Communities of Peace

Storytelling and story listening can be fundamental, groundbreaking tools for creating new approaches to building community, preventing conflict and reconciling differences, and promoting peace.

As our world becomes smaller with the advent of the internet and global communication, the horror of age-old conflicts has never been more apparent. Yet, as innovative as the last century has been technologically, we have learned little about improving people's ability to prevent conflict and resolve their differences.

If we are going to survive on this Earth, our most important task as a human race will be to build bridges of understanding—at home, in the workplace, and within the world community. Storytelling provides a vehicle for helping people, both children and adults, understand and honor the world in which we live and the people who live in it.

Through our work, the International Storytelling Center provides the experiences, knowledge, and tools to help people around the world build a more harmonious world—steering us toward a greater mutual understanding, a greater sense of global responsibility, and a greater solidarity through the acceptance of our differences and a celebration of those things that unite us.

A Success Story...

On the stage of a small South Georgia theater, a young girl begins telling a story about sexual abuse. In the middle of a line, she stops, and a middle-aged woman picks up the thread. Then a third person, a young businesswoman, steps in and continues. The telling of the story—and its implications of universality—leaves the audience transfixed.

But so do all the other tales being told on the stage of the Swamp Gravy Theater: how one man struggles throughout his life with his religious convictions, how a woman whose children have been abused by her husband winds up killing him.

These stories are not fictitious. They are the stories of the residents of Colquitt, Georgia, and through these narratives, the highly acclaimed Swamp Gravy Theater has found a way to bring the community together.

Prior to the inspiring productions of the Swamp Gravy Theater, Colquitt was, in many respects, a microcosm for the misunderstanding, suspicion, and mistrust that plagues our world. The universal themes struck by these very personal stories have forged bonds between fractured segments of the Colquitt community and healed socio-economic, racial, and generational divisions.