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.
Highlights
Working in neighborhoods and alongside community members to support their locally-driven projects is a fulfilling, yet increasingly challenging part of planning and social work
Story Bridge is a program that uses storytelling in a variety of artistic mediums to spark dialogue among community members about matters close to their heart, with the mission of empowering communities
Acknowledging the important role of social ties, we address the call by the American Academy of Social Work to explore innovative approaches to help “rebuild the fabric of frayed social connections” [4] (p. 8) by exploring arts and storytelling as capacity building work
Summary
Working in neighborhoods and alongside community members to support their locally-driven projects is a fulfilling, yet increasingly challenging part of planning and social work. Researchers have found that building community capacity supports program sustainability [1] as the longevity of local funding often requires evidence-based results [2]. This paper introduces the Story Bridge program hosted by the Lopez Island Community Land Trust and makes the following contributions. 8) by exploring arts and storytelling as capacity building work. Expanding on social work’s call, we seek to expand awareness to the planning profession for the need for more capacity building projects to address the challenges associated with social isolation in community work
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