Around the world, organizations struggle with how to engage constituents too busy for more meetings or another newsletter, people already wrestling with myriad media options. Is it even possible to get through?
In 2019, Denver decided to try a new and incredibly unique approach: Listening. Over the next five years, residents had much to say and even more to teach us about their experiences and our history as well as how best to do this work. They taught us the true power of story and its capacity to educate, to foster empathy and to change the narrative for social good.
With a staff of four and since 2022 only three, the Denver Office of Storytelling served more than half a million people. We created nine documentary films, about a hundred short films – not counting those that came out of storytelling labs – made about four million impressions on social media and hosted more than 70 community events. Most of those were film screenings by request of organizations wanting to share the work with their communities for educational and social good and as part of DEI efforts.
The work was recognized around the world. Dr. Simon Renoir of Université Sorbonne Paris Nord created a day-long conference based on the work, La production de représentations ordinaires du territoire par des dispositifs de «storytelling participatif», in fall 2022. The Office of Storytelling was featured on Chinese Global Television Network in 2023 and, in 2021, in the inaugural issue of Governance Matters magazine, which provides a platform for public servants and policymakers in 140 countries to share insights, experiences and good practices.
The Denver Office of Storytelling had work selected for five film festivals, was nominated for six Heartland Emmys and honored with some 27 different awards.
A scroll through www.IAmDenver.org provides perhaps the most accurate and diverse representation of a city anywhere. From a Vietnamese comic who tells his parents’ Boat People story to a Black cowboy who saw himself in rodeo when no one else did, from the city’s first same-sex married couple to an Iraqi refugee who helps others make a home in Denver and an unhoused woman getting prenatal care that included an ultrasound for the first time, you’ll find a broad diversity of ages, races, abilities, gender, religion and more in our stories – all in the voices of those who lived them.
Because this project was the first of its kind, we had no model to build off of. Working directly with hundreds of residents taught us it isn’t enough to share stories that often reveal the hurdles that people have been forced to overcome without including their triumphs, as well. Stories also have the potential to inspire change by bringing unheard voices into City Hall to inform and improve policymaking while also fostering relationships with the city and among neighbors.
At our community events, people laughed, cried and cheered, many excited about seeing themselves – or people who looked like them – often for the first time, in a story they never expected to be told let alone on a big screen at the highest quality. After a screening of “A Thousand Paper Cranes,” about how Denver’s Japanese American community emerged from internment in southeast Colorado during WWII, a woman whose mother was in one of the camps and featured in the film stood up and said, “Our only family heirloom was an Army blanket from one of the camps – until this film.”
See more at IAmDenver.org.