Cafe Harvesting through Story-Making

I recently completed an inter-generational, intra-regional story weaving project in Lebanon, which embodied various social technologies, including the U, Appreciative Inquiry and the World Cafe. One of the core design intentions was to collect the harvests of the cafe through a collective story-making process.

Project Brief

The initiative “Our shared community story” is a process of engagement, exploration, and creative expression transforming local public libraries to story making theaters; connecting five different regions in Lebanon across five public community spaces, Baakline, Hermil, Beirut, Srifa and Beit Meri, building on each completed chapter as they weave (overlap) their own emerging story. Each place provided a space for its people to co-create their own chapter of the overall collective story. The process took the attendees on a weaving journey first sensing into the richness of their current environment through memorable items, stories, etc.. then moving towards “exploring possibilities for the future" through a community dialogue/conversation (using the World Café and Circle social technologies), before further developing their shared story in light of the generated harvested dialogue insights (using a group story building technique) , which was finally transformed into an integrated embodied theatrical representation.

You will find photos and videos from the process here.


Lesson's learned

The overall outcome of the project was successful; however I noticed some places where integrating the generated insights into a story-making process required harvesting direct and focused ideas, keywords or statements; whereby when the ideas where generic or theme-based, it was difficult to incoporate into the story as is.

When the group was beyond 16 people, it was harder to maintain the sense of attention amongst the tables "pausing" waiting for their turn to contribute to the story.

Another outcome observation is that when the collective group are the collective harvesters themselves (not compiled by the facilitator, host or a visual artist) they were bringing newer dimensions when building the stories; it provided the space for them to bring reality into the harvest; which created a realistic current future image through the people themselves as they feel it and see it right now, in that moment that they are creating their narrative and collective story ....

What stays with me

I feel very inspired by the outcome of story-making harvesting to work it out more and prototype it more ... I sense some fine-tuning is required but it is a wonderful harvesting possibility, as it is still within the community, for the community, in the language of the community ...