Confronting Hard Truths
UNLEASH 2019 kicks off with a storytelling seminar that stresses the critical importance of honesty — even when it is uncomfortable
SHENZHEN, CHINA — Pulsating drums, villagers chanting “Finally” (the only English word she recognized), the local chief holding her hand while they were dancing in a colorful parade. This jubilatory scene in the Moyamba District of Sierra Leone hit Dr. Janice Marie Collins of the United States emotionally as she made the meaningful journey to her mother’s homeland — and she gave herself over to the celebration, dancing in the streets.
It was only later, as they headed back to the village base right before sunset, that she found out that the celebration was part of a ritual for young women going through what is known by villagers as female cutting, known by others as female genital mutilation.
The bifurcated feelings that the Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana felt — the euphoria of the music and the connection she felt spiritually to the people of a country that bore her ancestors, and then the conflict that she felt as she sympathized with the young girls experiencing the agonizing ritual — left her confused. But that confusion became part of the honesty of the report she then filed.
And that honesty was something she stressed as a critical element in narrative storytelling to the fellows in her UNLEASH seminar on the opening day of #UNLEASH2019.
“Candor and honesty can make a story human,” she noted. “Your flaws. They bring an authenticity to the telling. Sometimes, you have to have courage to tell a story.”
Collins is a facilitator of the new Storytelling track at UNLEASH, the annual innovation lab that convenes 1,000 young thought leaders from more than 130 countries. This year’s UNLEASH — the third edition of the event — is taking place in Shenzhen, China.
And this year, for the first time, two new tracks are being added to the roster of tracks that dovetail with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Storytelling is one, while the other new wrinkle this year is called UNLEASH+, and the latter brings back fellows who have participated in a previous edition of UNLEASH (either Denmark 2017 or Singapore 2018) and allows them to further develop the SDG solution they launched at that event.
There are slightly more than a dozen fellows in the Storytelling track, hailing from India, Nigeria, the United States, Kenya, Ireland, Morocco, Brazil, the UK, and the Netherlands. The Storytelling track got started a day earlier than the rest of the proceedings, to give these fellows time to meet each other and to identify stories that will allow them to produce a three-minute audio-visual deliverable, that will tell a story related to an SDG.
“Ask yourself, ‘Can I find a human aspect to this?’,” Collins advised the fellows, stressing the idea of emphasizing diverse voices, particularly those impacted by racism, sexism, classism, misogyny, or who faced under-representation — or no representation at all.
