Support Window Seat Media's 2018 Story Harvest!
Window Seat Media is part of a growing network of oral historians, documentarians, and community activists who use story as a catalyst for connection, conversation, and social change. Tsering Lama, a storytelling advisor at Greenpeace International, refers to storytelling as "world-building." She says, “To be a storyteller is to recognize, break apart, and critically reshape the stories of our communities and our world.” We carry out our "world-building" work through the framework of community oral history, and in partnership with local organizations.
Our 2018 Story Harvest will focus on the theme of home. What gives us a sense of connection and belonging to a place? Who belongs, who doesn’t, and why? What innovations, ideas and models are emerging to re-imagine a more inclusive way to live together? How have communities united across lines of difference to protect their home? Over the course of the next several months, we will explore these and other questions with a Network Council of several Thurston County social service and social justice organizations and the community members they support. More specifically, we will we will explore these questions through the lens of living in poverty, in 2018, in Washington's South Puget Sound.
The Network Council seeks to create a space where the people most impacted - people living in poverty - will help set an advocacy agenda that is grounded in their lived experience and local knowledge. Our role in supporting this work will be to facilitate a story gathering and sharing process that does three things:
1. Increases community understanding about how narrative shapes movement-building and policy-making
2. Gathers and amplifies stories on the margins, and
3. Reframes harmful narratives and tells a new story through a multifaceted, participatory communications campaign.
Our collaboration will also contribute a Community Confluence - a day of shared learning, storytelling, and advocacy training - this fall.
We’re excited to bring our skills as storytellers to support this cross-sector effort, and we need your help to stay engaged. I am asking you to make one-time gift or monthly pledge of $35, $75, $120 or more to support the design phase of our 2018 Story Harvest. Because when you invest in Window Seat Media, you’re not only investing in our work, you’re leveraging the work of our social service and social justice community in Thurston County, WA and supporting our most vulnerable neighbors.
Writer and activist Chimamanda Adichie says, “the problem with stereotypes is not that they’re untrue, but that they’re incomplete.” Your donation helps to create a more complete and nuanced story of our shared humanity. Thank you in advance for whatever you are able to give!