By Stephanie Narayanan, Director of Development and External Relations
Two years ago, I told a story about my mom onstage. She wasn’t able to attend in person—I really needed her help with my then-one-year-old instead—but she watched the video and sent the link to basically everyone she knew.
Two days after this year’s storytelling show, she died. It was not wholly unexpected, but the timing was a shock. It still is.
I’ve been thinking about a lot of things in the aftermath, but one of them is the story I tell myself about who my mom was and what she meant in my life. There is something truly crystallizing about having to choose an angle and tell your story in an eight-minute time frame. It’s a gentler version of the elevator pitch because you have time for supportive—even sentimental—details, but you’re still forced to cut most of the fluff.
The story I chose to tell onstage was about how literally lifesaving good systems can be. I’ve seen them in action, which makes it all the more devastating to realize they don’t work for everyone. They may not even be open to everyone. Changing that, helping us all do better, is what drives me.
Last year, our President and CEO Leslie Graham talked about how disorienting the immigration journey was for her, even as someone who ostensibly spoke the same language, and how a little voice of welcome has stayed with her throughout her life.
Haseeb Shinwary, our Workforce Navigator Manager, talked this year about his journey from Aghanistan to PCC. Despite the winding road in between, he’s managed to continue his core purpose of supporting education and empowerment for women, including the women his daughters will one day be.
None of these stories replace the data we should and do gather on our community impact. But metrics matter mostly as a high-level proxy for all those impact stories we’ll never get to hear. In fact, our human-centered design colleagues on the healthcare access team are used to stories as an integral part of the research and design process. They do interviews and collate results into representative “personas” whose challenges they seek to solve. People’s experiences are baked into how they understand the problem and roll out a solution.
Stories are also critical for a backbone organization like ours to do any degree of general fundraising. Because the general public doesn’t think in systems; they think in people. We all do, really. No matter how good we feel about an 11% increase in annual colorectal cancer screening rates, it matters most because we can imagine the beloved mother who’s still thriving next Thanksgiving following early diagnosis and intervention.
The evolution of the show I’ve enjoyed the most is that, generally, we no longer recruit direct service beneficiaries as the storytellers. Reasons include specifics like the unpaid time commitment involved and privacy considerations, as well as larger conversations about how nonprofits share client stories. Instead, our show focuses on the people doing this work and the experiences that drive them, with room to be as vulnerable—or not—as they like.
And, just maybe, that’s the ultimate nonprofit storytelling anyway: acknowledging the relationship between our own vulnerabilities and our desire to help. Our truest stories are an exploration of the ways we all need community and each other.
Two years ago, I told a story about my mom onstage. She wasn’t able to attend in person—I really needed her help with my then-one-year-old instead—but she watched the video and sent the link to basically everyone she knew.
Two days after this year’s storytelling show, she died. It was not wholly unexpected, but the timing was a shock. It still is.
I’ve been thinking about a lot of things in the aftermath, but one of them is the story I tell myself about who my mom was and what she meant in my life. There is something truly crystallizing about having to choose an angle and tell your story in an eight-minute time frame. It’s a gentler version of the elevator pitch because you have time for supportive—even sentimental—details, but you’re still forced to cut most of the fluff.
The story I chose to tell onstage was about how literally lifesaving good systems can be. I’ve seen them in action, which makes it all the more devastating to realize they don’t work for everyone. They may not even be open to everyone. Changing that, helping us all do better, is what drives me.
Last year, our President and CEO Leslie Graham talked about how disorienting the immigration journey was for her, even as someone who ostensibly spoke the same language, and how a little voice of welcome has stayed with her throughout her life.
Haseeb Shinwary, our Workforce Navigator Manager, talked this year about his journey from Aghanistan to PCC. Despite the winding road in between, he’s managed to continue his core purpose of supporting education and empowerment for women, including the women his daughters will one day be.
None of these stories replace the data we should and do gather on our community impact. But metrics matter mostly as a high-level proxy for all those impact stories we’ll never get to hear. In fact, our human-centered design colleagues on the healthcare access team are used to stories as an integral part of the research and design process. They do interviews and collate results into representative “personas” whose challenges they seek to solve. People’s experiences are baked into how they understand the problem and roll out a solution.
Stories are also critical for a backbone organization like ours to do any degree of general fundraising. Because the general public doesn’t think in systems; they think in people. We all do, really. No matter how good we feel about an 11% increase in annual colorectal cancer screening rates, it matters most because we can imagine the beloved mother who’s still thriving next Thanksgiving following early diagnosis and intervention.
The evolution of the show I’ve enjoyed the most is that, generally, we no longer recruit direct service beneficiaries as the storytellers. Reasons include specifics like the unpaid time commitment involved and privacy considerations, as well as larger conversations about how nonprofits share client stories. Instead, our show focuses on the people doing this work and the experiences that drive them, with room to be as vulnerable—or not—as they like.
And, just maybe, that’s the ultimate nonprofit storytelling anyway: acknowledging the relationship between our own vulnerabilities and our desire to help. Our truest stories are an exploration of the ways we all need community and each other.
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