Digital Stories Canada

After the Community Digital Storytelling (CDS) workshop ends, the stories that have been co-created need to find their niche audience. Completing the work is a thrill, as is experiencing the community members’ reaction.

How has the workshop design has changed over time for Our World Language, Indigenous-led programs, AMES and Digital Stories Canada?

Community Digital Storytelling grows out of our experiences in the world, shared as stories. Our strategy, as mentors developing new approaches to storytelling, is to create and hold open a receptive and welcoming space.

Doing this work in community (when safer spaces are created and held) tends to accelerate the process of individual healing, but it also activates the process of community healing—and can help ‘bring back the spirit’ of an entire people, culture or community.

In one way or another, all of the Community Storytelling practitioners interviewed referenced the healing capacity of storytelling. Evoking a full spectrum of emotions, the storytelling process is often experienced as sacred, therapeutic, cathartic, entertaining, and transformative—not only for the teller, but for those privileged enough to listen.

Brave stories require safe and supportive spaces for them to emerge into. In one on one, or smaller story-settings, creating a comfortable and safe space is primarily about the emotional qualities that a mentor or facilitator brings to the table (sincerity, curiosity, patience and openness, to name a few), whereas in larger workshops this might take the form of icebreakers, ‘community guidelines’, or community-circles.

Community Digital Storytelling doesn’t have a straightforward lineage that can be traced back to a singular ‘forefather’ at a specific time or location, but has emerged through multiple circles in multiple locations over time.

How did our Digital Storytelling Initiative begin? Lorna Boschman and Venay Felton decided to work together to research community digital storytelling.