Center for Love & Justice: Storytelling Workshop

 Challenge

Before their end-of-year advance, the Center for Love and Justice (CFL&J) was looking for a way to connect as a team and to better understand and reflect on their work together. Wanting a stronger and more strategic way to tell both their individual stories and the collective story of the organization, CFL&J wanted training and support to learn the craft of storytelling so they could not only improve their narrative skills but could celebrate with, and connect to, each other.

 RC's Response

RC crafted and facilitated an interactive, skill-growing, and healing experience for the CFL&J team, that helped participants connect with one another and their stories. At a critical time of reflection, we shaped the experience to celebrate where they had come from, as well as supported them to vision into where they are going – immersing them in a narrative unique to CFL&J.

We designed and facilitated a 2.5-day storytelling workshop that took participants through time to explore, re-examine, and be grounded in the stories that led to this moment – both for them as individuals and the center itself. By collectively investigating histories of injustice, racism, denial of education, the transformation of education, and stories of resistance, we supported them to create a future vision for the Center and education as a whole. Reimagining what education could look like helped CFL&J get concrete about that future, and by sharing strategic storytelling tools, we supported the team to practice storytelling and strategically mobilize people toward that vision.

Impact

RC built an experience that valued the “why” as much as the “how” of learning technical skills, and CFL&J members were excited about the organization’s future and gained clarity about the stories they wanted to tell. The reflective and emotive environment fostered a deeply personal yet collective experience.

After the workshop, CFL&J members felt comfortable and confident in their storytelling skills as well as being vulnerable with each other. They reported that the workshop helped them reflect beyond the tangible into the future, to think about connecting to potential partners differently, and that the facilitation was inspirational and powerful.