Prefigurative Community Building (Part 29)
Reclaiming Our Stories: A Power With Approach to Community Storytelling and Oral History Projects
Stories hold power, sometimes the only power a community has left after displacement, erasure, or trauma. But too often, storytelling becomes something extracted by outsiders, archived by institutions, or curated by a few. When storytelling and oral history projects are rooted in Power With, however, they become tools of reclamation, cultural continuity, and collective meaning-making.
In a Power With model, stories are not gathered about a community, they're told by the community, for the community. Intergenerational storytelling deepens social fabric, helps people heal and remember together, and affirms identity without hierarchy. Everyone has voice. Everyone has history. Everyone has value.
This guide walks through how to launch a community storytelling or oral history project using Power With coordination, with links to tools and organizations that can help. It also highlights two real-world examples already practicing this work without reproducing forms of Power Over.
Step-by-Step Guide to Launching a Power With Oral History Project
Step 1: Gather a Core Group Through Relational Invitation
Start with connection, not recruitment. Invite elders, youth, culture bearers, and people who hold lived knowledge. Ask: Who are the storytellers among us? and Who has never been asked to share?
Hold a community meal, open mic, or story circle. Don’t ask people to join a project. Ask them what stories matter.
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Step 2: Build Consent-Based Shared Agreements
Decide together how stories will be shared, recorded (if at all), archived, and credited. Not every story needs to be public. Consent is ongoing, not one-time. Value memory as sacred, not content to extract.
Agreements should include:
Ownership of recordings or transcriptions
Access limitations (who can listen, when, how)
How emotional safety is upheld in storytelling
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Step 3: Create Multi-Generational Pairings
Pair elders with youth, neighbors with newcomers, long-time residents with recent arrivals. Let storytelling become an act of relationship-building. Train folks together to listen deeply, document responsibly, and co-reflect.
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Step 4: Choose Low-Tech, Accessible Tools
Use phone recorders, zines, chalk walls, art, or hand-written books. Avoid expensive tech unless your group decides it’s needed. The goal isn’t media quality, it’s connection, memory, and dignity.
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Step 5: Share the Stories in Community Spaces
Don’t funnel the stories into academic archives or galleries unless explicitly invited to do so by your community. Instead, organize exhibitions in churches, schools, porches, laundromats, or parks. Let storytelling be public and local.
Ideas:
Painted story murals
Audio listening booths at bus stops
Pop-up story tents at farmer’s markets
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Step 6: Leave the Door Open for Ongoing Storytelling
Make the project replicable and accessible for others. Host a skill-sharing workshop so new groups can continue or remix the work. Power With means seeding capacity across many, not centralizing it in one.
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Examples of Existing Power With Storytelling Projects
1. The Black Memory Workers Project (U.S.)
Led by Black women and queer folks, this project supports people reclaiming historical records, oral histories, and archival memory for community empowerment, not institutional control. They focus on consentful practices, memory justice, and non-extractive storytelling.
https://www.blackmemoryworkers.org/
2. Desert Survivance (Tucson, AZ)
A grassroots Indigenous storytelling and oral history initiative run by and for Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui youth and elders. The group co-creates stories through drawing, voice, and community walks. No stories are digitized unless explicitly permitted by the speaker.
Conclusion: Memory is Power, and Power With is Healing
Telling our stories isn’t just cathartic, it’s transformative. In a world shaped by extraction and silence, to listen with care, to remember together, and to pass on knowledge without hierarchy is revolutionary.
When designed with Power With, storytelling projects don’t tokenize or erase. They honor. They reconnect. And they remind us that communities hold their own histories, not waiting to be discovered, but ready to be shared.
We don’t need to scale up, we need to seed wide. Let every block, every kitchen, every front porch become a storytelling site. Keep it local. Keep it relational. Let memory be a living thing we share, not a product we sell.