Watch this post on YouTube (text is a transcript of the video)

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”  – Barry Lopez

Hi everybody. I’m Avril Paice and welcome to my project on how non-profit organizations can ethically share stories about the clients that they serve.  I’m going to talk a little bit more about storytelling and what I mean by ethically sharing a story.

So we know that as human beings stories are one of the most important ways that we connect to other people, and they are a way that we make sense of the experiences that we have had in our lives. Non-profit organizations are sharing stories about their clients to engage other people and to raise money, and to raise awareness about the work that they do, and also to influence how people think about important social issues. And that includes everything from war and the refugee crisis, to poverty and homelessness, and mental health, and violence, just to name a few examples.

And as non-profit organizations we are using every platform available to us to share those stories, so everything from our newsletters and websites and blogs, to social media, to mainstream media, and also doing a lot of presentations and speaking at events. Any platform that we can use to get the word out is potentially beneficial to the work that we do.

The Good Stuff

For the clients that we serve in non-profit organizations, telling their personal stories can be very empowering and affirming, and it can help them to combat the risk of shame and isolation. It can have a huge impact on others, the people who hear the story, and respond to it. And as a social worker, I have an ethical obligation (from my practice perspective, not under law or policy) to help clients to make sense of their life experiences, and to tell a coherent story about what has happened to them. I have an ethical obligation to help clients to connect to their own power to make a bigger change in the world, if that’s something that they want. And I have an ethical obligation to help clients to decide and express what is right for them.

The Tough Stuff

We’re also have a lot of concerns about clients sharing their stories, or having their stories shared by other people, and how that affects their privacy and confidentiality, and how informed and ongoing consent fits into that, especially in the age of the internet where nothing truly ever goes away once it is published. There are some really important cultural considerations around ethical storytelling.  And one of the biggest concerns is when someone’s story is shared in public, we aren’t always aware of how that is truly affecting their healing, and their safety, and the stability in their lives.

And so I’ve had the opportunity to speak with clients of non-profit organizations who shared their stories to benefit those organizations, and they did that because they were grateful for the services they had received, they believed in the organization and wanted to support the work, and wanted to make sure that services were available for others in the future, and for all kinds of really positive reasons. And in some cases what I found was that although, at the time, everybody thought it was a good experience and nobody in the organization was aware that there were concerns, in fact, some clients did not feel that they had a way to say no or to set limits on what they shared, or they shared more than they had intended to in the moment, and in some cases there were unintended consequences of their sharing of their stories (or allowing their stories to be shared), and in some cases stories were used out of context, and that was also damaging to those clients.

Keeping It Real

Another concern about ethically telling stories about clients is that we want, as organizations, to be real and authentic with the supporters that we are engaging. And so when we take a story and strip it of all of the identifying details, or we create composite stories that reflect common experiences of our clients, we can lose some of that realness and connectedness that is really the whole point of telling the story in the first place. And that’s a very common challenge of non-profit organizations.

3 Cs of Ethical Storytelling

So over the years, I have developed some tools and processes for working with organizations and working with clients who are agreeing to have their stories shared. And  I focus on 3 areas which are working compassionately with clients, working with informed consent and ongoing consent, and keeping stories in context. So I call those the 3Cs of ethical storytelling.

Learning Together

The really interesting thing about this topic of telling our stories ethically is that there’s been very little research on these topics, and so there’s an opportunity there to work with researchers and also to learn from other materials that are relevant to these topics. There are, in a lot of cases, no easy solutions and what’s interesting about that is it creates an opportunity for all of us as non-profit organizations to talk with each other and learn from each other and be creative. And probably, most especially, to really engage clients in this process and hear from them and encourage them to have a voice and tell us about their experiences, and tell us how we can do this better. So those are some of the things that I really enjoy about doing this work.

What’s next?

One of the questions that non-profit organizations have asked me about this project is whether I’ll be sharing any of the “bad” practices that I see in the field, and the answer to that is absolutely not. There will be no public shaming of organizations in this project. I do like to share good examples when I have permission and when I see an organization that has overcome a challenge or they’ve just come up with a really great way of sharing stories and working with clients around that. So I encourage people to send me your examples, send me your questions, your challenges, your ideas. And really this project is about all of us learning together and learning from each other and from the experiences of our clients. And making that really safe. So everything that I know, I have learned from the mistakes that I’ve made and just from not knowing better at the time. And being curious. And those are some of the things that are really important to me in doing this work.

So I also have to let everyone know that this project is not meant to replace any legal advice that organizations should be seeking for their challenges (talk to lawyers about legal stuff).

And the other thing I want to let people know is that I offer consultations and presentations for organizations and community groups who are dealing with challenges around sharing stories ethically, and I do that completely free of charge. So please do reach out to me if that’s of interest and if you want to discuss that further. Please do follow the blog and my social media (see links at bottom of website) and you can also find me online at avrilpaice.com. And thank you so much everybody and please stay tuned!