Become part of the conversation about Restorative Narratives

Over the past year, there has been growing interest in Restorative Narrative— a genre of stories that show how people and communities are rebuilding and recovering in the aftermath or midst of difficult times.

The Columbia Journalism Review, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, PBS MediaShift, the New England Newspaper and Press Association, and others have featured stories about the importance and potential impact of this genre. Images & Voices of Hope (ivoh), a nonprofit that strengthens the media’s role as an agent of change and world benefit, coined the Restorative Narrative term and has created a related fellowship.

This June, ivoh will hold its annual media summit, where we’ll explore examples of Restorative Narrative and hear from speakers who will share insights about the importance and impact of this storytelling genre. We’ll also have sessions on how the media can challenge stereotypes, and how empathy plays into storytelling.

I hope you’ll join us at the summit, which will be held from June 25–28 in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

Each year, the summit attracts media professionals from a range of media fields — journalism, photography, documentary film, gaming, advertising, and the arts. The summit, which incorporates reflection and dialogue, offers attendees a chance to meet people from around the world who share a passion for storytelling and care about the impact that media has on people and communities. Some have called it “inspiring,” “thought-provoking,” and even “life-changing.”

You can register, and find out more details, here.

We’re excited about our speaker lineup, which includes top-notch journalists, photographers, and others whose work in media is effecting positive change:

Jacqui Banaszynski is a veteran journalist who teaches storytellers around the world. She is a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute, and the coach for ivoh’s Restorative Narrative Fellows. Her story of two men dying of AIDS won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She won the 1988 Associated Press Sports Editors award for deadline reporting from the Seoul Olympics. In 1986, she was a Pulitzer finalist in international reporting. Her edited projects have won awards for business, investigative, environmental, sports and human interest reporting, and her students are frequently winners in the Hearst competition, considered the Pulitzer Prize of college journalism.

Alex Tizon is the author of “Big Little Man: In Search Of My Asian Self,” which was awarded a Lukas Book Prize. He is a former Seattle bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and a former longtime staff writer for the Seattle Times, where he was a co-recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism. Alex has reported from a floating slab of ice in the Arctic Ocean, a lava field at the foot of Mount Pinatubo, and an ancient Buddhist temple on the island of Java. His reportage has covered aspects of the most cataclysmic news events in recent times, including the 9/11 attacks, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. Alex studied at the University of Oregon and Stanford, and currently teaches at UO. More information can be found at alextizon.com.

Mónica Guzman is a freelance technology and media columnist for GeekWire, The Daily Beast and the Columbia Journalism Review. She emcees Ignite Seattle, a popular grab bag and community fueled speaker series, leads the Western Washington Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists as board president and is vice-chair of the SPJ Ethics Committee, which just revised the influential SPJ Code of Ethics for the first time in 16 years. A juror for the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes, Mónica contributed the closing chapter, “Community As an End,” to the 2013 book “The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century.” In 2015, she completed a four-year term on the National Advisory Board of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. In 2012, she joined the Seattle hub of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community. She serves on the the board of the University of Washington Information School’s Masters in Science and Information Management program and is an advisor to Seattle international news site The Seattle Globalist. From 2007 to 2010, Mónica launched and ran the award-winning Big Blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and seattlepi.com, complementing news and culture coverage with weekly reader meetups. From 2010 to 2012 she developed user communities for startups like Intersect, Trover and Glympse. From 2012 to 2014, she wrote a Sunday column for The Seattle Times on digital lifestyles.

Ben Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com, and author of the New York Times bestselling book “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail.” Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University, where he played defensive back for the football team, the Wonder Boys. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York’s Hudson River Valley, and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called “For Their Own Good,” about abuse at Florida’s oldest reform school. He lives in Tampa with his wife, Jennifer, and three children.

Ellie Walton grew up in Washington, D.C., and has committed her life’s work to sharing stories that inspire connection across social and cultural dividing lines. She takes time to build relationships and trust with communities with whom she is actively engaging in the storytelling process. Ellie’s feature-length documentaries, “Fly By Light” (2015), “Chocolate City” (2007), “Igual Que Tú” (2009), and “Walk With Me” (2012), have been screened at film festivals across the world and continue to be used as educational tools at universities, schools and conferences.

