Stories are how we learn, connect with each other, and challenge the institutions causing harm to our communities. Upholding the principles of narrative sovereignty is a vital part of inspiring change ethically. Ensuring that frontline storytellers have authority and control over how their stories are told changes “who speaks, who gets heard, and even who hears.”9 By changing the story, we not only change accepted narratives of the past, but also the paths we’ve agreed to follow into the future.
This toolkit goes into detail on the technical aspects of storytelling because we believe that this knowledge and these best practices should be readily available to and accessible for community-based organizations who know best what their communities need. The methods of storytelling broken down in this toolkit are vital ways of obtaining backing and support for political advocacy and action.
While collaborating with external partners can change the game for a CBO’s storytelling efforts, these collaborations should focus on the aspects of capacity that cannot be learned through a digital toolkit. If tools like this and the resources we link to can help a CBO learn to produce its own digital content, a collaboration can then focus on greater tasks that are fundamentally impossible for a CBO to do on its own, due to its size or funding.
