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Healing and Building Community: The power of intergenerational storytelling
August 3 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Storytelling can play a profound role in building trust and empathy, bringing communities closer, strengthening the community’s capacity, feeling seen, and an improvement in well-being and mental health. Writing our true personal stories and sharing them with others as well as listening to someone share their lived experiences can reduce feelings of isolation, help us find own own voice, and empower us in our healing process. It can help create a safe and courageous space for marginalized and vulnerable groups such as women, non-binary and LGBTQI folks, and immigrants and refugees.
By using storytelling, we can transform the ways in which we can engage our communities across cultures and strengthen intergenerational relationships. In this interactive webinar, our speaker Dr. Meghna Bhat will first provide an overview of the different kinds of storytelling and introduce us to creative ways of bringing storytelling to our communities. Framing storytelling as an artistic practice for building intergenerational communities, she will further share the story and inspiration behind her own work, Gulabi Stories: A South Asian Healing Initiative. Meghna will present a summary of findings from this initiative including participant demographics, feedback, and other reflections.
About the speaker:
Meghna Bhat, PhD (she/her) is an independent gender and social justice consultant, prevention educator, scholar and storyteller based in Sacramento, CA. As a first-generation immigrant from India who often finds herself lost between her two countries and cultures, she is passionate about using storytelling to create safe and inclusive spaces to address complex topics, build empathy, strengthen intergenerational relationships, and bridge gaps among communities. Meghna also uses storytelling as a fun and creative way of finding her voice, building community, and learning from others’ stories. Meghna came to Capital Storytelling in 2019 and was selected as a Story Ambassador in 2022 for the organization. She now serves as a Mentor to the 2023 Ambassadors and co-leads the Immigrant Storytelling Program at Capital Storytelling. Thanks to the 2022 Seeding Creativity Individual Artist Grant awarded by the Sacramento Office of Arts and Culture, she created Gulabi Stories: A South Asian Healing Initiative, a storytelling project that centers the voices and stories of the larger South Asian diaspora in the US.