The Fate of Stories
I had the honor of speaking at Kertis Creative’s staff retreat and while everyone in the room was smarter than me, I still appreciated the opportunity to wax poetically about storytelling — or at least the prerequisite: listening.
The post-lunch speaking spot is always the most difficult, but I promise I won’t be offended if I spy a few eyes closing. We all need to rest now and then. I also promise that I’ll keep this as jovial and uplifting as possible — at least for a speech from a social worker post-pandemic.
So how did I get to be in front of you all? The long answer takes me all the way up to Upstate New York.
Now I would never dream of writing a memoir based on the fact that my life has been pretty close to perfect. Of course I’ve had the bad boyfriends and I took out a six figure loan for a bachelor’s degree, but all in all, my life is the epitome of charmed. I grew up on a 500 acre farm, the middle child of 5, learning lessons by falling out of trees and making small fires in the woods after school. My mom would coax us to get ready in the morning by promising to read a chapter from a Wrinkle In Time, and I was the lead in all the musicals — the perk of being in a very small school where mediocrity gets a gold star.
So naturally, I figured I could do anything. Including fixing the education system.
I moved to New York City where they let ^that child^ teach those children (which, looking at this photo, was clearly not a good idea). This is where I learned my first hard lesson: there are some things that cannot be solved in a lifetime.
So instead, I thought I’d be the one to solve global poverty.
I taught again at an After School Program in Guatemala, later working for the GlobalGiving Foundation where I wrote stories about my visits to small, local organizations across Asia for current and potential American donors. And then finally, the real kick in the pants, Senegal. I was a Peace Corps volunteer and just by the end of the second year, I realized I was only beginning to be able to truly listen so I figured it would take another fifteen years before I had any right to declare any possible solutions.
All of my naive and sheltered intentions were revealed for what they were, and I felt like I was starting from scratch. The loans that paid for all of these adventures were now demanding a steep monthly payment so I followed one of those bad boyfriends to Louisville, Kentucky and took the first couple of jobs I could find in walking distance to the house I shared with eight other floundering adults. I was serving queso at Dundee Tavern when the Cardinals won the NCAA Basketball Championship, and ironically, worked as a receptionist at a property management company.
It took two years before I knew enough people to find my way into a job I’m proud to put on my resume. As the Director of Development for Americana World Community Center, I was responsible for ‘telling our story’, and I remembered feeling like I never had the right platform or resources or time to do it in a way that made me good about it. I asked a journalist with Louisville Public Media how they manage to avoid exploitation and I received the most non-answer — something like, “I just do”. To be fair, I would imagine that’s like me asking a chemical engineer how they make flame resistant glue (or whatever chemical engineers do). You study for years, is the answer.
But while I wasn’t comfortable telling someone else’s story, I was listening, and I heard that life came to a screeching halt when money ran out — when housing was threatened and food was sparse. School, work, caring for your child, all suddenly becomes a non-priority when there’s no money and no safety net.
So in 2018, I moved my office a few blocks away to South Louisville Community Ministries. The place we would send our foreign-born neighbors when they were facing a financial crisis. And as the Executive Director, I’ve been able to adapt processes and shift cultures when the stories we listen to tell us it’s necessary. This deep listening, the slowing down for relationship-based problem solving, and the even slower work of moving the mountain that is our system putting profit over people — it’s a life’s work, and at this moment, I intend to stick it out.
So it seems I have spent my whole adult life scaling down and ramping up.
If someone would pay me a salary to take care of just one family, I would go that small. Because only then would I have enough time to do the work that is necessary.The challenges we listen to every day are life-altering. It can be as straightforward, but time sensitive as Missy’s phone that ran out of data. We need to pay for more data by the end of the day in order for her employer to track her location to confirm her hours as an in-home caretaker. She’s behind on rent so can’t lose that paycheck.
There are also the stories that don’t make it to the testimonial videos. Like Karen who is 66 and taking the three hour bus ride to our office every week. We’re at a loss of what to do next because she relies on her husband’s disability check to pay for rent, but he, apparently, is inviting other women over to their apartment every day (and likely spending what leftover money they have for food for their company). She needs to leave, but her fixed income makes renting a new apartment impossible and there is a lengthy waitlist for a housing voucher. So she comes to our office for respite and bus passes as we wait for the waitlist to dwindle.
