Work in Progress

Men Who Care

StoryWorks is working with The Fostering Network on an exciting project to gather the stories of male foster carers and share them with other foster carers and social workers. In February 2010 Karen Lewis and Steve Killick ran a two day storytelling session with twelve men who each told wonderful stories of their many years’ experience as foster carers. The workshop was a very powerful and often emotional experience for everyone involved and we are now in the process of putting the stories together into a booklet to be published early summer 2010. Some of the stories will also be available as podcasts in the future.

The Men Who Care project is a result of a successful bid for funding to the Beacon for Wales (Public Engagement) initiative.

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Pro-environmental behaviours research

The University of Bath, in partnership with StoryWorks, has been successful in securing funding has been successful in securing funding from DEFRA to create an innovative approach to stimulating pro-environmental behaviour. StoryWorks’ input will be to facilitate digital storytelling activity as a medium to voice older people’s stories of home energy efficiency, waste reduction and water saving in a lively and accessible way. Using tried and tested action research approaches we will invite both the storytellers, and the audience to reflect on what they are learning from the experience. The stories will be created during the summer 2010, working with communities in the Chew Valley area of Somerset.

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Using narrative to highlight privacy issues

We are working with Cardiff University on a knowledge transfer project exploring issues around privacy – especially internet privacy. The StoryWorks team is delivering training to staff at Cardiff University in narrative and digital storytelling techniques, to enable the creation of digital stories to populate an online portal being created by the research team. The results of the research findings are likely to be disseminated in 2011.

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Cancer: Learning from Patient Experiences

StoryWorks continues to work closely with Velindre Cancer Centre to gather digital stories of patient experiences and feed them back into staff development. We are hoping to gather some staff stories too in the near future.

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