All Our Stories: LocalMotion

All Our Stories invited people who have experienced disadvantage to share their life stories so that their voices could inform future visioning for Torbay, shifting established practices to meet the needs of all in the community.

The project was commissioned as part of Torbay’s early planning phase for LocalMotion, a collaborative initiative with six national philanthropic funders to explore and enact radical systemic change with six communities across the UK.

Their vision is to find out what would be possible if they put their collective expertise and resources together with local places to support long term, systemic change on the issues that matter to local communities. The funders are keen to take a strengths based perspective and to help shape future philanthropic practice. LocalMotion aims to be inspired by these six local communities, working together with them to find collective solutions to local challenges through local cross-sector collaboration with the community, civil society, public bodies, businesses and funders.

Through spring 2021, Filament invited participants to share their life experiences with facilitating storyteller Sara Hurley, who listened, distilled and retold their stories back to them as ‘story owners’. These stories were then woven into scripts, using only verbatim (word-for-word) material, bringing out prescient and universal themes to be shared with a wider audience.

The project used a storytelling process working in an in-depth way with a small number of participants, providing an emotionally safe framework within which people could share their stories.

The scripts were performed by actors at two zoom ‘Open Ear’ sessions, followed by a facilitated feedback session encouraged people to reflect what they had noticed or heard.

Considerable consultation has been undertaken across Torbay in recent years. This story gathering process worked those least likely to have been reached through traditional engagement processes. We carried out a wider review of previous consultations, community interviews and strategic reports to draw out findings that either supported the All Our Stories findings or highlighted gaps and outlying community concerns.

Through guided questions, participants reflected on four key themes:

• the challenges and journeys that people had experienced

• significant barriers and compounding factors

• strengths and protective factors that had helped them

• personal dreams & ideas for future support that would help them & others

You can find out more about the continuing work of LocalMotion Torbay here.