"Finding the Story" Workshop

Saturday, September 17, 1:30-5:30 PM; College Center S. Ballroom

Dr. Enrique Salmon, director of American Indian Studies at Cal State University East Bay, will facilitate a workshop, "Finding the Story."

Dr. Enrique Salmon is a Raramuri Tarahumara. He has dedicated his studies to ethnobiology and traditional ecological knowledge in order to better understand his own and other cultural perceptions of culture, landscapes and place. His book, "Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stewards of Food and Resilience:, will soon be released by the University of Arizona Press. Dr. Salmon will lead a four-hour workshop on Saturday afternoon that will empower participants to begin translating the "small steps" discussed at the conference into "big stories" for their respective communities. Dr. Salmon has led this workshop as a two-day workshop for The Center for Whole Communities. 

Workshop Description

The Need

For too long now our movements for change - especially the conservation and environmental ones – have hidden behind data, statistics, action plans, and budgets to convey their purpose and progress to those outside the movements and to those from which we want to garner support and involvement. But information is not transformation and what is most needed today are the tools that bring about ways of seeing, thinking, and acting.  Story – identifying and making heard our deepest felt longings and beliefs – can help us to cross the boundaries between one another, and therefore, can help our movements for change reach out more authentically to serve and connect more people. The practice of story, both finding our own and truly hearing the stories of others, holds the possibility of transformation on many levels.

What Will Be Offered

In this four-hour workshop, participants will explore what their story might look and sound like for a movement that stands to break old stereotypes and serve much more broadly the neighbors in their region. We’ll start with our personal stories; the values and ideas that captivate us and how they can best be presented. Next, we’ll talk about how personal stories and beliefs can be woven into a leadership practice that has the power to move and unite people. Participants will learn from one another how to speak about conditions that they are struggling with without offering nightmare scenarios and how to offer our dreams without being dreamy. We’ll look at how we can best support one another to find our voice, to use shared language, and to express stories that will better move our homelands toward a healthy future.

What Participants Can Expect to Learn

• How to articulate the things they care about so that they become more important to others
• How to hear others’ stories and come to a deeper understanding of those very different from themselves
• How to employ story practices to begin a firm articulation of what the new story might look and taste like
• How to define and articulate the solution and the vision, not the problem and the consequences
• How to use story to earn broader bases of support in their work
• How an organization or community can harness story to become a better agent of change