There is the family of five living in a hotel room after being evicted with no way to cook the food we could give them. There’s Nancy who graduated from Berea this past year, but can’t get a job because she doesn’t have a car and doesn’t live anywhere near a bus line. And this is just one morning of phone calls and conversations.
Then you add dystopian level scenarios like the pension crisis with the announcement that we’ll be the first line item in the budget to be cut, along with the libraries of course. The global pandemic that has violently pushed our low income families deeper into debt and instability. Three years ago, we were paying $250, on average, for late utility bills. Now, it’s between 8 to 1200 dollars. Leaders and decision makers live safely within their own realities, creating policy and programs that match that limited understanding.
Cue storytelling superhero.
This is where you all come in. Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries in L.A., says sharing stories helps people form and strengthen communities because “effective storytelling prompts rhetors to move beyond their own minds and connect with others.” It may literally be the only tool in the toolbox for change. It is the tried and true way of teaching — of learning new behavior.
I had my daughter just five months ago so you can expect I’m reading all of the parenting books because I have no idea what I’m doing. It is unbelievable how often storytelling comes up as the first and most effective way to teach children all sorts of things. Not only that, but they’re pretty sure storytelling has been used in this way in every culture in every era. To me, that says it is the most human thing a human can do — we sleep, eat, procreate, and tell stories.
According to our friend, Greg Boyle, it is also healing to tell your story. He provides an incredible amount of space and time for former gangsters to talk about their life experiences. To show them that they are the accomplishment and that their lives are full of events worth telling about, Boyle works to help them notice that their stories — that they — have value for others.
“Every human is unshakably good,” according to Boyle, so the mission of Homeboy Industries is not one of change but one of healing. He tells his clients, “You can not be one bit better.” And adds,
“Am I full of it when I say that? No. That’s exactly the truth, but the trick is he needs to see that, he needs to know that, he needs to discover and recognize that, and then he’s good to go.”
Not every problem has a solution, but every person, *every* story, has value and usually a lesson. I cannot argue my way out of this mess — I cannot convince our politicians and business owners and not-in-my-backyard neighbors through logic and data that they have to be better. Give more. Expect abundance. Nope. That’s not only impossible, it wears me down. It breaks my spirit and my heart. I know because I’ve tried, and inevitably I will try again.
Nonprofits try to cheat code storytelling all the time because we try to do everything short staffed and with shorter days. I’ve written grants and have contributed to community assessments and projects that promise storytelling but deliver shallow soundbites and testimonies. We’ve been told we’ll learn everything we need to know if we fund enough evaluation and data collection. It’s the equivalent of trying to build an app to solve homelessness. And it’s because our values have been a bit topsy turvy as of late — we try to speed everything up, commodify real experiences, when the only way to do this work well is to slow down and dig deep.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to slow down. I have more than 300 people coming through our doors needing a complex human issue to be addressed immediately or else. But people need to tell their stories to heal and inspire action!
So why don’t people just do it on their own?
Turns out, there’s a reason why people aren’t demanding that stage. Jhala or Micah, two amazingly resilient people who have had their stories told by this mighty fine team, needed compassionate and nonjudgemental ears so they can feel deeply valued. If they went directly to a person with power over them, told their story, told them they are hurting and they’d like them to care more (please) it would be terrifying, and I think dangerous. Dangerous because there’s a good chance that they’ll hear in response, “no, we can’t afford to care more today, sorry”. They are being told they are not worth being taken care of. They are not enough to warrant shelter and food. I personally think that is abuse, and I do not ask anyone to make such pleas.
I feel this so strongly because when I try to advocate on their behalf instead and tell their story, and am dismissed over and over again, I leave broken and frustrated and defeated. But I wonder if I’m so defeated because in my heart of hearts I know I’m still just arguing. I am not nurturing people into nurturing.
There is an alternative, and while it takes so much more time, it is beautiful AND joyful — even when it’s hard. You’ve all taught me this as I’ve paid close attention to your processes in collecting, considering, and delivering the story — through video, design, language. It’s all relevant here.
