Essential Photovoice Facilitator Cohort
Fall 2023
For 3 weeks in October, a group of 8 folks met and participated in a series of facilitated conversations about community using the Essential Photovoice (EPV) dialogue format. EPV is a recent pilot project of TH’s longtime dialogue consultant and friend Essential Partners in collaboration with Interfaith Photovoice (see below). The concept is simple: take photos responding to prompts each week, then come together to share and ask each other questions about the photos.
We had different sharing prompts each week:
Week one: Share a picture/or pictures to help people understand something meaningful about you; share a picture/or pictures that would help people understand something about your community - however you define that.
Week two: How and where is your community growing and flourishing? What are your community’s deepest challenges?
Week three: What is your role or responsibility in creating or maintaining community, however you define it?
During the last session, the participants also had time to create a page of our cohort’s zine. They were prompted to flesh out a narrative or theme from all the photos they had taken and present it in a way that made sense to them.
Virtual Zine
Connection
The purpose of these 3 sessions was to train the participants to facilitate their own conversations, but the results were much greater than acquiring skills: the 8 participants of all different ages and origins were able to share with striking vulnerability almost immediately. New friendships were formed and old ones were deepened; the group benefitted from hearing each others’ perspectives on how community forms and is maintained.
All 8 of the facilitators gave the training experience a 4/4 rating. When asked “What stands out as the most significant thing you learned in this workshop? what surprised you most about what you learned?,” they responded:
“I learned the power of using pictures to facilitate open, personal, and honest dialogues.”
“As someone with a very small family, it surprised me the most that I was able to relate to and find community with people that decades older than me.”
“The most significant and surprising thing I learned was how much people can open up if given the time and space to do so.”
When asked “how did this experience impact the way you feel about yourself or your community?,” they responded:
“I really felt validated in aspects of my life that I was downplaying. A greater sense of balance and contentment emerged!”
“This experience reinforced the amount of work necessary and needed for all communities to be viable and true to the common good”
“I feel so much more in sync with myself and with my community. The workshop gave me to space and tools to dissect what I want my community to look like and how I can best love them. The diversity of the group really showed me how similar we all are, even through our differences.”
Several trainees have even used the EPV format amongst their friends and family and in their own workspaces.
We hope to host another cohort of facilitator trainees in the spring of 2024!
More about Essential Photovoice
Essential Partners was founded in 1989, with the mission of helping equip people to live and work better together in community by building trust and understanding across differences. Their trademark approach -Reflective Structured Dialogue- empowers people to have healthier, more complex, more inclusive conversations about polarizing differences of values, beliefs, and identities.
Interfaith Photovoice has been around almost as long as EP. It is an arts-based approach to understanding that invites participants to respond to a series of prompts with their own photographs. These photos are used in a series of meetings as the basis for small and large group discussions. At the end of a project, the visuals and narratives are used to engage a broader audience.
Essential Photovoice combines the concepts and methodologies of both approaches to bring more richness to connecting around or across a social issues, and to illuminate and illustrate what is important to those impacted (or inspired!) by curating an exhibition, hosting an event, or collaborating on a tangible item through which other people can engage or better understand that topic.