Share your Story Erasmus Project

Project Title

Share your Story

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; Inclusion – equity; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

Long forgotten, but extremely powerful is the ancient art of storytelling. This oral tool has been used for centuries in order to communicate, heal and learn, and it offers a unusual but original approach to building self esteem, finding courage in the face of thriving uncertainty and coping with the unforeseen pitfalls of the everyday. During the last years, Finland and Slovenia have been infused with the energy of newcomers. Yet their assimilation has seldom been smooth. The challenges we face today are not new. Only the stories are. That is why, with our “Share Your Story” storytelling project, we focused on the social inclusion of the most vulnerable group of them all, young unemployed immigrants. With our workshops and storytelling cafés our aim was to make them more confident in expressing themselves by using their own personal story as a metaphor for other situations and giving others a deeper understanding of our multicultural society. Listening to stories really widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel.

We were trained (by a professional storyteller), we held transnational meetings in both countries, we organized an online webinar about storytelling in the classroom (for European teachers), we planned in-depth workshops and storytelling cafés (involving role play, ice breakers, non-formal learning, crafting, telling a story), and we ran a final seminar where our experiences and learning outcomes were used to make a practical manual (working methods, tips, do and donts, organizational advise). Nevertheless, not all the objectives of the project were met because we were not able to organize our storytelling workshops. That is way we also changed the narrative from our workshops more towards refugees, people from a foreign background (who don’t see themselves necessarily as immigrants), and to all newcomers to our societies as such. A wider interest group to make our project eventually come true. We are proud to present the creation of a manual for organizing storytelling workshops for immigrants, which is online available for anyone interested in the methodology of storytelling, as way to improve social inclusion of immigrants. With this manual our goal is to raise the potential of storytelling as an educational tool for youngsters, youth organisations, NGOs and schools, and use these methodologies and materials to motivate young immigrants. While stories have an impact on the listeners, telling them persuasively can really boost the young immigrants self-confidence and will make it easier to accept their current situation (unemployment, social exclusion) and give them the energy, engagement and motivation to look for a new job, a new and supportive community, a new start overall. Our manual, with many practical exercises in which personal stories are the core tool for delivering the entire workshop, not only teaches how to act, our aim is also to inspire others to act, so youngsters will be able to integrate quicker, promote themselves better and make the transition from unemployment to the world of work more rapidly. Our manual is a practical guide for everyone, based on a process of sharing stories, discovering personal power through your own story and supporting that personal awareness through the stories of others.

We have send our practical guidelines to over 800 schools in Finland, and also immigration offices, NGOs and adult education centres have picked it up already. We have focused our dissemination of the projects´ results to these representatives of local youth organizations, local NGOs, immigration offices, and adult education centres since they have the best established networks to reach out to young unemployed immigrants and make our free online manual available for for anyone interested in our project results. Together with our website http://storiesofhelsinki.wix.com/shareyourstory, we believe that in this way, we will be able to reach as many young immigrants as we possibly can, and increase our impact on the success of storytelling as a tool for fighting social exclusion on the long run. Furthermore, we will stay active with our own social enterprise, to disseminate the project results outside our partnership at the local and regional level, so our manual and storytelling workshops can be used in schools, libraries and a variety of other locations. For us, it was important to create a change that will be sustainable for the local community on the long run.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 12953,28 Eur

Project Coordinator

Inspiring Storytellers & Country: FI

Project Partners

• Storytellers for Change