Letter from the Executive Director

Over the past few years, TWI has become increasingly interested in exploring the many ways compelling storytelling can encourage dialogue, critical thinking, and  citizen engagement. In this issue I am pleased to introduce four new grantees that have devised innovative approaches in using storytelling to expand our thinking, build bridges of understanding, and spark constructive social change.

The Renaissance Journalism Center at San Francisco State University has been experimenting with different ways to support struggling small ethnic and community media. Through its trainings and technical support, the Center is helping small media tell their stories better and strengthen their communities.

The Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources (INJR) takes groups of journalists on field expeditions of a week or more. Working on tight deadlines, they rarely have a chance to think deeply about complex environmental issues. INJR gives them the invaluable gift of time: to learn, reflect, and just kick back.

In a similar vein, Images & Voices of Hope, designed an experiment to see what would happen if a group of journalists met together periodically over four years to talk about and reflect on their personal lives and careers. You’ll find a link below to the full report written by Jon Funabiki. I encourage you to read it.

Our fourth grantee, Voice of Witness, is a nonprofit publisher that gives voice to individuals who have suffered grave social injustices and survived terrifying humanitarian crises. The books, collections of first-person narratives, are used by educators and advocates to give readers a deeper and more personal understanding of human rights issues.

These four grantees show how storytelling can be used in imaginative and original ways to further their missions and ours.  We are excited about the work these organizations do and proud to support them.

To end on a personal note, I’m still thinking about the blog our board chair, Jill Blair, wrote to close out 2011. She suggested an alternative way to think about the holidays that really resonated with me. “What if we measure the meaning of this season by how well we listen to one another, the questions we consider, and the conversations in which we engage?” With 2012 already rolling along at a brisk pace, I’m reminded what good questions these are to ask regardless of the season. We at TWI intend to follow Jill’s prompt to listen well, ask good questions, and engage in meaningful and productive conversations with all of the wonderful people we are honored and privileged to work with. All the best to you in 2012!

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Bolstering Community Journalism
by Deanne Stone

Jon Funabiki calls himself a Little Media Guy. A former journalist and program officer at the Ford Foundation, he appreciated the work of little media in covering stories that concern their communities and in preserving the history and culture of the residents. He also knew they were struggling to survive.

A while back he began thinking about how he could combine two areas he knew well--journalism and philanthropy--in support of community media. The result was the Renaissance Journalism Center (RJC), which he started in 2009 at San Francisco State University, where he is a professor of journalism. Operating in partnership with Zero Divide, a small nonprofit foundation that funds technology training to benefit low-income, minority, and other disadvantaged groups, RJC is experimenting with ways to strengthen and revitalize community media. Funabiki broadly defines community as a neighborhood, ethnic community, or group of people who identify with a shared vision or purpose.

“We’re pretty entrepreneurial and opportunistic in approaching projects from different angles,” says Funabiki.  “We do everything from giving grants to offering technical trainings targeted to particular groups and teaching ethnic media how to use media and social media to educate communities on issues that affect them.”

One of the RJC’s most direct actions was its support of a community-led effort to save the Nichi Bei newspaper in Japantown. A community institution started at the end of World War II, it was forced to close when it ran out of money. RJC stepped in, providing a grant and technical assistance to help resurrect the paper as a nonprofit, online news site.

Another ambitious project targeted Agent Orange, the herbicide widely used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to destroy vegetation that might provide cover for its enemies. Agent Orange devastated the environment and killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese; it still causes birth defects.

RJC brought together 13 journalists from across the country, including two students, and trained them to give briefings on the effects of Agent Orange. They also paid their travel to Vietnam to collect stories and later worked with nonprofit groups to educate communities, raise money, and recruit volunteers as educators in Vietnam.

