Community Building requires Community Storytellers

In a recent email from THE NONPROFIT QUARTERLY magazine they had an archived article about the need for story telling when it comes to building momentum. Seems to me one of the things lacking today in the discourse that is disguised as dialog is a context. Stories help us provide context.

We are in meetings a lot as people around Hartsville work to find ways to make this community even better. Sometimes we hear great stories, most of the time we hear opinions. The article in NPQ does provide some real food for builing a story-telling skill. Susan Nall Bliss wrote the article and she built a case for why stories are important and also provided examples from some master journalistic story tellers. Here is a paragraph sort of setting up the need for story telling: In the opening pages of Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller famously intones, “I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse.” Miller was castigating the inability of the myth of the Rugged Individual or the Self-Making Person to capture the reality of life for many Americans in the 1930s. A contemporary update might read, “I will give you the Ownership Society as it looks the day after the levees broke.” That story, still in the making, would focus our attention on the things we must do together, because they cannot be done individually: from building roads and a reliable healthcare infrastructure to improving schools and repairing the ladder of opportunity in our society.

I recommend this article and then I recommend HartsvilleToday as a place to put some of these stories that can be told for our community and some of the stories that you might imagine if we don't continue to pay attention to positive growth in our community.