Screenshot of a worksheet with different questions and boxes to fill out. Text reads 'POWER & POSITIONALITY IN CAMPAIGNS www.forpurpose.au Sense check how power is being expressed within your campaign by looking at the relationship between storytelling and decision-making.' Questions read 'ower and Positionality in Advocacy Campaigns Worksheet (PDF) This simple process can be used to sense check how power is being expressed within your campaign by looking at the relationship between storytelling and decision-making. Whose stories need to be heard in this campaign? Do the people whose stories need to be heard have agency as storytellers? If you are not a storyteller, what is your role? Are you: Supporting and uplifting Collaborating and co-creating, OR are you taking up power and space? 1. Map ALL of the stakeholders that may be touched by the campaign and the social issue it aims to address. 2. Identify those who have lived experience of the issue and/or are directly impacted by the outcomes of the campaign. 3. Have people you have identified with lived experience (whose stories will be shared) been involved in shaping the campaign strategy and making decisions? If not, is it because there are barriers to participating in campaign decision-making? Is there a possibility that you are a barrier? What are the barriers to participation in the campaign - digital, social, physical, and financial? What can you do to remove the barriers? 4. Reflect on the way you might invite people to participate in the campaign using these guiding questions: Who decided who will be included? How will different people be invited to participate? How might the nature of the invitation affect their feelings of inclusion? 5. For each person or community make notes on how you will address access, decision-making ability, invitations, and recognition. !!! If sufficient power for decision-making doesn’t sit with people with lived/living experience/expertise how will you remedy this?Should you be involved in this campaign at all or should you distribute your space and resources as an ally?'

Storytelling with Community: Applying Co-design Principles in Collaborative Storytelling for Advocacy Campaigns

By , , ,

Introduction

As campaigners and organisers, we know stories of lived experience are powerful, and we’re eager to involve the community in our storytelling. But how do we do this meaningfully and with care?

This resource includes tips, tools and a presentation from a workshop session for digital storytellers and organisers working with affected communities.

The workshop was led by Zenaida Beatson and Kristin Gillies from For Purpose, a social enterprise from Aotearoa. They shared a framework and lessons on ethical storytelling with community including case studies from campaigns in Australia and New Zealand.

This workshop was hosted at a conference by Australian Progress called FWD+Organise 2024 and was held in Naarm/Melbourne.

Below are some tips and tools from their workshop session, and you can also access their full slide presentation below.

Tips and Tools

Storytelling and Co-design

Co-design is designing with, not for. Co-design brings together lived experience, lived expertise and professional experience to learn from each other and make things better – by design. – K.A. McKercher

Storytelling:

  • offers a vision of what can be…generating possibility by articulating the change we want to see in the world.
  • supports sensemaking, both on an individual level and collectively. The process of creating a story helps us make sense of our own experiences. It helps us to zoom in, feel through and articulate aspects of an issue.
  • can build a collective understanding of experiences.
  • helps us to develop relationships and helps build relationships more widely in that it enables us to tell people who we are.
  • builds collective identity. It can give us something to believe in, identify with and unite under.

One of the key functions of Storytelling is to co- construct our reality, we can come together and say “here’s what we’re experiencing and here’s why we must act”, so storytelling is really important for us to build understanding and empathy and develop a shared picture of what is going on and why we need to take action. – Kristin Gilles

Storytelling that draws upon co-design principles:

  • invites people with lived experience into the creative process
  • is collaborative and participatory
  • seeks to recognise and share power

If you would like to learn more about co-design principles and processes, read more here. 

Centering Lived Experience

Any campaign that shares the stories of those with lived experience and advocates for impacted communities requires a high degree of care, sensitivity, and awareness.

What you can do:

  • Explain your Processes
    When you’re working with Community or user-generated content in particular, it can be really useful to create templates and guidelines so that people understand what the process is going to be.
  • Create Safe Ways to Participate
    Make it easy for people to participate so that they kind of understand how their stories are going to be used and give them some guidelines or frameworks that make it easy for them so they don’t have to spend a lot of time or energy thinking about how they can contribute. For example, see this resource – Transformation Ethical Storytelling (T.E.S.T) – by Our Race. It is a framework developed by Australian storytelling and anti-racism group Our Race to create safer spaces for Story Holders to create and share stories on their own terms. The framework was developed to address the issue of organisations and institutions (Story Caretakers) using stories in ways that might be detrimental to Story Holders.
  • Provide Options
    Give people options so that there are different levels of participation; that way they can participate in the way that feels right for them. It’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all thing.
  • Make it With Them
    The goal is not storytelling about them but storytelling preferably by them or with them. Let people speak for themselves.
  • Ownership
    Do the storytellers have ownership of their own stories? Do they have a say about how it is used and stored?
  • Grow their Power
    Consider the role of story holders, those with lived experience, those most able to change the narrative, to garner understanding and support, to inspire others to take action – how do we grow their power beyond sharing their stories? See worksheet below.

