Storytelling and Arts to Facilitate Community Capacity Building for Urban Planning and Social Work

Abstract

Creating social connections and fostering engagement in communities is a growing challenge for community work. Planners, social workers, and community activists are starting to look towards the arts and storytelling as a way to promote community capacity. A community in Lopez Island, Washington, facing sustainable housing and agricultural issues brought in a two-day storytelling and theatre program to build capacity for their ecosocial work. This research describes facilitator engagement methodology and pilots a community capacity survey to evaluate the experience of workshop participants. Preliminary results show that the storytelling program makes strides in deepening connections to others and generating authentic dialogue. Participants reported both positive experiences of building trust and negative feelings of vulnerability. As funding can be a major barrier for community groups to incorporate arts programs, this research introduces a preliminary survey that communities can adapt and improve upon to help them start gathering evidence-based data for assessing measures of community capacity. Though the facilitators brought unique theatrical and choreographic skills to the programming, planners and social workers can take away for practice a simple storytelling exercise that participants enthusiastically expressed fostered listening, trust, and connection.

Harmonizing Movements and Messages: A Traditional Dance Performance Arts-Inspired AIDA Model for Promoting Sustainable Behavior and Effective Marketing Sustainability Communication

“…Further complementing this perspective, the research of Bower and Forgas [71] on the influence of emotional states on information processing underlines the effectiveness of traditional dance in eliciting emotional responses, especially concerning environmental and cultural themes. This aspect is expanded in the work of Taylor and Wei [72] and Newman et al [73], who stress the capacity of cultural mediums to deepen audience engagement with environmental issues. Their research offers empirical support for the proposition that attention to the aesthetic and narrative components of traditional dance significantly enhances emotional engagement with sustainability themes, thus enriching the emotional connection and experience of the audience with the subject matter.…”

“It Really Put a Change on Me”: Visualizing (Dis)connections within a Photovoice Project in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong, Ontario

“…The interdisciplinary research and evidence of social connectedness as an important factor for health and wellness is extensive, and factors such as individual and community resilience, diagnoses, and recovery all improve with the presence of meaningful connections (Comes 2016;Griffiths et al 2007;Hari 2018;Taylor and Wei 2020;Umberson and Montez 2010). According to Small (2009), to examine and minimize inequality in well-being due to network inequities, we must first understand how people's social connections are formed.…”

“…Participatory storytelling methods like photovoice carry the same potential as any participatory method to unintentionally reproduce dynamics of power, privilege, and harm (Murdoch et al 2016;Taylor and Wei 2020); in particular, depoliticized art or art that focuses on aesthetics over authenticity can unintentionally objectify, oversimplify, and diminish people's identities (Askins and Pain 2011). By leaning into storytelling, photovoice can be one tool to intentionally build social connections and community.…”

“…Another risk lies around how much participants are asked to disclose, as this requires caution, education, and training because it can make participants vulnerable and even re-traumatized, especially if antagonistic power relations are present (Beauregard et al 2020). In Taylor and Wei's (2020) case study of Story Bridge, participants felt optimistic about building trust, but some left feeling vulnerable and raw, saying they had not shared that deeply in decades. This risk reminds me of Tuck's (2009) call for research to focus on desires, which might include stories of hurt, but also hope and creativity, so as not to fetishize loss and ongoing denigrations.…”

“…Residents were encouraged to decide what they wanted to take photos of and develop self-representational narratives via the photo journals, and they should feel autonomy in what they were choosing to share or not. When undertaken thoughtfully, storytelling methods, such as photovoice, can provide a less extractive exploration of lived experiences, encourage creative thinking, active listening, and connection building (Joyce 2018;Taylor and Wei 2020;Wang 1999), and are possible strategies for mitigating methodological harm.…”