It’s a vibrant community where testimony is cultivated, creativity is nurtured, respectful discourse is fostered, and change is created one powerful, purposeful narrative at a time.
A narrative advocacy training at the Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy.
We are survivors, witnesses, writers, advocates, artists, and allies calling injustice by its name and calling the world to confront it.
Because we are here to be heard.
During our signature two-day writing workshop, participants read and discuss testimonial writing from across history, social movements, and genres; take part in a series of real-time writing exercises; and benefit from moderated, trauma-informed workshopping of their writing. We currently offer workshops for survivors of gender-based violence; immigrants and refugees; those impacted by economic injustice and income inequality; and those impacted by racial injustice, particularly within the criminal justice system. We run workshops for both adults and youth.
Our Center for Story & Witness Narrative Advocacy Training Program was created to help allies, advocates, and activists, working on a wide range of social justice issues, think in new ways about the power, purpose, and ethics of storytelling; to consider how language and word choice can help us break through ideological or partisan barriers; and to consider which stories they seek to tell in their work.
We partner with world-class artists, writers, and content creators who are as passionate about human rights as they are about artistic excellence. Together, we bring the stories developed through our writing workshops to life in powerful, provocative, change-creating ways.
Through our year-long Teacher Training Institute & Fellows Program, we’re developing a new generation of testimonial writing workshop instructors and facilitators. Our end goal? Cultivating leaders deeply connected to the communities we work with, so as to expand our Center for Story & Witness programming at the grassroots level.
We’ve worked on four continents, in 12 countries, and over 40 U.S. states.
COLLABORATIVE
Brought our programs and lectures to over 250 grassroots organizations.
Trained over 26,000 activists through our narrative advocacy trainings.
Graduated over 1,300 writers from our testimonial writing program.
Helped change state and federal law through our coalition-driven, story-focused advocacy efforts.
Developed to help those who have lived through or witnessed gender-based violence or other human rights violations use their voices, faces, and stories to call the public to greater compassion and — more importantly — social action, Center for Story...
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Louder Together, Center for Story & Witness’s crowdsourced poetry project, seeks to create video poetry that speaks to a range of human rights and social justice issues. Each crowdsourced poem in the series utilizes the voices of those who have lived...
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At Center for Story & Witness — a global storytelling initiative and testimonial writing program — we love celebrating the successes of our staff, workshop alums, and organizational allies. In Spring, 2025, there will be a lot to celebrate as...
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In September, 2024, Center for Story & Witness (formerly The Voices and Faces Project) traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, where we partnered with UN Women to pilot our newest narrative advocacy workshop series, Local Storytelling, Global Change: Using Narrative in the...
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This summer, award-winning playwright Caity-Shea Violette, an alum of our Stories We Tell testimonial writing workshop for survivors of gender-based violence, and novelist R. Clifton Spargo the co-creator of that program and a lecturer in creative writing at Yale University,...
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Our lives are constructed through narrative. We live our stories, and then we tell those stories in a way that allows us to make sense of them. But which stories do we choose to tell, and in what medium or...
READ MORE ❯Reconsidering the power, purpose, and ethics of storytelling
Developing the next generation of workshop leadership