Power and Decision Making

See the Power and Positionality in Advocacy Campaigns Worksheet (PDF) created by For Purpose to help sense check how power is being expressed within your campaign by looking at the relationship between storytelling and decision-making.

Whose stories need to be heard in this campaign? Do the people whose stories need to be heard have agency as storytellers?

If you are not a storyteller, what is your role? Are you:

● Supporting and uplifting
● Collaborating and co-creating
● Or… are you taking up power and space?

Screenshot of a worksheet with different questions and boxes to fill out. Text reads 'POWER & POSITIONALITY IN CAMPAIGNS www.forpurpose.au Sense check how power is being expressed within your campaign by looking at the relationship between storytelling and decision-making.' Questions read 'ower and Positionality in Advocacy Campaigns Worksheet (PDF) This simple process can be used to sense check how power is being expressed within your campaign by looking at the relationship between storytelling and decision-making. Whose stories need to be heard in this campaign? Do the people whose stories need to be heard have agency as storytellers? If you are not a storyteller, what is your role? Are you: Supporting and uplifting Collaborating and co-creating, OR are you taking up power and space? 1. Map ALL of the stakeholders that may be touched by the campaign and the social issue it aims to address. 2. Identify those who have lived experience of the issue and/or are directly impacted by the outcomes of the campaign. 3. Have people you have identified with lived experience (whose stories will be shared) been involved in shaping the campaign strategy and making decisions? If not, is it because there are barriers to participating in campaign decision-making? Is there a possibility that you are a barrier? What are the barriers to participation in the campaign - digital, social, physical, and financial? What can you do to remove the barriers? 4. Reflect on the way you might invite people to participate in the campaign using these guiding questions: Who decided who will be included? How will different people be invited to participate? How might the nature of the invitation affect their feelings of inclusion? 5. For each person or community make notes on how you will address access, decision-making ability, invitations, and recognition. !!! If sufficient power for decision-making doesn’t sit with people with lived/living experience/expertise how will you remedy this?Should you be involved in this campaign at all or should you distribute your space and resources as an ally?'

1. Map ALL of the stakeholders that may be touched by the campaign and the social issue it aims to address.

2. Identify those who have lived experience of the issue and/or are directly impacted by the outcomes of the campaign.

3. Have people you have identified with lived experience (whose stories will be shared) been involved in shaping the campaign strategy and making decisions?

  • If not, is it because there are barriers to participating in campaign decision-making?
  • Is there a possibility that you are a barrier?
  • What are the barriers to participation in the campaign – digital, social, physical, and financial?
  • What can you do to remove the barriers?

4. Reflect on the way you might invite people to participate in the campaign using these guiding questions:

  • Who decided who will be included?
  • How will different people be invited to participate?
  • How might the nature of the invitation affect their feelings of inclusion?

5. For each person or community make notes on how you will address access, decision-making ability, invitations, and recognition.

!!! If sufficient power for decision-making doesn’t sit with people with lived/living experience/expertise how will you remedy this? Should you be involved in this campaign at all or should you distribute your space and resources as an ally?

Other Frameworks and Tools

  • The Power Cube Framework
    Designers often have more power than we may recognise, and we occupy roles that enable us to act within and between systems as influencers, mobilisers and connectors. Explore the Powercube conceptual framework for understanding levels, spaces, forms and expressions of power and how they interrelate. By analysing how power is expressed across these multiple dimensions, we can gain a deeper understanding of how we might act to bring about change. 
  • Manawa Ora Tikanga for Lived Experienced Storytellers
    This is a Tikanga tool for lived experience storytellers developed by Mind & Body (Emerge Aotearoa and Mahitahi Trust with lived experience storytellers. This tool is an excellent model for co-creating a process for storytelling with community, and it offers some useful prompts for examining the purpose, intent and desired impacts of the storytelling.
  • Storytelling for Systems Change 
    This is a report by the Centre for Public Impact that offers some useful insights into storytelling with community, and contains some great examples of change-focused storytelling.

See Full Presentation Slides

Storytelling with Community: Applying co-design principles in collaborative storytelling for advocacy campaigns (24 Slides)

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