Rochelle Riley’s columns have appeared in the Detroit Free Press and at freep.com since 2000. She also blogs at rochelleriley.com and makes frequent television and radio appearances, especially on NPR and MSNBC. Rochelle writes passionately about responsible government, community responsibility, public education, pop culture, race, film, and Michigan’s reading crisis. She has worked at The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, and The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky. Her columns on the Kwame Kilpatrick corruption scandal were part of the entry that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Rochelle has won the 2013 National Headliner Award for best column writing, the inaugural Will Rogers Humanitarian Award for community service from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists (2011), and first-place column-writing honors from the National Association of Black Journalists (2014). The Michigan Press Association has named her Michigan’s best local columnist four times. Hour magazine readers just named her Detroit’s best female columnist for the fifth year in a row (2014).

Dan Norton is a founding partner and CCO at Filament Games. He specializes in the design process and documentation for developing games with specific learning objectives. He is proud to have designed games about a uniquely broad range of topics, ranging from marine turtle ecology to legal argumentation. Dan sees Filament as an opportunity to merge his life long love of games with his incessant quest to learn about new and interesting things. He is a founding member of the GLS organization at UW Madison. Aside from games and game design, he enjoys bicycling, baking, killing dragons with his wife and spending time with his incredibly stupid cats.

Nancy McGirr was a Reuters staff photographer for Central America during the turbulent eighties. In 1991 she founded what would becomeFotoKids, giving cameras to six kids who lived in Guatemala City’s garbage dump. Fotokids now has 215 students living in at-risk areas in Guatemala, Honduras, and California’s agricultural central valley and provides scholarships from primary school through university. McGirr has directed Fotokids for 24 years and has produced more than 45 exhibits in 14 countries. She’s done interviews on BBC, Australian TV, ABC, Japanese and Dutch TV, etc., has given workshops in Tinduf Algiers, Granada, Spain, and Australia, and has spoken around the world for Harvard, Boston Museum School, Photographers Gallery London, PHotoEspaña, and TEDx. She was the recipient of the prestigious Lucie Humanitarian Award in 2011.

Kevin Becker is a licensed clinical psychologist and senior partner with ORI Consulting, a global crisis consulting firm. For 25 years he has specialized in the areas of psychological trauma and crisis. He served as clinical instructor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry and with Marsh Crisis Consulting, where he worked with Ambassador Paul Bremer advising governments and public and private organizations on how best to prepare for and respond to crisis. He served for 10 years as director of The Trauma Center in Boston, an internationally renowned research and treatment facility specializing in psychological trauma. He has assisted governments and organizations following major disasters such as 9/11; the 2004 Tsunami; Hurricane Katrina, the Kashmir earthquake in 2005, the Newtown shootings, and the Boston Marathon bombings. He was founder and director of the Massachusetts Victim Assistance Academy, and he served as the training and technical assistant consultant to the nationwide network of victim assistance academies for the Department of Justice/Office for Victims of Crime. He was founding chairperson of the Massachusetts Disaster Response Network for the Massachusetts Psychological Association. He consults nationally and internationally on a regular basis, and has produced an award-winning documentary entitled “PTSD: Beyond Survival.” Most recently Dr. Becker was appointed by Boston Medical Center as the Program Director to establish the Massachusetts Resiliency Center for victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. His preferred methods of self-care are running and glassblowing!

Scott Gurian is a radio and print journalist who’s reported extensively on the Hurricane Sandy recovery for WNYC / NJ Public Radio and NJ Spotlight. Previously, he spent five years as news director at public radio station KGOU in Norman, Okla., where he covered everything from the Oklahoma City bombing anniversary and political wrangling at the state capitol to tornadoes and the annual prison rodeo. Scott’s work has also taken him abroad, including to Cuba — where he covered the thawing of relations between Washington and Havana — and to Haiti, where he reported on how the 2010 earthquake led to the disappearance of that country’s middle class. His stories have aired on NPR, the BBC, and dozens of radio stations and programs around the country. He’s won numerous awards including a national and two regional RTNDA Edward R. Murrows.

Kim Cross, an award-winning feature writer, just published a literary nonfiction book — “What Stands in a Storm” — about the biggest tornado outbreak in the history of recorded weather. As Editor-at-Large for Southern Living magazine, Cross has edited such literary luminaries as Winston Groom, author of “Forest Gump,” and Rick Bragg, author of the haunting memoir “All Over but the Shoutin’.” Three years ago, she recruited Bragg as a monthly columnist for “Southern Journal,” the magazine’s famous back page. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a journalism degree, Cross joined the founding editorial team of Business 2.0 magazine to cover the dot-com boom and bust in San Francisco. She returned to Tuscaloosa for a fellowship in the journalism school, where she published in-depth reporting projects for The Anniston Star and the The Birmingham News. She honed her storytelling skills writing features for the Tampa Bay Times, formerly the St. Petersburg Times, and covered double-murders, hurricanes, and most harrowingly, local government as a beat and spot news reporter for New Orleans Times-Picayune. Cross’s features and narratives have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of American Travel Writers, and the Media Industry Newsletter (MIN). Her work has appeared in Outside, Cooking Light, Bicycling, Runner’s World, Bike, USA Today, ESPN.com, Health.com, and syndicated on CNN.com. Cross is also a top-flight athlete, competing nationally in water-skiing, sprint triathlon, off-road triathlon, and 24-hour adventure racing. She lives in Birmingham.

