What is Telling My Story?
Telling My Story (TMS) is an interdisciplinary arts program that works to develop self-awareness and communication skills through collective creativity. TMS employs journaling, storytelling, and reflection to break down barriers of preconceptions about differences. Pati Hernandez developed this program in 1999 as a non- profit organization and has offered it successfully over 60 times locally, nationally and internationally, in correctional facilities, drug rehabilitation centers, high schools, colleges and universities, and community centers.
By practicing listening, speaking and withholding judgment in a group, we build relations based on trust, communication, and dialogue. In order to do this, we must first identify and dismantle the visible and invisible walls of preconception and bias that surround us, which many times we actively help to create and maintain. Typically, a TMS program runs 4-8 weeks. During 2020, we successfully started to offer the program virtually with great success.
Given the dire conditions we face today as a society, threatened by global pandemic, climate change, white supremacy, rampant inequality, fear, polarization, and immobility, this program highlight themes of race, class, and gender as we explore our social experiences and unpack our silenced realities. Over the course of the sessions, participants work to identify the social walls they experience and create on a daily basis… in order to name them, own them, and achieve better communication, understanding, and dialogue about their effects on our lives, and how we can address and/or dismantle them.
About Pati Hernández:
Pati is a mother, activist, dancer, stilt dancer, puppeteer, a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater community, and a Dartmouth College adjunct professor. Originally from Chile, she immigrated to North America in 1983. Her professional focus is the exploration of political and social problems through the arts. She is the creator and facilitator of Telling My Story, a program she has developed in correctional facilities and substance abuse rehab centers in Vermont since 1999. One venue of the program is the class and extra-curricular program she developed at Dartmouth College since 2007. Currently the program is focused collaborating with community members from the Upper Valley working on the themes of race, class, and gender
About Telling My Story’s Governance
For more information on our board, governance, past meeting minutes, and upcoming meetings, please visit our public documents archive. If you’d like to join an upcoming meeting, please email us to request a zoom link.