So often, people who work for justice are silo’d into different “issue areas” – there are the feminists, the folks working for race justice, the environmentalists, the lgbtq movement, and never the groups shall meet.  There are even more people who want to see positive change in the world, but are kept out of the discussion because they don’t feel like they’re part of one of these existing movements.

Since these different movements are working on issues that share root causes, it’s important for people across issue areas to work together and support one another.  It’s also very important that folks who don’t feel like they’re part of a movement are able to participate in justice work and share feelings of solidarity regardless.

This workshop uses storytelling as a medium to bridge those between folks in different movements, and between folks in movements and folks who aren’t.  Everyone has experience they can share, and everyone who does justice work has motivation for that work.  With good facilitation, folks can locate and feel comfortable sharing experiences that expose their deep motivation for doing justice work.  By sharing these experiences with one another, we learn about each other’s motivations in a way that lets us share and feel the force of that motivation to join movements and participate together.

This deep motivation is the same feeling that politicians try to conjure and share with the “Story of Self”.  But unlike a traditional “Story of Self” workshops, this workshop teaches experience sharing as a mutual process to build and foster interpersonal relationships – not a manipulation tactic to develop a hierarchically formed base. By building friendships and affinity groups amongst participants who share a passion for justice, this workshop helps build one of the strong social networks that are the currency of strong social action.