It is to dig deeper, listen more intently, find that common denominator that makes us all unshakably good and expose that truth. Even if we are ignored, it will remain as art and art has a way of slowly breaking through — “a schism through the paradigm”.
And while I don’t know much about the actual storytelling part, I do know a great deal about the listening piece. I listen to stories every day, trying to find truths and reason and solutions. And I’ve decided I could spend a lifetime trying to perfect four values that make me a better listener, friend, and member of my community. But values aren’t skills you can put on a resume. They require constant attention, acts of re-centering and stretching of these muscles. So while I’m sure none of this is new to you all, I invite you to let it sink in and wash over so you can walk away with that refresh button.
#1) Shift from mile wide inch deep to inch wide mile deep.
Everything about our current culture and society tells you this is a bad idea and a waste of time. Fast, disconnected, efficient, cheap — these are the things we’ve been tricked into valuing, but we all feel that void profit over people has left us with. Something is not right, and we all know it.
Let’s do less and have longer lunches, but while we’re scaling down, we’re actually ramping up. We are going deeper, creating space often through silence to leave room for stories that would have not been told because they are about the human experience, not a product.
#2) Humility is a requirement of being a good listener.
I am an expert on my own self. You are the expert on you. Every individual is the only expert on themselves. If we swoop in thinking we know more or better, people will shut down. People have intense intuition around whether or not they are being judged or categorized or deemed not important. Humility is the antidote. They are the experts, we are the students.
And number three is the hardest one, I think.
#3) No one exists outside our values because if you’re alive, you’re a part of a community.
And if we really are going to transform our communities, we have to reveal that unshakable good in the people we think are causing harm too — or maybe they are just boring or difficult. It may be harder to discover that unshakable good because they have no immediate reason to be vulnerable — in fact, their interpretation of success may have a lot to do with not showing any signs of weakness. But as Bryon Stevenson said, “There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”
And if telling our story is truly healing, reminding them they have value because of this brokenness, making them a part of the shared human experience, and not because of wealth or achievement. If we can crack that nut through those first two values, maybe that’s when they’ll embody being an interdependent part of our community. They are a person that is like no other person — and are valued for this most.
Pro tip: If you’re having a hard time getting there with someone because you just don’t like them, picture them as a child — if they are really challenging go all the way to when they were a baby. Picture that unshakable good on their little baby face and then start over.
And my final value, and quite possibly the most important:
#4) Be joyful.
This may be really annoying to some of you, and I get it. The world is a dumpster fire right now. People are allowed if not encouraged to hurt other people because of unchecked greed. By no means am I saying, just be happy. Oh no. I am not happy on most days, but I find pleasure and joy in gratitude and kindness. And this fuels all my fire. Without it, my burn out would be inevitable and swift.
We are not only allowed to be joyful in our work and our lives, but according to adrienne maree brown, it is the whole point. She writes,
“Pleasure reminds us to enjoy being alive and on purpose… Pleasure — embodied, connected pleasure — is one of the way we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to co-create the world. Pleasure helps us move through the times that are unfair, through grief and loneliness, through the terror of genocide, or days when the demands are just overwhelming. Pleasure heals the places where our hearts and spirit get wounded. Pleasure reminds us that even in the dark, we are alive. Pleasure is a medicine for the suffering that is absolutely promised in life… Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.”
People often ask me how I’m feeling as things are getting worse for my neighbors — and yeah, I don’t feel good about it. I pride myself in thinking big and carrying out change, but no one is a superhero. There is no hero and there is no villain. Harry Potter cannot just kill Voledemort. Frodo can’t just throw the ring in the fire.
But what if we could be humble and joyful and inclusive enough to listen deeply and tell astonishing stories that teach us about our human connection — inspiring action? I tell people we are in a one hundred year war. We may not see the effect our slow and intentional relationships may bring to this world and our community, but I’m close to certain that we, living through these counter cultural values, are creating a schism in the paradigm. We can nurture people into nurturing. We can tell stories that settle deeply in our hearts that later on, without realizing, transform our communities. And that is enough, thank God.
