The art of story holding: How ethical storytelling helps charities create real change
Patrick Toland
Imagine you’re at a get-together, you have a moving and personal story to tell and everyone wants you to share it. The room goes quiet…you begin…except all of sudden your very best friend interrupts and says ‘I can tell it better!’ and proceeds to do so…
How would that feel?
Good charities have a strong and genuine impulse to tell stories that inspire and motivate people to support their causes and give a ‘ voice ‘ to people who often experience ‘voicelessness’. The personal stories their community members tell or share are often deeply felt, recounting struggle or triumph. These stories can be equally laced with trauma or a profound sense of vulnerability that requires a genuine ‘handle with care’ or ‘do no harm’ approach. These stories are often nested or framed within a wider ‘collective’ story — for example, the story of ‘stigma and poverty’ or even the story of the charity itself.
When crafting charity stories to support new projects or policies, it’s essential to balance such responsibilities and the duty of care towards the people being served. Ethical storytelling or ‘story holding’ safeguards against over-exploitation and helps maintain a fertile rather than over-harvested garden of stories. The JRF Stigma Power and Poverty Team, from my witness perspective, exemplifies this ethical approach to storytelling.
What is ethical storytelling?
Ethical storytelling involves telling stories that honour the dignity, privacy, and agency of the people being served. It necessitates approaching storytelling with empathy and sensitivity and acknowledging that participants are not objects of pity or study, but individuals with their own past, future, hopes and dreams. Sharing these stories is not an infinite resource to be mined, but requires recognition of the effort involved and the need for rest, renewal, and constant reconfirmation of purpose.
JRF Stigma Power and Poverty Team: A case study ethical storytelling in action
It is to the immense credit of the facilitators of our group (Sarah Whitehead, Sarah Campbell, Kirsten Nott and Alana Avery) that I have witnessed many of the key principles of ethical storytelling in action within the JRF Stigma Power and Poverty Team. I’ve seen it in its architecture of face-to-face or remote sessions, and the scaffolding of information sharing and reassurance/reaffirmations that accompany the schedule, and the pace and direction of our discussions. This approach is also supplemented and allied with a ‘coaching’ strand for participants in regards to their own personal goals and life or career aspirations. This is in itself innovative, as the ‘quid pro quo’ of story sharing can often reduce to, and centre around, notions of payment alone as the metric of exchange value. The JRF facilitators rightly understand that new metrics for such story exchange must be formed around a wider notion of life-enhancement, or life-reflection, for story participants and how their involvement in the group can impact them (or the others they work with) positively into the future.
The facilitators of the JRF Stigma Power and Poverty Team exemplify not just through instinct but design, the best standards of ethical storytelling. They do it by our collective agreed guidelines, the fostering of a safe and inclusive environment, the practice of on-going guidance and support, the willingness to incorporate diverse perspectives and the ability to encourage reflection/evaluation during the process of story sharing as well as in the aftermath.
By practicing ethical storytelling, charities can build trust with their supporters, and create stories (allied to their work in areas of research, advocacy or fundraising) that are authentic, respectful, and empowering. Certainly, the sense of empathy, collaboration, transparency, non-assumptiveness and iterative approach to how individual and group stories intersect make JRF a true story ‘partner’ rather than solely as (in the phraseology of Story Holding recently advanced by the Our Race organization in Australia and Dung Tran and Doug Cronin) story ‘interpreter’ or ‘extractor’ (see https://www.ourrace.com.au/).
Combating visibility theft: Importance of centring the voices of underrepresented communities
Such an approach greatly mitigates against the risk of something evolving from my own field of research around poverty and stigma — ‘visibility theft’. Already within our group, we have heard testimony of such ‘visibility theft’ in the past experiences of some of our participants. I wonder then how much more does this happen than we realise and what can be learned from these experiences to ensure they are unrepeated, or that people ‘taken from’ are given some form of redress or restoration? Theft may feel like a strong word — but what word to best use when something of deep personal value is taken? What better words can we employ to describe the feeling of your own ‘story’ being taken and told by another?
‘Visibility theft’ is the act of appropriating the achievements, contributions, or experiences of underrepresented groups without giving proper recognition or compensation. It erases the contributions of marginalized communities and reinforces power imbalances, leading to further discrimination. It can happen accidentally and occurs in various contexts, including media representation and social justice activism. To combat visibility theft, it’s then important to centre the voices of underrepresented communities, actively seek out diverse perspectives, and ensure credit is given to the originating people and communities.
This is why the work and good endeavours of the JRF Stigma Power and Poverty Team, which are strongly grounded in the principles and practices of ethical storytelling and ‘story holding’, are worthy of commendation and hopefully can inspire other charities. Storytelling, story sharing and story holding is essential for charitable organizations to engage their audiences and raise awareness about their causes. Following even some of the principles outlined above ensures those stories are shared in a way that is respectful, authentic, and empowering, and that they contribute positively to the overall goals of the organization as well as (most importantly) the life progress of the original story-sharers themselves.
Patrick Toland — CEO NIRDP/Regional Manager Triangle Consulting/Director StoryHolders
