Story sharing strengths in group based interventions
While listening to Rachit Shah’s presentation on his group based intervention work in Uganda, I was struck by how directly he was able to work with the community. Through a series of information collection and response, he and his team realized they would need to shift the intervention to address the needs of the adolescents who were not in school even though they were not originally intending to focus on adolescent age groups. This shift to address the need of the community resonated with my experience with my Clowns Without Borders (CWB) group because we also realized it was necessary to shift out population focus. Rather than address the wide variety of communities that the clown performers reach in various states of need and population makeup, we decided to pivot to address the clowns themselves as the population. This shift will address the need for trauma informed care while still trickling into the communities themselves via more effective performance interventions.
Rachit and his team were able to conduct a series of trials with the community directly which allowed them to tailor an intervention to not only the culture but also their specific adolescent population. The open ended handwritten questions provided a platform for anonymous group discussion. The bead bowl gave the adolescents another opportunity to share something personal with the group that they wold not have otherwise and the group could support them. The trigger chart and emotion cards allowed Rachit and his team to identify adolescents with higher degree of risk and provided the adolescents with scaffolding to describe a problem they are dealing with especially if they struggle to find words. Lastly, the happy moment and surveys portion gave the adolescents a chance to reflect on the intervention itself and their own present state. By week 6 or 9 most people had shared their biggest challenges which goes to show that with the right combination of structure and fluidity, group based interventions can serve as a safe space to be open with those in your community and encourage support and empathy. With the wide variety of group sharing opportunities, Rachid’s intervention inspires me to consider how my CWB group might receive more direct feedback from the clown community about the training we are designing, about their personal needs as performers, and how we could provide structure for them to reflect.
The central strength of Rachit’s intervention from my perspective is the persistence of highlighting the adolescents’ words and first hand reports. Although there was initially resistance from the community because of their positionally as outsiders, they brought a fresh perspective and respect to the community through a focus on narrative building. The design practice meets the psychosocial process at the intersection of narrative which brings people from the unknown to the known with context. This championing of narrative directly from the source makes me wonder how we might integrate more narrative within the training tool for CWB. Ideally, we could utilize some firsthand accounts from the performers to personalize the training examples and to address any of the performer needs we may have overlooked. Additionally, we should structure a trial training with some volunteer performers to gain experiential feedback. Finally, not only should we include a portion of the training where performers can type in their own firsthand accounts of the training as well as any of their own applicable stories as performers, but we can also provide a series of prompts that they can keep in mind to ask their fellow performers to serve as check-ins and story sharing opportunities while they are on location.
