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To download a complete program brochure, click here.
From its onset, Herstory has partnered closely with those at the cutting edge of designing innovative programs for students and faculty. Such initiatives have included integrating personalized writings into curriculum community outreach opportunities, immigrant students and professional development. Some examples:
Professional Development for Social Workers
In collaboration with Stony Brook University’s School of Social Welfare, Herstory offered a one day workshop to social workers and those in the healing professions to use the Herstory model as an adjunct to therapeutic work with trauma survivors, to aid healing. The workshop trained participants how to use Herstory’s manual Paper Stranger: Shaping Stories in Community in their practices.
Immigration Project at SUNY Old Westbury
Entitled “Our Story,’ this project brought together students, men and women, to share their stories of immigration. The goal was to put a face on the current great wave of immigration, dispelling myths and challenging prejudices. Using Herstory methods, students crafted their Page One experience. Each week they shared their drafts in a two-hour Ourstory workshop, writing and rewriting in response to the suggestions of their classmates, their professor and the Herstory facilitator. The process empowered students to find their own voices, to better understand their family’s history, and to share their stories with classmates and the broader college community. This was a Civic Engagement placement, culminating in the presentation of the students’ stories to a college and community audience at the School of Arts and Sciences “Immigration and Migration” Research Day and the First-Year Student Presentation Program. The experience was powerful and transformative for everyone involved – the students themselves and all those who were moved and changed by their compelling voices.
Dialogues Across Differences
From 2005 through 2009 Herstory hosted an annual day-long retreat at the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University involving a large circle of students, faculty and community writers in imagining where they might wish to be met by a Stranger/Reader at any chose cross-roads of their lives. This bilingual bridge-building encounter not only started many writing journeys, but became a truly intergenerational and intercultural event. It became a model for Herstory’s later bridge-building templates.
Latin America at the Crossroads
A service-learning course at St. Joseph’s College invited Herstory to stage a mini-series of memoir-writing workshops for students and faculty. These, in turn, led to the establishment of a new bilingual workshop at the Patchogue-Medford Public Library in response to the 2008 Lucero hate crime in that community, in an attempt to bring together Spanish-speaking and English-speaking women in a spirit of hope and healing.
Adelphi University/Herstory Institute
In collaboration with Adelphi’s Masters of Fine Arts program, Herstory will offer a three-day conference in the summer of 2010. It will include Herstory’s signature memoir-writing method, as well as a train-the-trainer track. Plans include the training of Adelphi MFA program interns in the Herstory technique, in order to allow them to play an active part as conference co-facilitators.
Herstory in Nicaragua
In the Spring of 2009, through Antoinette Hertel, associate chair of St. Joseph’s College’s Modern Languages Department, Herstory’s method was introduced to a group of twelve female community leaders in Sutiaba, Nicaragua in conjunction with St. Joseph’s ongoing service project with the people of this impoverished community on the outskirts of León. Over the years of working with these female leaders, St. Joseph’s representatives had heard the women’s stories, but now brought the Herstory Page One Moment technique to bear. In a very condensed period of time, each woman in the group shared her life, both orally and in writing, editing and commenting on each other’s stories, as well. The women of Sutiaba continue to meet and write.
Evaluation of Herstory Prison Program by St. John’s University
Natalie Byfield of Black Media Foundation, and a faculty member at St. John’s, was awarded a grant by St. John’s University to spend the summer of 2009 in a personalized in-service training in the Herstory method, which she then brought to two of her sociology classes in the fall semester. After her sociology students experienced a Herstory workshop, Natalie created a focus group to pilot an evaluative study of the method in action, for publication. The intent is to provide Herstory with an important tool for measuring effectiveness and impact of its prison workshops which have trained more than 700 incarcerated women since 2003.
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