Corey’s Story Journey: Corey’s On Fire
November 4, 2009
Annie’s Note: For those of you not yet familiar with Corey Blake’s work – one of his projects was to help Robert Rentera write and tell his story in a wonderful book called, “From the Barrio To The Boardroom.. This book is making a huge impact in areas of social change that formerly seemed impossible.
From Corey: This morning I was working on a blog post that Katie had sent me about Barrio and was adding my two cents to it when I felt the emotional stir of what we are building. Then I dove into some pages that she had prepared from our last call and suddenly felt the hairs stand up on my arms. I needed to talk about Barrio today.
So when Annie, Katie and I got on our weekly call, Annie bought us a virtual round of coffees and teas and we dove right in. I am compelled to start this story with one of the last lines from Annie on the call, “I appreciate how totally fucking passionate you are to be out there doing the impossible…”
Today I just ripped. Not only about Barrio, but about what our work stands for to me. Robert and I each have our own agendas with the book of course — it’s incredibly personal. My secret agenda is that I want teachers all around this country and the world to start using storytelling in their work with kids.
My main focus around creating the Barrio curriculum was to create a program that inspired these kids to use Robert’s story as a launching pad for them telling their own. Story is powerful. Story is what makes us stand out in a crowd. What makes us three dimensional.
For example, last week, we were presenting our curriculum to a group of 50 social workers and I asked them to tell me what they did for a living. Most of them were too afraid to try. A few of them gave me longwinded, uninspiring answers. Then one woman said, “I put bandaids on bullet wounds.”
WOW. Suddenly, everyone in that room turned and recognized this as a woman who was passionate about what she was doing. A woman who was trying. A woman who recognized the disparity between how they were trying to solve the problem (bullet wounds) with their solution (bandaids).
With those few words, that woman was suddenly understood by her peers who would otherwise not have even seen she was there. Isn’t life like that most of the time? Don’t most of us feel invisible throughout our day? Story makes us visible. And good story motivates people to do something. To introduce themselves to us. To say, “I don’t know why, but I think we are supposed to talk.”
Imagine how different life would be if at a young age our stories had been pulled from us? Imagine how less judgmental our peers might have been of us. How much more visible we would have felt. Imagine if we could have articulated what we stood for when we were in high school or earlier. Life changes when you know who you are.
Life changes even more when others see who you are. Through story comes understanding. Through understanding confidence is built. Through confidence we make better choices. It’s called character. And every story starts with one.
Annie’s Notes: It is so exciting to see Corey on fire with his project and to know the true power of story to change lives and change the world. Bravo Corey and Robert, for impacting so may people through story.
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Wonderful story. I do believe that we are born as story tellers. At very young ages, we tell stories about imaginary characters that animate our lives, or we tell a story about something seemingly so simple — like an incident at the playground that gets embellished by the child into something so exciting s/he can’t get the words out fast enough. But somewhere along the way, this story telling impulse is crushed by our parents, who “shush” us, or teachers who demand quiet in the classroom or other less imaginative children who make fun of our funny tales. So, how do we keep the story telling fires alive?