You're Invited: Strategic Storytelling for Social Justice Pilot Training

Where can you find strategy, storytelling, and social justice (and alliteration) under one roof? Join Line Break Media at Intermedia Arts for a 3-part Strategic Storytelling for Social Justice workshop series later this month. Best yet, your feedback as part of this pilot series will inform the ultimate design of this important and valuable training; so just as the workshop asserts, your voice and story matters!

As a human, you are a natural storyteller. Your mind creates narratives to make sense of the world, and you share those narratives with others around you. How can you strategically apply this natural storytelling ability in your work for social justice, and why is it important to do so?

This 3-week pilot workshop series (our LAST pilot opportunity!) will share some fundamental tools and frameworks to deepen your communications strategy for social justice. Come sharpen your narrative analysis and grow your ability to make deliberate, intentional choices in your storytelling for achieving organizing and advocacy goals. 

Facilitated by Eleonore Wesserle of Line Break Media, this workshop series is informed by materials and worldviews from the Center for Story-Based Strategy, the Center for Media Justice, Ricardo Levins Morales, and other visionaries (references and background reading will be provided). Sessions will center around why and how to communicate your own social justice issue while deconstructing mainstream narratives, and will include:

1. Getting grounded: Why storytelling and communications strategy?
• Grounding
• Culture as soil: A parable
• The power of framing your truth: A brief immersion behind the buzzword
2. Unpacking Dominant Narratives and Narratives for Social Justice
• Visioning and articulating a core narrative for your social justice issue
• Case study: Analyzing a status quo narrative vs a social justice narrative
• Now, Wow, How: one message method to organize your story
3. Crafting a strategic story to achieve your goals
• Audience inquiry: who are you trying to move?
• Battle of the Story: Outlining critical elements of strategic stories

Discussion will explicitly:

• name oppressions and systems of power, including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, and others; 
• explore how these systems support and are supported by dominant cultural narratives and media structures; and 
• explore tools that can help stories for social justice break through.

Please note: We recently ran the first pilot version of this workshop series. This will be our second pilot. While we are incorporating feedback from our first pilot into this series, we would like additional feedback before we begin officially offering this series.  As such, we are:

• limiting participants to 20, 
• requiring participation in all three parts of the series,
• requesting your commitment to strong critical evaluation of the series, and 
• requesting a deeply discounted $15 fee to hold your spot (working out to $5 per session). No one will be turned away for lack of funds, please contact Eleonore directly with fee questions: eleonore@linebreakmedia.org. 

Please note: This is a 3-part workshop series. Dates/times are:

• Monday, Mar 16, 6:30 - 9:00pm
• Monday, Mar 23, 6:30 - 9:00pm
• Monday, Mar 30, 6:30 - 9:00pm

Attendance at all three dates is mandatory for participation.