Ethical Storytelling: Introduction to Ethical Storytelling 101

I'm Heidi Berkey and I'm Rachel Goebel and this is the Ethical Storytelling podcast. Boop boop boop. [laughs] Gotta keep it fun. So Rachel, who the heck are you? Well, I'm still figuring that part out a little bit but I would say that we're here today because I've been running an anti-trafficking organization for the last about decade or so and we've done a lot of storytelling over the last 10 years and we have learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes and we're very interested in looking at what we can create in terms of a code of conduct and standards and starting a conversation around how we can be telling story better in this space. I like that. I'm into it. Where are you here? Well, I'm a storyteller so I've spent the last almost 10 years of my life making films for nonprofits, for advocacy work and then also in news and media so I've kind of spanned the various avenues through which stories about human suffering and global issues have kind of been the focus and I really want to learn how to create more dignity for those stories that I'm capturing but also to help guide nonprofits and feature filmmakers in learning from the mistakes that I've made and hopefully avoiding those as a community moving forward. What are some of those mistakes that you feel like you've made over the years? I think assumptions are the initial mistake going into countries and cultures that I've only read about and had an experience in assuming storylines and throughlines that actually weren't the reality but I was so committed to them that I framed the story and the way that I captured this story through a lens that wasn't actually reality. And I think there was a moment where it shifted for me. I was filming in the Congo in the DRC and I was at a hospital where women were being treated a medical treatment and there was a little girl who had a half body cast. She was about three years old and she for the first two days I was at the hospital hadn't smiled was really downcast and had a pretty terrible experience in her village that had put her in that cast and my assumption was this woman, this child is downtrodden, this child is destroyed, her spirit is destroyed and I was so intrigued by it and just constantly wanted to make her laugh or to do something and to film her and then on the third day when I was there I walked into this room and she was playing with a couple other kids and she was dancing and laughing and running around like a little child and it was shocking to me. I almost expected that she didn't have that in her and it made me realize that her backstory was actually what far less important than the fact that she was just dancing in her little broken cast and it taught me that there's different ways we can see suffering and I think the way that I choose to embrace suffering has to be done over time and it has to be done through listening and observing for a while before I ever pull my camera out. I can definitely hear your dog. Are you snoring? Don't snore. Any story is a good story. It's okay, Willow. Just stay there. What mistakes have you made in that you're hoping to help others learn from? You know, I think looking back at it, I would say when you create story within a nonprofit, I see story in many ways as a nonprofit's currency and so I think we share stories as organizations to show impact, to show social change, to inspire people for hope or for freedom that change is possible and to invite people into the missions of who we are and what we're doing and to kind of, I think in many ways, bring what can be global issues into different parts of the world that otherwise would not be able to learn about those narratives or those issues and when you're creating story, there's a lot of different ways to go about that but I think there's also different audiences that you're creating it for and I think that there have been many times in our past where we've created story particularly for a donor and in the process of that, either not engage the narrative and the nuances that are available in a narrative to teach us and to remind us that we are connected in our humanity and instead have focused on what a donor might want to hear or need to hear or even reiterating a narrative perhaps that they're already used to hearing so that it's something that they may expect, especially in the anti-trafficking world from an anti-trafficking organization and so I think as we've grown and matured in our storytelling, we've begun to shift away from that audience and instead focused on how can we tell story in a way that really inspires resilience and gives examples of youth in our program that we hope will inspire the other youth in our program and so we've started creating story more for our youth than we have necessarily for our donors and I think that as we've gone through that shift, it's taught me that we made mistakes in the past and we told story that I don't think was ours to tell and we didn't necessarily hold the sacredness of that space with people that either entrusted us or honestly may have even felt forced to share their story and if I could go back, I think I would tell that younger version of myself the importance and the sacredness of story sometimes means that it should not be published and so now my hope in this space is that we can start to create a discernment process around when is it that we share story? When is story meant for a small room, a sacred space? When is story meant to inspire? When is story meant to heal and to start to learn how to trust our intuition, how to remind us of our common humanity in those spaces so that we're creating story that really is bringing all of us towards a more whole and free future? Yeah, that standard that you mentioned is really I think what drives my personal interest in this and having really graduated into the digital age 10 years ago, we were looking at fundraising and storytelling in the digital landscape which is so different than it had been operating in before and with that more and more accessed great cameras was also happening simultaneously. So the access internationally to these stories and also the ability to capture them was at the hands of 22-year-olds who have had amazing intentions and I was one of those and realizing over time that we weren't holding ourselves to any journalistic standards because we weren't journalists, we weren't holding ourselves to documentary standards because we weren't quite that. We were working with nonprofits and oftentimes nonprofits who didn't hold us to any standards and so I really am hoping that this becomes a place where those of us who have made mistakes feel free and safe to share them for the learnings of those who are coming after us but I also hope that we as a community can come together and define our own standards for nonprofit storytelling and ethical storytelling and really say this is the standard that we want to live by. Yeah, I completely agree. I think one of the temptations that I've seen organizations fall into in part of what inspired that righteous anger so to speak in me that really launched me into okay what is this kind of idea of ethical storytelling and how do we start to grow in that conversation? I started to see multiple organizations, I work in Southeast Asia and I started to see multiple organizations exploit the narrative of trafficking to raise money for themselves and I can you know think of one in particular where there was a founder that began to write false narrative is about the young women that were in his program about how they had been trafficked and the terrible things that had happened to them and it turned out that none of that was true he was selling a false narrative to raise money for his organization or there's other instances where maybe Maybe a story should have been kept in a small sacred space and instead it was broadcast to the entire world. And people that I think are healing in their story aren't ready for that. And it's not the world's story to hold. It's their personal story to hold. So really I think that the narrative aspect of how we tell story, how we can so easily exploit story, especially in the justice community, especially in the anti-trafficking world, which has been my world for the last 10 years, I'm excited to create the possibility of a new way of doing that. And I'm sure that even 10 years from now we'll be looking back and saying, "Oh, Rachel and Heidi, oh, the mistakes you made." You thought you were creating something new and you started this conversation around ethical storytelling, but I think that that's the point. It's a growth. I would look back at where I was 10 years ago and I'm glad I'm not there anymore. I'm glad I have grown to where I am and I have no doubt that we will continue to grow and continue to evolve. And so just to reiterate, I think Heidi, what you were just sharing, that hope that it is a place where we can share where we've made mistakes. But the posture that we all take as we come into these conversations is one of, we want to grow, we want to learn. We want to hear a diverse perspective of voices and ideas so that truly we can keep taking one step forward. And so no matter where you are in that journey, that we're all engaging our growth because I think that's what matters. Yeah, and whether it is an engaging with stories in a devastating field like the trafficking world or if it's simply talking about poverty and lack of access to food or water, there is something we can all do to be better storytellers and to create more dignified stories. And so this will be the place that we hope we can break down some of those examples and we can hear from practitioners and we can hear from storytellers who can share about the ways that they're trying to apply this in their own lives. And we can all take something away from it. So welcome to the Ethical Storytelling Podcast. We hope you all learned something and we hope you'll share your stories with us too.