How to Centre Community as Experts Through Digital Story Telling

The power of video, story telling and positioning our old people and communities is quickly becoming central to discussing inclusion within platforms like conferences and corporate functions and events.

A few years ago, pre covid world. I developed the program for the NSW Aboriginal Languages Gathering, an event that saw over 150 language stakeholders across the state come together over three days. It was an amazing event, extremely successful and was the result of lots of grit and hard work by the languages team of that time.

When I was designing the conference program much feedback we received from stakeholders was that we MUST have Uncle Stan Grant senior there. Uncle Stan was quite vocal in the development of the Aboriginal Languages Act, in terms of opposing the presence of legislation around our language and culture. And rightly so, he told us of memories of family as a young boy who had been imprisoned for speaking language!

So, it was critical from an integrity perspective to ensure he had the opportunity to have a voice at the NSW Aboriginal languages gathering.

Now people might think, ah yes lets get them to record a message or too video record a speech.

But this is not the Oscars, often our community members are not seasoned in this modality of communication and from a Cultural perspective when talking too themes of such significance, the capacity to be present in those places are important.

The challenge though, was that Uncle Stan was at the time unwell and unable to make the trip. Luckily we took the opportunity to fly to Wagga and drive to Nerrandera, spending two full days at his home with him and his wife.

We said Uncle we are here to develop a keynote for the conference, that keynote was a highlight for many people at the conference as evidenced in the evaluation report here:

https://www.aboriginalaffairs.nsw.gov.au/media/website_pages/policy-reform/language-and-culture/ngamuru-nsw-aboriginal-languages-gathering-2019/FINAL-NGAMURU-PARTICIPANT-SURVEY-SUMMARY.pdf.

But it took 2 full days of yarning, listening and sharing space. To listen to Uncles story, personally and also his language journey. Interwoven throughout those yarns were questions connected to the theme of the conference, questions of the future for Language revival in NSW and what role the establishment of the Aboriginal Languages Trust could play in that journey. Through those yarns they helped to bring out a core message from Uncle for the conference attendees.

It was honestly one of my proudest pieces to produce, but it took a lot of investment in terms of resources and time. That said, the return on that investment was significant as evidenced in the evaluation.

This showed me how significant the power of video and story telling is for centring our people and community within places and spaces that can at times be hard to access or outside of peoples comfort zones.

Most recently, I worked with a team at the University of New South Wales, doing amazing work with the community of Walgett. We worked together in preparation for a presentation of how Universities can partner with community and embed community led ways of work at the recent Social Policy Research Centre conference.

This team held the same values, around centring community as the experts in their own experience, considering the same video communication approach for capturing the stories and knowledge of community on the ground in Walgett.

Covid made that regional travel hard with a recent outbreak t produce that piece in person, so we pivoted to a teams record. Same rules applied where we used yarning as a critical Indigenous research methodology and through that identified the key themes in those yarns that we wove together for the conference. Through the power of editing and post production all with the advice and guidance of community as the experts in the finalisation of that message.

The result of this was the centring of community as the experts in the academic and professional conference world.

Often the experts on the ground are not professional speakers and public communicators, i have seen it time and time again where absolute legends in the field are thrown onto a stage to share their wisdom with the world, often missing many key opportunities for communicating critical points of learning or reference, only because of the challenge of speaking and presenting, i have definitely been one of those people!

But through digital story telling we could work with those people on the ground to help craft that narrative.

The pressure of even presenting live on teams was one that was causing significant anxiety, so being able to produce this in advance with community experts helped take that pressure off.

We aimed to position their ‘speeches’ as central to the presentation at the conference with both speakers then available for a Q&A at the end of the presentation, the engagement was next level!

And the confidence of the community representatives was high, because they felt respected in their positioning within the narrative, with complete control over the communication of their message and support with clarity around its delivery, anxiety had dissipated, and they were free to absorb the energy of the experts they so rightly deserved to be.

In a future world of more virtual and digital communication one thing is becoming clear for me, that is the power of digital story telling to position our people as experts in their own experience.

If you have any conferences, events or opportunities to co curate community stories where centring the experience and stories of people is essential to your success, reach out to

www.impactpolicyau.com