In our Spring 2011 newsletter, we alerted readers to RJC’s free, online Media Tool Kit, tutorials it developed to help small nonprofits make use of new media. (www.newmediatoolkit.org)  RJC’s research showed that ethnic media, too, lagged behind in using new technologies. To test whether bilingual workshops were an effective way to bridge the gap, it organized three all-day workshops for journalists working for Spanish-language news outlets.

RJC is still evaluating the effectiveness of the training and whether future workshops should target a broader audience of ethnic groups. It’s also looking at using the Agent Orange training project as a model for studying other issues, such as immigration, juvenile justice, or health care for the elderly. “What’s terrific about the unrestricted money we get from TWI,” says Funabiki, “is the freedom it gives us to be experimental. That kind of grant money is difficult to come by.”

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Field Expeditions for Journalists
by Deanne Stone

This past spring a group of fourteen journalists spent one week traveling around Lake Ontario. Starting off in Toronto, they explored the city’s underground facility for managing storm run-off.  Over the next six days, they visited an aquatic biology research station, a wind-turbine farm, and an Atlantic salmon hatchery. Each step of the trip highlighted larger themes, like recovery and restoration of the densely populated shoreline and the effects of climate change on lake levels and temperatures.

The field expedition was organized by the Institutes of Journalism & Natural Resources (IJNR). Headquartered in Missoula, Mont., it was founded in 1995 by Frank Allen, a former journalist and professor of journalism. Having worked for major dailies for more than 30 years, Allen knew well the pressures and drawbacks of turning out stories on tight deadlines. He created IJNR to remedy what he regarded as the serious weaknesses in coverage of the environment and natural resources. “So much of it was shallow, conflict-oriented and polarizing,” he says. “It lacked context, ignored explanations, and avoided fair analysis of origins, consequences and possible solutions.”

IJNR runs three to four expeditions a year. Besides the Lake Ontario trip in 2011, it also led trips to explore the estuaries and land around Puget Sound, the threat of an Asian carp invasion in Lake Michigan, and energy sources in New Mexico and Colorado. Allen and his wife Maggie Bishop Allen spend several weeks scouting out the most compelling and informative sites and then figuring out how much they can include in the expeditions. The trips are posted on the IJNR Web site and journalists at all career levels and from all kinds of news outlet are invited to apply for fellowships. Not surprisingly, IJNR receives many more applicants than the maximum 18 slots for each expedition.

A tremendous amount of planning goes into each trip: scouting sites, selecting fellows, booking lodgings and inviting experts to educate the fellows on their journey. IJNR chooses experts--scientists, natural resource managers, farmers, miners, regulators, industry leaders, and tribal officials--representing different viewpoints and work experiences who bring something extra to the discussion. Allen and his wife, assisted only by two half-time employees, take care of all the planning and logistics for the trips. Since its inception, IJNR has organized 50 expeditions and awarded more than 700 fellowships.

The expeditions are planned to educate the fellows in a relaxing environment far from the distractions of newsrooms. “Journalists are constantly in a hurry and under pressure to produce all the time,” says Allen. “As soon as they collect information from interviews, they have to turn it into an  interpretive analytical story without having time to process what they heard and reflect on it.”

IJNR chose the field expedition format to make it feel like an adventure. Journalists are encouraged to get up early and stay up late to take advantage of time with the experts.  Depending on the kind of trip, fellows may spend their days hiking with a naturalist in a national forest or touring a farm with a rancher, all the while talking with them about their work and what about it excites or exasperates them. These shared experiences, says Allen, stimulate reflection and enrich the quality of the discussions.

“These trips turn into eight-day dialogues,” says Allen. “Fellows and experts are in conversation all day and over meals. At the end of the day, we put our feet up and reflect on what we learned and observed. Barry Lopez, one of my models for good writers and storytellers, said that he learned from goat herders in Africa that the responsibility of the storyteller is to create an atmosphere where wisdom can reveal itself. That’s what we’re trying to achieve on these expeditions, and it takes a combination of dialogue and reflection to get there.”

