Storytelling, and the opposable thumb, have made us a very successful species. Storytelling has allowed us to defeat death by helping us to pass our experience from one person to another. It has given us identity, history and culture, religion, politics and the arts. I contend that we invented language to facilitate story, not the other way around. Story came first and story comes last.
Stories are about shared time, shared place and, most of all, shared experience.
It is my goal to help them tell it so well, in fact, that they can use it to help others understand and share that experience, creating common ground, building community in the process. Storytelling is both a methodology to facilitate personal and social change, and a mechanism to document, evaluate and illustrate the impact of that work with individuals, families, organizations and communities. Interestingly, while working with those kids I found myself re-framing my own story and my own life. This was both vocation and identity. I have spent the years since then working with communities and individuals, for nonprofit organizations, educators, ministers and lawyers to help them identify what their story is and to help them tell it more effectively.