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Your Voice is Your Creativity: Building Safe Spaces for Creative Expression

When I was seven years old, I was learning to draw by copying masterpieces. I had such confidence that I truly believed my drawings were superior. I look back on those drawings today and think “What naiveté”… and then I think, “How can I get that back?” How can I reclaim that belief in my ability to be stronger than my fear of how I might appear through others’ eyes?

Fast forward many years, and I’m sitting at my friend’s marathon poetry open mic, listening for five hours straight and never once participating. The entire time, an internal debate about whether I could or couldn’t write poetry ran through my head. I went home that night so frustrated that I chose to settle the argument by writing my first poem. The poem started like this: “You, yes You. Sitting there, just sitting there. I used to be you.” And from that moment on, the debate was over: I would not sit on the sidelines anymore; I would actively participate and learn to express my creativity. This was the start of my journey to what I call “reclaiming creative confidence.”

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If Not Us: A Community Collaboration for Intergenerational Stories of Standing Up

Grandpa Doug died a few weeks ago. He wasn’t my grandpa. He was my neighborhood’s grandpa. Always at the local elementary school being a handyman or there with his camera documenting the talent shows, the art exhibits, whatever was going on . . . even in the classes that his granddaughter wasn’t in. 

We got to talking . . . and he started inviting me over for coffee. He was a coffee connoisseur, but not the kind that was snobby. He just knew a lot about it. I sheepishly asked for cream because I had heard that “real” coffee drinkers didn’t do that. He brought me cream. Happily. And we’d talk. We’d listen. 

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Why Sound? – by Joel Knopf

One fall morning, I step outside my door and listen. I’m amazed by how many sounds I hear. A bird calls; another answers. A gaggle of school children moves left to right, full of laughter and overlapping conversation. A dog howls and a woman says to a stranger, “Sorry, she’s really into squirrels.” And how could I have ever thought there was only one wind? This morning, the wind is a pastiche of rustles, slow and fast.

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Too Big to See – by Jamie Mayo

Sometimes racism is so big you don't notice it. I grew up in an all white town. I didn't think about it much. It was just the way it was. It didn't mean anything. After all, we sang, "Jesus loves the little children, all the little children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight," every Sunday. And that's what I knew about diversity. But what I didn't know then was that it was an intentional racist act that ensured that my hometown was all white. By law, black people had to be out of town by sundown. Until 1968. And that is the way it was.

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Digital Storytelling Community Gathers in Athens To Discuss How the Crisis Has Shaped Our Work – by Joe Lambert

On May 8-10, more than two dozen countries were represented at the Digital Storytelling in the Time of Crisis conference hosted by the Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media and the University Research Institute of Applied Communication of the University of Athens with the collaboration of the Hellenic American Union. 

Speakers were asked to situate their work against the backdrop of the sustained economic and social crisis of Europe and beyond. Greece has been amongst the hardest hit countries, with massive cuts in the public sector, and the decline of GDP, employment, and social programs reaching Great Depression levels. The University of Athens itself weathered a five month strike by administrators earlier in the academic year, forcing conference organizers to calibrate the conference ambitions appropriately.

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It’s time to talk and to listen – by Sally J. Laskey, National Sexual Violence Resource Center

April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) and National Child Abuse Prevention Month in the U.S. I remember a time when Sexual Assault Awareness Month was mostly about talking for me. As a social justice activist trying to end sexual violence, there certainly has been a lot to talk about. I can still feel the vibrations from the first Speak Out against rape that I ever attended. Indeed, it moved me to continue to tell stories of resilience and resistance. I believe stories have power. Sharing them promotes healing. 

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Writing Women into History – by Kayann Short

“Where are the women?” is the question behind Women’s History Month each March. The absence of women from much of recorded history and scholarship has left gaps that undermine women’s progress toward equality. While the conditions under which women’s history has been lost, erased, and suppressed may be familiar—prejudice of all sorts; sexual violence; second class status; lack of time and resources—such conditions continue to impact the inclusion of women in private and public discourse today.

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Patients first for integrated care – by Joe Sammen

In 2013, the Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS) included questions around mental health for the first time. The results were significant: one out of every four Coloradans experienced one or more days of poor mental health during the past 30 days. I’m not really surprised by these findings. Nearly everyone I know, including myself, has faced at least one bout of stress, depression, or emotional instability at some point in their life.

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Stitching Together the Stories of StoryCenter's First 20 Years – by Joe Lambert

This weekend I found myself writing a quasi-academic article about the 20 years of the work of the Center for Digital Storytelling. The argument was more or less that we have watched four significant phases in the growth of our work, each with a slightly different emphasis in our work, and in each phase an arc of expansion, a wave of interest, that surged and receded. It was an interesting way to understand what an organization, and a movement, can accomplish over two decades. 