Laura Lo Forti is a multimedia producer and a “story midwife” who has been using non-traditional approaches to media making for the past 10 years. She supports others on the transformative journey of bringing their personal narratives to life. Through this work, she has become a strong advocate of engaging marginalized communities and vulnerable individuals in self-representation and including them in the decision-making process affecting their lives. She is the co-founder of A Fourth Act, an agency that merges technology and participatory practices to unleash the full potential of stories for social impact. With digital folklorist Brenda Kenneally, she founded The Raw File, a series of immersive documentary work that highlights the intersection of race and socio-economic class. Since 2014, she’s been facilitating a community-based oral history project capturing the memories of those who survived the 1948 Vanport Flood, Portland’s Hurricane Katrina-like disaster which displaced thousands and forced the state known for its white supremacist leanings to embrace a multicultural population.

Elissa Yancey, MSEd, is an associate professor in the journalism department at the University of Cincinnati, as well as a contributor at WCPO-TV Digital, and a communications consultant with UC’s Office of the Provost. With 20-plus years of reporting and teaching experience, she received UC’s Just Community Award in 2011 for her teaching of diverse cultures in a wide range of Service Learning courses for journalism students. In 2013, she received the university-wide Sarah Grant Barber Outstanding Award for her advising work with students.

Hawah Kasat, founder/executive director of the nonprofit One Common Unity, has acted as a youth representative to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism and was director of Peaceable Schools at Wilson High School in Washington, D.C. Hawah has been interviewed on XM National Satellite Radio, BBC, CNN, Pacifica Radio Network, NPR, and Al-Jazeera. He has authored four books, produced three documentary films and two music albums, and is the creator/editor of the “Poetry of Yoga” book anthology, which features Grammy award-winning musicians and master teachers. As an artist, author, educator, yoga instructor, and community organizer, he has dedicated his life to teaching about solutions to violence and ways to peace, and has traveled to over 28 countries in the past 10 years to facilitate interactive workshops and dialogues, perform poetry, teach yoga, and speak with those interested in creating a caring, sustainable, and equitable world. He has a degree in peace and educational philosophy from American University and resides in Washington, D.C.

Debra Weisberg is a Massachusetts-based artist. Working intuitively and embracing the unexpected is core to Debra’s art process, using predominantly, paper, fiber and tape to create large-scale drawings, sculptures, collaborative installations and glow-in-the-dark work. Her imagery always has “one foot in nature,” alluding to a multitude of phenomena in nature: tidal pools of water, tornados twisting in space, land formations moving and shifting. To bring to reality these “unseen scapes” sometimes means hours of meanderings, a willingness to recreate work in the moment, and a collaborative approach with materials. Debra is a 2015 Somerville Arts Lottery recipient and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at places such as the Noyes Museum, Duxbury Museum, Danforth Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Mills Gallery, and the East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art. Her 40-foot high installation at the DeCordova Museum, entitled “(Sub) Surface,” won an award from the Boston Art Critics Association. Weisberg was a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship winner in drawing (2008). She twice attended the MacDowell Colony and was awarded an art residency in CanSerrat outside of Barcelona (2009). In addition to teaching at Boston College and New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University, she also conducts creativity workshops for businesses.

Jake Harper is a health journalist with WFYI in Indianapolis. After getting out the Peace Corps, he got his start with a data journalism fellowship at the Sunlight Foundation. He discovered his love for making radio at a community station in Madison, Wisc., & soon after began an internship with NPR’s State of the Re:Union. Jake’s work received a 1st place award from the Milwaukee Press Club & was a finalist in KCRW’s 24-Hour Radio Race. In his spare time, Jake makes pizza, rides his bike, and thumbs through random books at his local library.

Cy Wagoner’s accomplished art projects often began with, “you can’t do that…” Siding with underdogs and motivated by going against most odds, Cy has spent the past seven years managing the Black Sheep Art Collective, which focuses on bringing public art to communities. Cy’s work is influenced by stories of beauty and strength that come from youthfulness, and their growing relationship with the vigorous and forgiving world that houses them.

Look forward to seeing you in June!

~Mallary Tenore, ivoh managing director