What is Digital Storytelling?

What is Digital Storytelling?

Simply defined, “Digital Storytelling" uses new digital tools to help people tell their own stories in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories can build community. Community storytelling and multimedia narratives, focused on social inequity and injustice, can become forces for social change by disadvantaged communities.

Since 2000, ZeroDivide has been a leader in the field of digital storytelling funding. In collaboration with Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), the California Council for the Humanities (CCH), and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ZeroDivide is working with these organizations to develop opportunities to amplify community voices through digital storytelling.

Together, we provide training and technical assistance to a network of organizations to generate rich content about stories, histories, events, languages, and to promote social justice oriented storytelling through community multimedia.

DSI: California Stories 

DSI: California Stories is a collaboration between The California Council for Humanities and ZeroDivide to support programs that focus on building a diverse cohort of California youth to capture and tell the stories that are unique to their lives, through the use of digital media and the humanities.

DSI:California Stories is creating the next generation of digital storytellers from a cohort of eight organizations through a select program of cash grants, technical assistance and peer collaboration resulting in a collection of digital stories that reflect the craft and vision of young storytellers. The application of technology—not only as a medium and tool for filmmaking—but as a way to explore new modes of learning and shared expression will be explored. Participants learn how to effectively distribute, disseminate, and share their newly created works—with an emphasis on identifying new models of communication enabled through technology such as mobile devices, video streaming, and the Web. From our experience, we know that such story-sharing programs help strengthen communities. In an independent evaluation report on CCH's multi-year California Stories initiative, the findings presented clear evidence that participation in California Stories programs encourages youth to engage in civic dialogue and to develop increased appreciation and respect for those with a different history and culture.

For more information, please visit  DSI: California Stories

New Routes to Community Health

In the Fall of 2007, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundaton (RWJF), through the Benton Foundation, funded a collaboration between BAVC, La Clinica and ZeroDivide for a series of digital storytelling workshops dealing with domestic violence. The collaboration is intended to  provide a way for health organizations to use media to transform the way health services are delivered.

Supported and extended by the application of technology, these community members will create stories around domestic and intimate partner violence. Researchers and experts have suggested that immigrant populations are victimized at rates similar to the general population but their rates of reporting crime are lower. Immigrants face greater hardships when reporting crimes due to language barriers and cultural differences. Using digital storytelling, community members can establish better communication within the community and prevent intimate partner violence through open dialogue.  In an effort to support organizations committed to improving the lives of immigrants, New Routes.org was created.

The purpose of New Routes to Community Health is to improve the health of new immigrants and refugees using locally-focused media. It supports local partnerships made up of immigrant organizations, media production centers, and established community institutions. In the next 3 years, New Routes grantees will make radio shows, produce videos, publish newsletters, and more, creating content that will give voice to immigrants, enabling them to exchange valuable information with one another and with their receiving communities.

New Routes will provide the help each local program needs to succeed, including national training conferences, grantee site visits and on-going communication via phone, e-mail and the New Routes Web site. The site will act as a hub for information exchange, connecting New Routes grantees to others who are doing similar work. New Routes builds strong, cohesive communities through immigrant integration in its eight grant sites—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Oakland, Phildelphia, and San Francisco.

For more information, please visit New Routes.org