IJNR showcases articles written by fellows on its Web site. To read the articles and learn more about IJNR, please go to www.IJNR.org

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Journalists Need Time for Personal Reflection, Too
by Jon Funabiki, executive director, Renaissance Journalism Center

Deadlines define the rhythm of journalism. They are never-ending. It's the juice that makes journalism an exciting profession. But it has its toxic effects, too. Ask most journalists and they are likely to complain that the pressure of deadlines robs them of the time to think and reflect, not only about their stories, but also about their personal careers and lives. They want time to ponder their big picture questions such as, "What's important to me?" and "What do I want to do with my life?"

For the past four years, I've been involved in a remarkable experiment that responded to this desire. The project was developed by Images & Voices of Hope, which believes that journalists and other media makers have a unique power, should they choose to exercise it, to shape the world in positive ways. IVOH's International Dialogue for Thought Leaders in Journalism posed the following question: What might happen if IVOH brought together, over a period of time, a group of top media professionals to talk about what they do, why they do it, and what they hope to do going forward. No pre-conditions or expectations were placed on the participants.

The project convened 34 prominent journalists, filmmakers and media professionals and gave them the time and space to reflect on their core values, professional challenges and personal demons. The results were dramatic--some called it "life changing" and "transforming." I was asked to write the final report about the four-year experiment. It's titled, "Questions to Ask About a Career and a Calling." You can read it here.  http://ivoh.org/blog/questions-ask-about-career-and-calling-ivoh-thought-leader-dialogues

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Telling Stories, Reclaiming Lives
by Deanne Stone

Imagine being imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit, living in fear of deportation and imprisonment as an undocumented immigrant, or fleeing war and persecution in Sudan only to spend years in a refugee camp. These are just three of the first-person narratives published by Voice of Witness that recount the experiences of individuals affected by human rights violations and social injustices around the world.

Started by writer Dave Eggers and physician and human rights scholar Lola Vollen in 2004, Voice of Witness recognizes the power of oral histories to empower narrators, deepen readers’ understanding of complex political and humanitarian crises, and stimulate discussion and action in response to injustices. Originally an imprint of McSweeny’s Publishing in San Francisco, Voice of Witness became a nonprofit division of McSweeny’s in 2008 and hired Mimi Lok as its executive director and editor.

The Voice of Witness publications are primarily aimed at readers of all stripes, with high school students and college students a significant part of its readership. Many educators, policy makers, and advocates also use the books for teaching, training, and advocacy. So far, it has published eight books and has three more in the works for this year.

Voice of Witness draws on its sources--humanitarian workers, lawyers, former employees of the Department of Justice, immigration lawyers, and even fiction writers--for story ideas and referrals to narrators. Regrettably, there’s no shortage of stories of social and humanitarian injustices. The challenge is choosing which ones to tell.

“We look for ongoing human rights issues that are either underreported by the media or disproportionately skewed in one direction,” says Lok. “We also try to make the books as teachable as possible and create educational resources for the books that fit in with or complement school curriculum standards.”

Last year Voice of Witness launched an educational outreach program in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves. Voice of Witness education director, Cliff Mayotte, worked with a pilot group of Bay Area teachers on ways to incorporate the oral histories in the classroom. Besides running a summer training for teachers, Voice of Witness also hosts a student summer institute and organizes classroom presentations, inviting  narrators to speak whenever possible.

“First-person narratives take what is abstract and make it human,” says Lok. “You can feel the energy in the classroom change when students hear authentic, unfiltered voices. It captures their imaginations and gives them another way to understand the world.”
 
For individuals who have suffered the indignities of social injustices or the terrors of wars and upheavals in silence, telling their stories publicly is a way of reclaiming their lives. Voice of Witness  respects the narrators’ courage in coming forth and works closely with them in ensuring their stories are told accurately and in full. Narrators are involved in the editing process and give their approval before the books are published. To learn more about the titles in the series or to sign up for the online newsletter, please go to: http://voiceofwitness.com.

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