Our work is underpinned by this definition from the Village Storytelling Centre Glasgow, Scotland and the Aurus project: https://www.aurusproject.eu/
“Applied Storytelling is the purposeful application of story as a tool for personal, community or organisational development, learning or information-gathering and sharing. The ultimate goal is often to support and platform participants’ expression in ways which feel safe, authentic and appropriate for them. These processes have the potential to be of benefit to participants’ well-being and self-esteem, as well as to support people with lived experience to inform organisational and/or strategic change.”
Applied storytelling can be used in many settings: examples are in schools, communities, in workplace organisations, in the criminal justice setting and in voluntary organisations.
Applied storytelling fits with our person-centred approach to people and can be undertaken with minimum resources. We adopt a strengths-based approach, focusing on people’s strengths rather than weaknesses. We favour arts-based creative approaches to facilitate storytelling, giving participants a choice in how they want their voice to be heard. This may be through spoken word, but equally through visual arts such as painting, modelling or digital outputs.
We also use Digital storytelling to support people to share stories and for impact evaluation.