Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center: Storytelling Webinars and Working with Native American Communities

At StoryCenter, we've heard time and time again from public health professionals of the need to put the "public" back into public health, and while many talk about community engagement, they're still seeking successful and viable ways to put it into practice. This is what the Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center (RMPH-TC) said to us when they initiated a partnership to bring StoryCenter's storytelling webinars and workshops to public health professionals across the Rocky Mountain region. 

StoryCenter designed two digital storytelling production webinars for RMPH-TC, one for public health professionals and researchers around the topic of mental health and another for those who work with American Indian communities. The webinars were so popular they had a wait list, and the online training format made it possible for a diverse group of participants to participate and make digital stories. We went on to deliver several larger webinars to RMPH-TC, including sessions on "The role of Narrative in Public Health," :The Ethics of Digital Storytelling for Public Health," and "Who’s Watching? Sharing Public Health Digital Stories for Maximum Impact. "

Ongoing work with RMPH-TC has included training for their constituents in audio story production and in capacity building for the facilitation of storytelling workshops, so that public health practitioners in the region can take narrative work out into their communities and put the public voice back into public health. 

Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center worked with StoryCenter to produce, film, and edit two important documentary-style videos to capture the need for and impact of Population Health interventions at Denver Health and Cheyenne Regional Medical Center.

Our teams interviewed providers on the ground to hear about how the idea of treatment stopping when patients are discharged doesn't help our communities get healthy and stay healthy. And we also documented a population health approach to tobacco cessation.