Community members are invited to participate in an experimental skill share developing solidarity driven storytelling tools for community organizing. This skillshare is sponsored by helpfuljellyfish, a WRC collective.
Why storytelling?
Storytelling is a tool that each of us is capable of accessing & implementing in our work towards collective liberation. How can personal storytelling be leveraged to help us explore & illustrate how to humanize & liberate each other from our shared class struggles?
Who should participate? Who benefits from this work?
Community members engaged in solidarity driven mutual aid, organizing, independent media or cultural vitalization are all invited & encouraged to participate. We’ll be discussing the language surrounding each of these sessions for collective clarity on what participants are committing to do.
Ideally, in addition to each participant directly benefiting from this shared space & the resources we collectively generate, this skill share extends that benefit to the people we each work alongside. By improving our individual capacities to listen, discuss & share our collective realities with a class conscious framework, we improve our collective capacity for this important communication work. By using humanizing tools & processes rooted in solidarity & collective action, we create humanizing environments that develop solidarity & promote collective action.
What will we be doing?
We will use personal storytelling in a class conscious context to help us define & illustrate what it means to be in solidarity while improving the way we understand, work & organize together around class liberation.
We’ll be creating helpful storytelling tools that empower us to:
- describe our relationships to scarcity & abundance in a humanizing, class conscious context
- imagine & illustrate what it means to act in solidarity with us
- develops self awareness & collective consciousness
- helps the work being done in our communities already
How are we going to do that?!
The agenda
[Step One: adjust to being together] ≈ 10 min
In order for us to collaborate effectively, we must be able to come together authentically. Using sight, script, sound and speech we will practice recognizing, addressing, remembering, & referring to each other accurately and respectfully (even if we need notes to help).
[Step Two: set our intentions] ≈ 10 min
This is an experimental space for collaborative play, not productive performance. We’ll actively cultivate the kind of environment we need to be able to collaborate authentically by agreeing up front on how we will treat each other in this space.
[Step Three: explore our goal, independently] ≈ 10 min
This is the part where we independently collect our thoughts on ‘paper’ before diving into collaboration so everyone has a starting point to contribute to group discussion. We’ll minimize relying on our screens so you can play however feels comfortable. A technical facilitator will help collate individual contributions to be provided to small groups.
[Step Four: experimenting in small groups] ≈50 minutes
We’ll break into groups and collaboratively play with designing tools using all our available resources & references (including tools you already use!). Each group will also have access to a real world example tool.
A technical facilitator will help groups add or link to their tools in a shared document with the contexts (who, what, when, where & how details) of implementation.
[Step Five: Reflection & implementation] ≈ 10 minutes
We’ll reconvene as a whole to present our tools & the contexts of implementation . Our group document will host the tools so participants can continue collaborating, test the tools to provide feedback, ask clarifying questions, consider potential problems or to use the tools for implementation in their own work.
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