“We don’t want just some typical speaker training and we don’t just a ‘storytelling workshop,’” she told us. We got it.

Is in-person or online learning better for learning how to share personal stories from lived experience as an advocate? It depends.

Yep, we're doing it. Everyone’s weighing in on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey — the box office numbers, the armor discourse, the modern-English dialogue debates. So here are three insights from The Odyssey for advocates sharing their stories from lived experience to make a difference in the modern world.

Why do we recommend new advocates start by designing a three-minute advocacy talk?

This can’t be done. How do you hold space for someone’s story when there’s a screen between you?

When first-person voices disappear from the record—from textbooks, from archives, from policy conversations, from public memory— something irreplaceable goes with them.

This series gives us an opportunity to check in with some of the advocates we talked to over the course of our book’s three editions and 14 years, get an update on their work and see where exactly their paths have taken them. 

Rachel Holmes, Director of Advocacy and Community Engagement for The Food Group, an anti-hunger organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota, became certified in LPA coaching methods to support advocates with lived experience of food insecurity. She recently shared with us how storytelling-for-advocacy fits into her work with The Food Group.