Building Community for Higher Education and Adult Learning

On March 10, 2020, as New York shut down, I reached out to Gail Kelman and Marc Williams – trusted friends I'd met through my company, Story2 – and asked, "How can I use storytelling to help people through COVID?" They said almost the exact same thing: "Create a space for people to tell their stories."

The following Thursday we opened up that space and called it Storyhood. After the first few weeks, Roxy Azari, Story2 Director of Coaching, took over as group leader. Storyhood, as it lives today, is something Roxy and I co-created, with the stories and trust of many vibrant storytellers across five continents.?

Marc Williams became one of our beloved Storyhood coaches, and helped us launch Storytelling and the Art of Social Entrepreneurship with Jeffrey A. Robinson, Prudential Chair at Rutgers Business School, and Shakee Merritt, president of the student body at Rutgers-Newark.??

We incorporated Storyhood into our virtual learning platform, teaching students from Riverside County, KIPP, Student Leadership Network, and others how to tell their own stories in a community setting as a foundation of their college admissions experience. One of our commitments for 2022 is to find a partner in writing and college admissions to connect this simple, scalable platform with many more high school students in the college process.??

Associate Dean Eva Kubu and Assistant Dean James M. Van Wyck invited me to lead a cohort of Storyhood specifically for graduate students at Princeton. These students were looking for tools to navigate challenging times, and the workshop was offered as a GradFUTURES initiative. We constructed that course based on students' questions and needs; it suggested what was possible using storytelling as a framework both for professional development and for community building. In a post-course survey, one of the graduate students said, "I learned to show how my scholarly research prepares me for other professions." My favorite comment: "It helped me to heal."?

We further developed Storyhood in collaboration with Tsinghua University, Morgan State University, and Hostos Community College at the City University of New York. And we pushed it in an entirely new direction with Rutgers Business School.?

In each of these instances, participants affirmed how the framework of storytelling "improved my speaking and writing confidence" while creating "a sense of community." Pause again to listen to that possibility whispering: when we suspended judgements, interpretations – even short-term outcomes – and focused on telling stories, we improved participants' confidence both in self expression and in their sense of community.?

The outcomes from Storyhood are consistent across different learning contexts:?

• 94% participants said, Storyhood "improved my speaking and writing confidence"
• 98% said, "I learned skills I can use immediately"
• 100% said, "I gained a sense of community"?

In 2022 we are expanding this possibility of combining professional development and community building, supporting adult learners to shape their personal and professional identities while ensuring smooth functioning of an intersectional group.?

Without community there is no learning; we are just a cacophony of individuals fighting for attention and resources. And if we are to work together to heal this planet, our shared home, before it's too late, we need everyone to start where they are, muster the energy and will they have already, and work together to shift how we approach these fundamental challenges as a human community.?

With change comes opportunity. We've made exciting shifts in the Story2 team to lead this next phase:

• Promotion of Kim Cuomo to President of Story2 where she’ll extend her responsibilities to the operational and financial success of the business and its people.?
• Promotion of Nick Fernald to Director of Systems and Learning, ?the perfect fit given his Masters in Education from Harvard and classroom teaching experience in English and Spanish.

I will shift my focus to writing and publishing about storytelling and community; developing and leading cohort-based master classes; and coaching leaders working to transform their culture to one that works for and is led by their teams.?

Like the metal at the heart of a medieval shield, the boss is the center of the business. The boss takes the hard hits so others can move forward, radiating learning and change outward – because without community we are nothing, not as individuals and certainly not as a team.?

You could say that we've been doing this work of Storyhood all along, side by side teaching people how to use stories to get more of what they want and deserve. The first test of that possibility was a workshop Ita Ekpoudom invited me to lead for women leaders at Mastercard in 2015.?

Last year, we worked with Anesha Grant and Kishau Rogers to create a live, online course to help young Black women secure leadership roles in technology for Black Girls Code. And I coached engineers at a major pharma company. Each of these corporate assignments is designed to promote individual learning and growth, while building community for the people together online.?

I am indebted to Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon and the Founder Gym community for helping me see what was right in front of me, what I wanted and was trying to do all along; the visionary investor Arlan Hamilton whose It's About Damn Time taught me to "show up as myself, so the right people can find me;" and Resmaa Menakem, whose essential book, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our? Hearts and Bodies, led me to do the work of healing, publicly and in real time.?

I invite you to join me and the Story2 team in this new adventure. We look forward to building storytelling and community for you and your team.?