Retreat 2023

Storytelling

When I first started as a fellow for Path to Purpose, I knew that I wanted to incorporate storytelling into whatever project I chose to do. A dream of mine had always been to create a student-led town hall. We often choose to go into an area of social change based on what we have been personally affected by and I always thought it was important to hear the stories behind why change is being created. I was given the opportunity to host a town hall at our Spring Retreat at Lake Wauburg. I created around twenty prompts and had the fellows choose one randomly out of a bowl. Prompts were either labeled yellow or purple depending on the difficulty of the questions being asked. I created prompts ranging from questions about religion to questions about one's favorite food. The goal was to create a safe space for individuals to speak about a story pertaining to the given prompt and why they may hold an opinion based on the story. I received so much positive feedback from the town hall and it heavily motivated me to continue activities like these in my next year at Path to Purpose

In February of 2023, fellows from Path to Purpose organized a virtual exchange with students from South Africa. The goal was to speak with these students about the work that we do and the interest areas we have in order to help them think about their own interest areas they may have based on their experiences and stories. Another fellow, Haiden, and I were tasked to create and discuss storytelling methods and what is required in order to efficiently and effectively tell a story. We explained the basic elements of storytelling and used example stories as well in order to get our points across. In our second meeting, the students from South Africa told us their stories, one student explained how he wanted to become an electrician because the village that he was from always had power outages. Another student wanted to become a neurosurgeon due to her grandfather passing away from a rare brain tumor. Storytelling can be done through different mediums such as, dialogue, art, and dance, my experiences, and work in storytelling have shown me how impactful it can be to listen and tell different stories and tap into our empathy in order to create and encourage sustainable change.