Resilience. This word is popping up everywhere. Last year our workshop “Stories of Resilience: Strength through Story” with a group of local women from Gympie was a very deep, enriching experience for us and for the women involved. One woman referred to it as “life changing”. A couple of months later most of the women gathered to discuss next steps. They even used some of our story processes learnt in the workshop “There once was…” “Headlines…”  

The group wants Red Thread Stories back so they can become “change agents in their community” and to “build a community that listens” A powerful vision. So I am returning in late February to assist people to apply strategies they found purposeful in the initial workshop and to explore how they can work to reach their vision. The power of this work is that it came from the women.  

Red Thread Stories are also beginning another project "Our Rocklea" Connecting with the Heart through story and creativity. We are being contracted by ARCSI Inc community centre who have been funded by Brisbane City Council. They do wonderful community work in Acacia Ridge and surrounding suburbs. Ky Curran has also been contracted to assist the creation of a commemorative art mural. We will be holding some workshops and also assisting people to record and document their stories and oral histories. The heart of this work is acknowledging, supporting and celebrating the communities’ capacity and resilience. 

There’s that resilience word again so I thought I would do some resilience research. Community resilience is the "sustained ability of a community to withstand and recover from adversity".(Research Highlights, Rand 2011) How does Red Thread Stories work contribute to building resilient communities? What makes a community resilient? Admiral Thad Allen (see www.rand.org) believes resilience is strengthened by relationships, partnerships and networks of trust and co-operation - the building blocks of a civil society.  A psychologist  Kelly (2011) identified a resilient community as having 

• Access to support services
• Community networking
• Attachment to community
• Participation in community groups
• Community/cultural norms against violence
• Strong cultural identity/ethnic pride

One article I found interesting related to rural communities in Europe. Schouten et al (2011) evaluated the role of community resilience in development programs. They suggested that a community's capacity to adapt is central to its resilience. This adaptive capacity is a function of the community's ability to 1) store and remember experiences what they called INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY 2) to use memory and experience to learn, innovate and reorganise resources in order to adapt to a changing environmental demands or INNOVATIVE LEARNING 3) connect with others inside and outside the community or CONNECTEDNESS.  

This research reinforces the value of what Red Thread Stories does. Stories and oral traditions pass down local knowledge, provide advice, assist with connectedness and belonging. Red Thread Stories also places focus on processes that heighten self-awareness and increase our capacity to learn and connect as we listen deeply to each others experiences and stories. This contributes to a community who wants to consciously focus on building resilience. From self reflection comes learning, from listening deeply comes connection and the building of trusting networks.

However we only play a small role. A catalyst. Community resilience is built over time. People come forward. Leaders emerge  from within the community. Relationships are nurtured. This happened with the women we met from Gympie. 

What Red Thread has yet to explore is building resilience where their is existing conflict or resistance to change within a community. Deb has recently returned from a trip to Sri Lanka where she was part of a team that worked using Playback theatre (the basis for many of Red Thread stories processes) with communities who have been at war with each other. Hopefully she will share some of her experiences in our next blog ... Jen from Red Thread Stories

Stories are critical for engaging community. Recently Department of Communities invited us to facilitate a day with a diverse group of women from local communities surrounding Gympie. Beryl, one woman who shared her story, wrote to us the next day and her words demonstrate something of the essence of the day and the power stories can have in building community and connection. She writes

"I felt that each story was a thread of a  beautiful fabric that is weaving our community into more connectedness. It will make a difference in our community and each woman is both a thread of the fabric and an essence of the perfume of our community. "

Now we are considering how this work can be further deepened and applied in Gympie and other community contexts. 

We are looking forward to next Friday's workshop - 'Facilitating Stories in Groups'. 

Preparing for this workshop has been exciting and stimulating. We (the facilitators) have been exploring the possible steps in a process where, we in conjunction with the participants, evolve an environment in which a range of people feel safe enough to share their stories. Every time we run workshops and share our practice with other practioners we gain greater insights and experience from one another. Its the challenge of developing processes, which allow for the formation, of a community of people, whose needs and desires for that moment are experienced as overlapping and through a sharing of stories people recognise that they have had similar experiences and challenges.

Another delight for us in in Red Thread Stories is that we share our love of stories with each and everyone else who come

There is place for one more, if you are interested in joining us you need to contact us by Wednesday 17 August.

Let me introduce you to Red Thread Stories. We are a consultancy which uses collaborative learning, drawing on the experiences of the participants as they share their stories.  We humans have always told stories to explain our selves to ourselves We put great store on the power of personal stories. They usually have archetypal elements; and we, the listeners see in the other’s story, something pertinent to ourselves and an elaboration of the greater cultural and political world in which we live. The teller is heard and usually learns something more about themselves, others and their cultural milieu. To achieve this we use a process which draws from a number of sources, including physical theatre, improvisation, Playback theatre and psychodrama where the emphasis is on promoting the physical, emotional and conscious engagement of each participant.

Studies have shown the effectiveness of cooperative learning. Groups of people where differences in opinions are shared and discussed can work together to reach agreed decisions which embrace aspects of each other’s views. There are some psychologists who argue that early in our human evolution we learnt to debate or discuss issues with each other and together we reach better decisions than we do on our own. Alone we rarely confront our most deeply held biases and end up with a polarised perspective, which  “even enable us to violate our own moral intuitions” (1) .In a group we have to explain ourselves more carefully and take into account the opinions of others. A similar process can be seen where individuals of like biases group together and maintain strongly polarised positions. Similarly we argue, when we gather in a group and hear stories of people we have not meet before and whose lives may be very different from ours,  we are presented with an opportunity to see similarities and differences between ourselves and the tellers and to begin an exploration, a new dialogue with our self, with another person and another way of being in the world.

(1)  Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.)

Acting Up - Acting Out workshop, Playback Theatre workshop series held in Brisbane in 2010. For information about this and future workshops please contact us.

In 2010 Red Thread Stories ran a workshop at the Celebrating Stories Conference in Melbourne. Have a look at the video and think about going along to the next conference in 2011 "Creative Consulting: Widening the World of Work".

Red Thread Stories has launched its Workshops program for 2011. Learn by doing, reflecting, discovering and applying knowledge and skills to work situations.

For Trainers, facilitators, community and youth workers, service providers, H.R practitioners, counselors, creative performers. Workshops and programs are fully tailored to your particular needs and objectives, so talk to us about how our  “talk, listen, learn‟ workshop methodology can help you, your organisation or your clients. For details please click here.