Chief Storyteller

For three years, I served on former Mayor Michael B. Hancock’s senior team as director of communications. We heard so many stories and wanted others to hear them, too, but struggled to reach underserved communities and engage them in a way that built relationships. When my husband died in 2015, I could no longer be available 24/7 and took my efforts to find new solutions to the Agency for Human Rights & Community Partnerships. The Mayor said, “Meet people where they are.” These days that means video and social media. I set out to change the official history of Denver through film by creating Denver’s first Office of Storytelling.

The Denver Office of Storytelling preserves and shares the history and culture of the city primarily by creating films in the voices of residents. Through story, the office strives to inform decision-making at City Hall and to uplift community voices for conversation and engagement, particularly around issues of social justice. Since 2019, DOST has created eight documentary films and dozens of other stories – from daring drag queens to the first Black fire chief, from Native educators to wheelchair activists, and so much more.

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 over the past five years has taught us it isn’t enough to share stories that often reveal the hurdles that people have been forced to overcome. Residents have taught us that stories 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.

In the past few years, we’ve hosted more than 40 community screenings, and at many, someone cries. People also laugh and cheer, many excited about seeing themselves – or people who look 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.”