International Day for Sharing Life Stories

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January 1, 2008
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Sharing Stories:

How To Organize An Elder Story Share

One of storytelling’s most important functions throughout history has been to transfer knowledge and experiences from one generation to the next. In this activity, we encourage you to seek out some of your community’s elders to share their life experiences and wisdom to the rest of the community.

It is important to create an environment in which the elders and their stories are honored. If the elders in your community are already in close contact with the people who will come to hear their stories and everybody has similar expectations about how to honor elders, than the following suggestions may not be needed. However, if this is a new experience for the elders and/or the participants, the guidelines may create a more rewarding elder story share for everybody in the room.

• Welcome your audience, thank them for attending, invite them to have refreshments, tell them where the bathroom is located, and any other logistical issues that folks should know about.

• Briefly explain the purpose of the event and that it is one of many events happening worldwide to celebrate the International Day for Sharing Life Stories.

• Create a climate of respect for elders by taking the time to introduce them and why they are important to the community.

• Talk to the elders before the event about what stories they expect to share. Let them know how many other people will be sharing stories and explain that you would like each elder to have more or less the same amount of time for storytelling. The event moderator should set up a system for signallying to the elders if they are exceeding their alotted time.

• As one of the purposes of this event is to benefit from the wisdom and experiences of the elders, make sure that the audience has time to ask question. The moderator will be responsible for fielding questions from the audience.

• Collect contact information for audience members and thank them for their attendance.

BEFORE THE ELDER STORY SHARE:

• Recruit and identify your storytellers. What stories or perspectives do you want to make sure are expressed? Have a conversation with potential storytellers in which you explain to them the event and make sure that they fully understand and are comfortable sharing their stories in a group setting. Encourage them to select their particular story ahead of time (it may be helpful to refer to the prompts resources page) and practice telling it to you or someone else who can offer guidance.

• Talk to the storytellers about the number of other elders telling stories and explain that you are planning on each person having about the same amount of time for telling their story. Let them know that the moderator will signal them if they exceed their alotted amount of time.

• Determine who you would like your audience to be. Who do you think would gain the most from this experience? Do you want to partner with another organization? If so, how will you determine who attends? Do you want to limit the number of attendees, require an RSVP, or have an open invitation to the public?

• Find a space for your event. Make sure that is easily accessible to your participants and provides your event with the level of privacy and intimacy you want.

• Arrange transportation for your storytellers to and from the event if they are unable to transport themselves.

• Create a welcoming environment. Make sure the seating is comfortable and arranged effectively. Arrange for snacks and drinks for before and after the event. Make sure the room is at a comfortable temperature.

• Determine the time of your event. What times generally work best for your participant group? Does that time work with the venue?

• Do you want to partner with an outside group, such as a local radio station or other media organization, to document the event? Do you or your organization want to take photographs of the event for your own archives?

• If your event is open to the public, how do you want to publicize the event? If you are interested in generating press coverage for your event, craft a press release for the event and send it to your local media outlets at least two weeks before the event and a follow-up reminder two days before the event.

• Decide how you want to structure your event – will you allow questions following each story or hold them all until the end? Will you encourage dialogue and conversation among the various storytellers?

• Ask each storyteller how they would like to be introduced. Consider printing short biographies of the storytellers in an event program.

• Identify a moderator -- somebody you can count on for encouraging participation and helping keep people with their allotted time.

AFTER THE ELDER STORY SHARE:

• Send thank yous to the storytellers, moderators, the venue and any other people who helped the event happen.

• Send photos and a description of how your event went to CDS (laura@storycenter.org) so we can include them on our International Day site and archives.

• Consider hosting another storytelling event in your community.

ACTIVITY KITS

HOST ORGANIZATIONS

* Center for Digital Storytelling

* Museu da Pessoa

NAVIGATION