Story Collection Project - Heart of Building Strong Families

By Yvonne Tran

I will be trying to do a weekly post about a story or two that we have been collecting here at ACRJ.

For folks who don’t know yet (or been under the proverbial ACRJ rock), we are unleashing our Strong Families Initiative this year (kind of a soft launch) to directly confront the Right’s family agenda. We want to take back the value of family from the Right, who have defined it in the last 30-40 years (and in mainstream society… basically since the industrial revolution) as a heterosexual-two-parent-household-man-breadwinner-stay-at-home-mom-with-two-kids-a-dog-and-a-white-picket-fence-nuclear-family family.

Guess what? Under 25% of American families actually resemble that (according to 2000 Census). So, what about the rest of us?

Yup, we’re still here. Forming and re-forming our own families.

And we want to collect all of those stories. Five thousand to be exact.

And we started at Western States Center’s annual Community Strategic Training Initiative in Portland, OR two weeks ago. We got to collect over 25 stories from participants all over the western states including Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming.

I definitely ran around all weekend along with my co-workers to collect these stories and it has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on. For me to be able to be in the same space as participants share their story with me on camera, something that is usually reserved for the most intimate spaces, has been truly humbling.

Here is a sample of a story I collected by Patty Katz from Partnership for Safety & Justice in Oregon at CSTI: