A student-led dialogue following “Our Stories Are Our Power.”
We’re training a new generation of social justice advocates.
Social change. It’s not enough to want it. Or even to work for it. We also need to strategize for it. Our Voices and Faces Project Advocacy Training program was created to help allies, advocates, and activists do just that.
Immersive, interactive, and audience-relevant, each of our advocacy trainings are customized in partnership with local host organizations, evaluated on an ongoing basis, and continually updated to best address current events and contemporary advocacy challenges. Since the inception of our advocacy training program, Voices and Faces Project trainers and facilitators have traveled to 48 US states and four continents, creating social change every step of the way.
In addition, members of our Voices and Faces Speakers Bureau are using their names, faces, and testimonies to educate the broader public on the causes and consequences of gender-based violence. Launched in 2006, our speakers are making the personal political, using their stories to call audiences as large as 5,000 – and as intimate as 20 – to greater compassion, and action.
Debuting “Unsilencing Public Policy” at Northwestern University.
Our most popular advocacy
trainings and lectures.
Our Stories Are Our Power
Survivors from across the globe are increasingly using their names, faces and stories to change legal and social responses to gender-based violence and other injustices or forms of oppression. How do we make the most of, and build on, this moment? How can we effectively use our testimonies to call the world to not only compassion but – more importantly – measurable political action? And what lessons can we learn from history’s most effective storytellers? During “Our Stories Are Our Power,” an interactive presentation and workshop led by The Voices and Faces Project, program participants will: 1. Explore real-world examples of how survivors of gender-based violence (from the US, and beyond our borders) are using personal testimony to change minds, hearts, and laws; 2. Consider new strategies and non-traditional mediums for using personal narrative to create political change; 3. Explore best practices for meeting people “where they are” by using language that breaks through partisan & right/left barriers; 4. Take a closer look at the links between sharing our stories and healing from trauma (what has been called “post-traumatic growth”); 5. Examine the “ethics of story sharing,” thinking critically about how we represent our own stories and the stories of others in an increasingly global, interconnected world; and 6.Take part in an interactive writing exercise or exercises designed to help workshop participants think in new ways about the power and purpose of their own stories.
Voices and Faces Project Advocacy and Training Programs have traveled to 48 US States and across three continents. Our programs have been offered in partnership with the Clinton Presidential Center, the Buffett Center for International & Comparative Studies at Northwestern University, the University of Southern California School of Social Work, the Obama Fellows Program at the Obama Foundation at University of Chicago, and the RefuSHE School in Nairobi, Kenya, among other institutions.
The Power of Young
We are past the point of “protecting” America’s youth from online bullying, sexual harassment and damaging rape myths. Young adults spend an average of seven and a half hours per day online and, as a result, each of them is now a bystander poised to enable or defy rape culture. It is critical that we focus prevention tactics in ways teens can relate to and engage with. Voices and Faces Project founding member Christa Desir and Alina Klein, both authors of popular books for teens, offer a strategic model for connecting with young adults through popular culture to reframe their lens on rape.
“The Power of Young” is an interactive lecture that provides anyone who works with teens the tools they need to co-opt the most popular social media platforms and initiate prevention from within. Desir and Klein explore the use of young adult novels and pop culture media to promote critical, cultural analysis, seed important multimedia messages onto various online platforms, and challenge teens to initiate their own creative endeavors to inspire a movement among their peers.
New Rules for Radicals
In this interactive advocacy training, Anne K. Ream, founder of The Voices and Faces Project, explores how storytellers, opinion shapers and subversives are changing the movement to end gender-based violence. She includes the story of a pastor who has developed a ministry focused on sexual violence; a group of survivors in South Africa who are challenging the African National Congress to take gender justice as seriously as they did Apartheid; and a trifecta of online activists who effectively used Facebook to drive a boycott of Facebook — an action that ultimately led the company to change its policies on addressing anti-woman hate speech.
Watch the 2016 Clinton Presidential Center debut of “New Rules for Radicals.”
Marketing a Movement
Legal advocacy and the provision of direct services are critical to addressing gender-related violence. But are they enough? In “Marketing a Movement,” our half day capacity building workshop, Anne K. Ream, the founder of The Voices and Faces Project and a Founding Co-Chair at World Without Exploitation, makes an impassioned case for communications as the third leg of any effective effort to change minds, hearts and public policies on sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Along with workshop facilitator Katie Feifer, Voices and Faces Project Research Director and World Without Exploitation Founding Co-Chair, Ream uses the award-winning Ugly Truth campaign – a multi-media public awareness campaign that made over 700 million audience impressions in seven US cities – as a case study to explore and strategize on how we can successfully utilize communications.
Watch the 2016 Pepperdine University presentation.
Unsilencing Public Policy
Change. We know it when we see it — and we can usually feel it when it is happening. But can we really create change? The Voices and Faces Project recently debuted a new interactive workshop — “Unsilencing Public Policy: Creating Programs That Create Change” — that explores this question, and challenges audiences to create their own social-entrepreneurial programs. Our workshop considered two of The Voices and Faces Project’s most effective creative initiatives (our first indie-rock benefit CD, and The Stories We Tell, our testimonial writing workshop) and then challenged the student and advocate audience to develop their own social change programs.
Creating Change:
A one-day workshop for educators and advocates that focuses on best practices in generating and sharing testimony; how to think about the role of testimony in educating the public on social justice; and how to incorporate testimony and the art of storytelling into teaching methodology and practices across disciplines. This training talks about curricular planning, pedagogy, and trauma-sensitive methods of working with difficult materials in and outside the classroom. Participants discuss examples of testimonial writing, undertake writing exercises, reflect on their own stories as educators, and participate in seminar-style conversation about how to use story as a vehicle for personal and political change.
To find out more about all of our available lectures and trainings, or to bring one of our trainings to your community, contact us.
Debate and downtime after a moderated Voices and Faces Project discussion.