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The Mahi-Mahi & The Map: Digital Storytelling for Science – by Shawn Margles, Coastal & Marine Planning Scientist

Can storytelling help scientists convey even complex and contentious topics like marine spatial planning?

In my experience, storytelling not only helps, it is essential if we want broader audiences to understand and support our work.  Revealing something personal about why we do what we do can connect audiences with our messages and disarm adversaries.

Consider the field of marine spatial planning.  Here, disconnects between scientists and audiences can be glaring.

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“Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is” – by Rob Kershaw

Somewhere in a box, stored either here or there, is a framed, aerial photograph of an offshore semi-submersible drilling rig – the Ocean Ranger – being pulled out to sea just off the coast of Newfoundland. The derrick in particular, if I remember correctly, is lit soft orange by early morning sunlight and the ocean is dead calm.

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For Love & For Story

For all the Loves that are ours, and yours, instead of chocolate or flowers,
we give you stories, and a poem.
With hearts full of gratefulness for the gifts of listening, and telling,

– StoryCenter

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Turn Toward What You Deeply Love – by Joe Lambert

Berkeley is the kind of place where you find little surprises.  As you climb down the hill from Hinkel Park in the Berkeley Hills, you may find yourself on one of the many paths that connect the streets. On the Yosemite steps there’s a wall of poems. On a walk in late January, well before dawn, I came across this poem, illuminated by the less-than-romantic light of my iPhone.

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To Stand Now Is to Tell Our Stories – by Tommy Orange

I’ve been so excited about the good work being done through the All Together Now workshops across the country. Thinking back, I can’t really say I’ve had an opportunity – or I haven’t seen it ­– to take a stand, and to engage in the necessary civil disobedience required to go against the American grain. Even if it’s “only” telling our stories. If telling our stories is subversive to an ultimately damaging master narrative, then let our voices be like a march, and let them be heard by as many people as possible.

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Stand Up Now: All Together Now – by Daniel Weinshenker

I grew up in Palo Alto in the '70s and '80s. I think there were three students out of a graduating class of 300 that weren't going to a 4-year college. I'm not sure I knew a single person who was joining the military. There was one publicly known homeless resident in the town, whom nobody actually believed was homeless (word around town was that he was a writer doing research for his next novel). And there were maybe ten African Americans in my entire high school. 

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Breaking Down Walls: All Together Now Civil and Human Rights – by Arlene Goldbard

“I got very emotional when I read my story aloud in the first story circle before the recording. Probably it’s because November was the month when Esther passed away; this is the fifth anniversary of her death. When I said that line about the anniversary of her death, I just broke. I felt so vulnerable because I was embarrassed and then Mr. Westmoreland said, ‘Just breathe.’ That was when I was able to actually sit up and continue to read the rest of what I had written. Then when I actually did the recording, I didn’t cry. I started to get choked up toward the end, and I got choked up when Eugenia played it back. But when I actually recorded it, I didn’t cry. I’ll never forget that, when Mr. Westmoreland just said, ‘Breathe.’"

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Not Feeling Alone: The Power of Storytelling in Uganda – by Carrie Ngongo and Simon Ndizeye

Imagine feeling ashamed because you perpetually smell of urine or stool. Imagine mourning your stillborn baby – a baby that died because it was stuck in the birth canal and was not delivered by cesarean section in time. Imagine traveling for hours or days to reach a hospital, hoping that a doctor will be able to surgically restore your continence, which is caused by a condition called obstetric fistula. And then imagine that while you wait for your surgery date to come, you are invited to watch short videos telling the stories of women who have endured exactly the same thing as you have.

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Colorado Public Television 12 First Annual Independent Media Award Luncheon

The CPT12 Independent Media Award honors people in our community who cultivate independent expression. The 2013 award will be presented to Daniel Weinshenker, Director of the Rocky Mountain Region Office of the Center for Digital Storytelling.

Please join us for this inaugural event. Featured speakers will include Jon Caldara of The Devils Advocate, Tamara Banks of Studio 12, Dominic Dezzutti of Colorado Inside Out, CPT12 Director of Development Shari Bernson, and CPT12 Interim GM/COO Kim Johnson.

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StoryCenter Partners with WeVideo and Takes Digital Storytelling to the Cloud

Berkeley, CA (September 16, 2013) – Center for Digital Storytelling (StoryCenter) is sharing its expertise in powerful personal storytelling with video editors and content developers across the WeVideo user spectrum.

"The world is moving to the cloud, and so is Digital Storytelling with the enormously innovative online tool WeVideo," says Joe Lambert, Founder and Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling. "The cross platform, affordable, and easy-to-use editor has the potential to revolutionize the practices of Digital Storytelling in countless contexts. We can see teachers creating collaborative projects in international educational exchanges, small companies encouraging storytelling about their engagement with customers with the customers themselves, social service and human rights advocates working in new partnerships with local communities via the web, and many, many more uses. We are more than pleased to join forces with WeVideo."  

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