Event displays state stories

Share your story, connect with others, enjoy lunch and earn a stipend at Project Storybridge on Friday, Nov. 7, 12:30-2:30 p.m. at the CSB Multicultural Center. CSB+SJU students, faculty and staff are invited to participate in this event, which aims to build connections and gather stories for Minnesota policymakers.

Project Storybridge is a collaboration among the Multicultural Center, McCarthy Center and Civic Bridgers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bridging the divide between rural and urban communities. The project is an outgrowth of the Minnesota Story Collective, which is working to collect the individual lived experiences of people in Minnesota.

They then take those stories and connect them to policies that the state creates, and influence policymakers.

“It’s this idea that everyone has a lived experience and a story, and they [Minnesota Story Collective] want to collect those stories and share them with legislators so that they’re operating with real people’s experience,” Malik Stewart, Assistant Dean of Multicultural Services, said.

Civic Bridgers is collaborating with the state to gather these stories from across the state. CSB+SJU is just one of the multiple locations where these events are happening. Besides collecting stories, Civic Bridgers focused on fostering community.

“It’s not their goal to just collect the story and send it to the state. Their goal is to help people converse with each other. For this event, people will grab some lunch, then they will share their story with another individual, person to person. There’s a prompt that they will have, and they will both respond and share. Then they will capture that story through the story collective process, and then that will go to the state project,” Stewart said.

All staff, students and faculty are invited and encouraged to attend, regardless of their residency status in Minnesota. The experience shared just needs to be from within the state. The stories recorded are anonymous. Civic Bridgers will also provide participants with a $30 stipend for their time and contributions.

“They’ll [participants] have an opportunity to tell a little story about their time in Minnesota and what Minnesota means to them. It’s the mixture of stories and insights that will help inform policymakers about how to best serve the state in the future,” Political Science Professor Matt Lindstrom, Director of the McCarthy Center, said.

So why CSB+SJU? Lindstrom explained that it has to do with the rural area, education, and the age ranges of the community here.

“They want to make sure they talk to young people who go to college or universities outside of the major metro area. They want to get that part of the state of Minnesota. That’s a demographic the state and Civic Bridgers think it’s important to listen to,” Lindstrom said.

While these stories will be shared with policymakers, Stewart explained that the impact of sharing these stories won’t be direct.

“There might have been a person who changed their mind on something or said, ‘You know I’ll sign on to support that project.’ The idea is just to get that stuff [the stories] out there,” Stewart said.

There is an option to attend a sensemaking session to process and reflect on themes from data all over the state about a month after the event.

“We want to provide an opportunity for the participants to hear what everyone else talked about,” Lindstrom said. “I think it will be fun. Meeting new people in our community and hearing a little bit about people’s experiences in Minnesota and what it means to them. There are no right or wrong answers here.”