Creating Meaningful Relationships

The stories of people’s real lives are our most powerful organizing tool.

Reflection on the lessons of the stories of what people have achieved, where people get stuck, and how people deal with barriers is our most powerful source of learning about how to make changes. Our stories will be powerful if we focus on becoming better story-tellers and better learners from stories. We can ….

• Provide a “storytelling assistant” to people who need or want one
• Encourage the use of multiple media: video, audio tape, cd-rom, drama, performance art, poetry, drawing, painting, sculpture, music as well as written materials and traditional testimony
• Gather interested people to learn to tell their stories more purposefully by consciously choosing what and how to tell in terms of the needs of a particular situation
• Call forth stories from different perspectives including the perspective of involved people with disabilities, the perspective of mothers and fathers, the perspective of brothers and sisters, the perspective of the people who provide support and the people who manage support organizations, and the perspective of engaged community members.
• Gather people to exchange stories around a particular theme, for example the experience of dealing with bureaucratic barriers or the deeper meaning of the suffering imposed on people with disabilities and their families by the facts of social injustice.
• Create safe places for us to tell more of our stories, truthfully accounting for our own failings and fallibility and errors and defeats as well as accomplishments and ways others place barriers in the ways.
• Create safe and effective ways to reflect on the lessons in our stories.
• Gather people to discuss such dilemmas in storytelling as how to balance privacy with being able to define ourselves as we want to be known or how to deal honestly with the desire to tell an encouraging story in which straightforward steps lead to a desirable goal and the need to communicate the complexity and the “downs” as well as the “ups” in people’s real situations
• Find ways to tell and learn from “organizational stories” which describe how agencies and organizations design and adapt to the work of supporting community engagement.
• Listening to stories from community leaders is a powerful tool for working in the circle of community association.
• Person-centered planning provides a variety of helpful ways for people with disabilities and their families and friends to consider critical questions about desirable futures and to guide action. As the service system adopts some of its techniques and language, it is important to encourage people with disabilities and their families to maintain the capacity to plan independently of the service system.
• Offer interested family members and friends and people with disabilities training and support in facilitating person-centered plans.
• Match more experienced families with less experienced families as mentors in the process.
• Develop more ways to gather and disseminate information.
• Being in contact diminishes the loneliness that discourages people from finding their voice and taking action. Information about what others have done and how they have done it communicates a sense of possibility and a challenge to organize to take action.
• Convene a gathering of family groups and support circles at least annually.
• Develop clear and straightforward guides for family members that describe what experienced others have learned about such things as recruiting and managing personal assistants, finding or developing suitable housing, settling on a workable individual budget, making the best use of available benefits, etc.
• Continue to develop web pages as a source of contact and information.

(source: “Community Engagement: A Necessary Condition for Self-Determination and Individual Funding“, by John O’Brien. This 19-page paper relates to building a strong foundation for community living for persons with disabilities and those around them.)

Link:  Teaching For Change’s Telling Stories page

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tell more powerful stories, and send me a copy. I just love stories.