Tell me OUR story — Part 5 from The Stanford D School
“Story” has so many meanings. It conjures up thoughts of safety and love as you remember your parents putting you to bed, and reading stories to kids of your own. It is a device for transportation and fantasy, how religions have survived over millennia.
It holds the morality and pride of our families, passed down from generation to generation. Story also falls under critique when used in work scenarios. Investigative journalists comb the follicles between “fact & fiction” looking for flaws to show deception, failure and challenge narratives.
In our last exploration at Stanford, story played a large part in how we were prompted to push our work forward. It raised uncomfortable squirms from my classmates and I. Sure, the reason we’re here is that we do the work and have many “stories” about both our successes and failures. But we have trouble telling the stories about the people we affect, and how we came to the work. We would try out our “pitches” in small groups, and the universal response back was, tell me about YOU and WHY. We would defer to metrics and to other people’s research and stories, but had trouble prioritizing why US.
I wanted to dive deeper in to this and expose the nerve it was hitting. I read a bunch of wordy and heady articles in the vein of Ethics & Storytelling and found a piece that really struck a chord from the awesome Daniel Taylor. Using a description like that would make most of the peoples’ work I read skin crawl, but this is my story so they’ll have to suck it up.
“Yet do not stories also distort and sometimes even falsify our experience? Inevitably. But that is not an argument for dismissing the ethical value of literature. It is rather an argument for telling and preserving as many different stories as possible, so that collectively they can witness to more of the whole truth of the human experience than can any one story or handful of stories. This is a need rightly manifested in the current concern for hearing from people whose stories historically have not been told. The cure for inadequate stories is more stories from different tellers.”
Well Daniel, how about an almost entirely invisible population ranging in the millions right here in our backyards? Shall they not add their experience, expertise in our socio-economic situation and their “What Happened”s to our story?
Building on that I poked at John Steinbeck’s, Writers At Work.
“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. . . . We are lonesome animals. We spend our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say-and to feel-”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”
Story helps with isolation, it “groups” us out of solitude.
In a recent talk with my new pal Mark Horvath, I told him of my experiment with the texting and as an aside I mentioned I had created a group chat as well. He latched on to that piece and we riffed about his experiences over the work with “Invisible People” and his homeless journey:
“Peoples lives are saved by technology every day. I had a woman in Sydney Australia contact me and she was suicidal, I reached out to her and we talked through it. She says I saved her life, I said I was a guy who cared in the right place with the right tools.”
Invisible People shares a core competency with Humans Of New York/Philadelphia/insert your town here. Homeless applications like my friend Kevin Adlers “Miracle Messages” allow people in the streets to share stories with the hope of reconnecting with their families. Reuniting is the single quickest way out of homelessness.
We talked this week about “story” and the work we’re doing and this stuck for me:
“If you do a google search “homeless person reconnects to loved ones” about half of the entries relate to our work. The other half are RANDOM moments where a homeless person does some act (plays piano, sleeps on grate) and through the news coverage/story the seemingly impossible happens. A family member or past person sees it and the connection is made.
The question now is not what’s not being done, or if the media could help. The question is, why are homeless people disconnected from their loved ones in the first place?
If you survey the street, the responses are thin and are around technical illiteracy. When you dig deeper, you find out that most of the time it’s an emotional barrier. When we ask someone to record a message and they hum and hah about it and we push further they say “ I feel dirty.” They are living the opposite of the American dream and don’t feel worthy. They feel they are failing on every level and don’t deserve love. The co-creation of a pointed video (not a sadly scored choreographed video but an authentic one), the power of REAL storytelling is massive.”
When Kevin first launched his application it went viral, I was tagged in it no less than a hundred times. A hundred. That means that that many people in my social network not only liked it, not only saw it, but were sold on it as a solution with a 3 minute video. We KNOW that connectivity is the answer to our problems and the good news is, the people we want to help are already connected.
In my last experiment, I asked the people on the ladder of homelessness in my group to “tell me about a skill [they] have that [they] wish [they] could use more.” Pretty straight forward, right? Well, no. Not at all. Let me tell YOU a story, or two.
One of the women in my group shared that she was a translator, fluent in Swiss, German and could teach conversational English. I kinked my head reading this response like a dog being asked where the kitty is. Translator?
“Jen” had a very normal upbringing, had graduated with good grades and applied to UCLA where she studied these language skills, along with Music Industry related classes, with the dream of working with rockstars. She landed a job in the industry that quickly exposed her to drugs and found herself deep into addiction and consequently homeless.
Jen has now found her way out of that addiction and working with a local non-profit helping out, but translators, they make damn fine money. In fact, on average 3 times minimum wage here in California.
Through mentorship, Jen saw this skill as something the market here in the Silicon Valley and Stanford-ville could really use. Running a ground-level campaign of photocopied posters stapled to telephone poles (music promo roots showing) she offered her services and almost immediately was hired by an international student for a 3-month contract. We laughed over coffee that she was making more than me this quarter and she had brought a picture from another prompt I had sent during the experiment.
“Tell me about someone who makes you proud, take a picture of them and tell me why.”
Her picture was of her student. Of HER student. She told me,
“His English is getting so much better, I’m really proud of him.”
I welled up and we ended the exit interview. Agency is so very important, and purpose gives us a huge chunk of it back.
More stories like this arose. Through interviews I uncovered a man who has severe PTSD from his Hummer being ripped in half while serving his country. He works as a mechanic, but can’t work in loud environments. Doesn’t it seem like a win-win? A shop could hire him to work the night shift, when everything is quiet and nobody else wants to work, and this man can use his skills in an environment that suits his needs.
If so many skills are out there, and there is a need for those skills, what is the single biggest obstacle? I worked with agency on this part (actual agencies working with marginalized populations, not what we fight for every human to have) and asked them if they knew about all of these skills and why they weren’t acting further on it. While I assumed I knew the answer from my years around this work, and all my friends in it, assumptions need to be tested. One worker nailed it, almost angrily to me, saying,
“we are constantly in Triage. We’re understaffed, and are actually bandaging wounds and trying to keep people from fucking dying.”
I listened to him continue and showed restraint of commiseration and understanding, instead opting for shutting up and listening. It bore fruit. Once he had gotten through venting he came to a place of wants, and after the necessities it wrapped back to dedicated help for those who are ready to work. Not those who could and would never due to severe disability or mental illness, in the traditional sense, but those who had expressed the want and need to rejoin the work force and society. Traditionally when people reach this point up the ladder there isn’t support for them as the force is focused on, you guessed it, triage.
I’ve confirmed that people want to share their stories, to learn how to present themselves and have skills the workforce needs. Unconventional solutions. Other people want to hear their stories, to share them emphatically, to help them realize their goals and dreams of connection and purpose. Agencies need help and understanding and support.
This is the opportunity I will continue to explore this quarter and I have to share with you, I’m very excited.
Rest In Peace Diana “Auntie Di” Maclellan, Jan 14th 2017 — Champion of the underdog, and cat. You will be missed so very much.
