qtd in Pigg & Bradshaw, “Catalytic Community Development,” 397.
cix
Xavier de Souza Briggs points out that “Community building strategies should respond to
important features of the local context, not just generic principles about being inclusive or
building productive relationships.” Xavier de Sousa “Networks, Power, and a Dual Agenda” .”…
Because meaningful change requires leverage that “multiplies” the force of your strategy, a savvy
scan of the local context is vital as an input. Relationships are time consuming to build and
sustain, some are more important than others for accomplishing particular objectives, and
strategies grounded in a realistic assessment of organized interests and patterns of influence are
more likely to pay off.
cx
Envision Victor, “Description of Projects,” Envision Victor Website,
http://www.envisionvictor.com/whatsnew.html#actionproject.
cxi
See the Orton Family Foundation website for more on Starksboro:
http://orton.org/page/art_soul_civic_engagement.
cxii
Erica Kohl, “Telling the Truth in a Small Town: Ukiah Players Theater” in Community Arts
Reading Room, (Community Arts Network: 2001)
http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2001/02/telling_the_tru.php
cxiii
Medical, business and law schools are paying attention to the power of stories in healing, and
in building ethical, effective business leaders. See Rita Charon, “Narrative and Medicine”, Fe 26
2004 New England Journal of Medicine and . Douglas A. Ready MIT Sloan Review Vol 43 No.
4, 2002
cxiv
On the front page of The Clinton Foundation website, “Stories Behind the Statistics,”
http://www.clintonfoundation.org/stories/. The front page of The Gates Foundation website is
dominated by multimedia stories: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx
cxv
Oxford Story Museum Website: http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/press/index.html
cxvi
StoryCorps Website: http://storycorps.org/.
cxvii
“One in Eight Million” New York Times Multimedia Website,
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html
cxviii
Vermont Folklife Center Website: http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/: Appalshop
Website: http://appalshop.org/ .
cxix
Tracklines Walkumentaries: http://www.artmobilelab.ca/?q=tracklines Murmur Project:
http://murmurtoronto.ca/ and Community Almanac: http://www.communityalmanac.org/
cxx
PEER Associates, Inc., Heart & Soul Community Planning Projects
Interim Evaluation Findings : Damariscotta, Maine, February 2010.
cxxi
Green, “What Role Can Community Play in Local Economic Development?” 347-348, and
Luloff & Bridger, “Community Agency and Local Development,” 209.
cxxii
Pigg & Bradshaw, “Catalytic Community Development” 390.
cxxiii
Kearney, On Stories, 3.
cvii
49
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cxxiv
Richard K. Miller Writing at the End of the World, (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2005), x.
cxxv
In “The Most Human Art” Scott Russell Sanders argues, “ Stories show us the consequences
of our actions. To act responsibly, we must be able to foresee where our actions might lead, and
stories train our sight. They reveal the patterns of human conduct, from motive through action to
result.”
cxxvi Marshall Ganz, “Why Stories Matter,” in Sojourners Magazine, March 2009,
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0903&article=whystories-matter.
cxxvii W. B. Yeats, “Man and the Echo” in The Collected Poems (New York: Scribner, 1996),
212.
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