Strengthening Voice, Deepening Trust: The Power of Participatory Storytelling

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Think back to the last time someone shared a compelling story with you. Chances are, it drew you into their world, helping you see what mattered to them, and perhaps even prompting you to think differently about your own experiences. As humans, we are hardwired to process stories as a natural way to make sense of experiences and learn from others’ perspectives.

Within the context of learning and evaluation, storytelling can be a powerful tool that gives participants a way to share their own narratives and highlight insights that other data collection methods might miss. These stories become even more powerful when participants have agency over how they get shared and with whom.

At Engage R+D, we’ve been exploring how storytelling can best be applied within the context of participatory learning engagements. This blog post focuses on why and how to harness the power of stories in this context. It offers both a framework for understanding participatory storytelling and practical guidance for applying this approach.

What Is Participatory Storytelling, and What Are the Benefits of this Approach?

As community-based nonprofits navigate the profound, and in some cases potentially existential, challenges wrought by the national sociopolitical environment, relationships with funders based on listening, understanding, shared power, and a commitment to honoring lived experience have become even more essential. These relationships can become true opportunities for participatory learning. As defined in Engage R+D’s recent field guide—Fostering Participatory Learning Approaches in Philanthropy: A Guide for the Curious—participatory learning involves the deliberate inclusion of grantees and community members in learning activities to both gather their firsthand perspectives and to share and shift decision-making power to those traditionally on the periphery of such processes. 

One expression of participatory learning is participatory storytelling, a data-gathering method that involves collecting and sharing stories that come directly from the lived experiences of grantees and community members and engaging them as co-creators and decision-makers throughout the storytelling process.

Collaborating with grantees and community partners to confirm the best format for a given project’s goals can help ensure the stories are accessible, resonant, and useful for the various audiences involved in the effort.

Participatory storytelling can also offer meaningful benefits for grantees and community members, as well as for funders and evaluators:

  • For participants, it provides a powerful way to document and reflect on their lived experiences in ways that can be affirming and healing. It also allows participants to shape evaluation findings, control how and with whom their stories are shared, and influence decisions that affect their communities.

  • For funders and evaluators, participatory storytelling can strengthen broader learning and evaluation efforts by bringing depth, context, and community perspective to traditional data; addressing grantee- or community-identified learning priorities; and fostering trust and greater community ownership of the evaluation process.

Participatory storytelling can take different forms depending on goals, audience, and context. These forms may include, but are not limited to:

  • Photo essays

  • Digital stories

  • Video or audio recordings

  • Community exhibitions

  • Creative writing

 

Participatory Storytelling in Practice

We recently co-facilitated a session on participatory storytelling with the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation (Blue Cross NC Foundation) and Better Together Montgomery (BTM) at the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) Learning Conference (May 2025).

During the session, we described a photo-based storytelling project we conducted in collaboration with BTM in Montgomery County, NC, as the organization aimed to strengthen its connection with residents, counter harmful narratives, and demonstrate the impact of its community health work. The project emerged from our broader evaluation of the Blue Cross NC Foundation’s Community-Centered Health initiative, which engaged six grantees, including BTM, working to improve community health through resident-led approaches.

For the storytelling project, BTM invited a group of residents to submit original photos and short first-person reflections of their experiences living in Montgomery County. Participants could specify where and with whom their photos and stories could be shared (e.g., on social media, with funders). Participants also attended facilitated sensemaking sessions where they reviewed the photo submissions and worked with BTM staff and Engage R+D to lift up themes and collectively shape their own narratives about health, wellness, and community. The process emphasized consent, choice, and control.

The result was a set of photos and captions that told stories about residents’ experiences in their community and the impact of BTM’s work. BTM shared these photos and stories back with various audiences in their community to help spotlight community needs and the impact of their work in residents’ own words.

According to Jamie Ewings of BTM, the participatory storytelling process enabled community participants to feel seen and heard, not judged or evaluated. This experience, in turn, helped participants to strengthen their trust in BTM and its work. It also provided BTM with a deeper understanding of residents' perspectives on its work.

 

Guidance for Applying Participatory Storytelling

As part of the GEO conversation, we shared our new field resource, the Quick-Start Guide to Participatory Storytelling. We developed the Guide as a component of our evaluation of the Blue Cross NC Foundation’s Community-Centered Health initiative. In the Guide, we describe the different stages of a participatory storytelling project. It is geared towards those implementing such projects—including evaluators, funders, and community partners—and includes key questions and considerations, activities and tools, and tips for each stage of the process. The Guide is a companion to our recent resource, Fostering Participatory Learning Approaches in Philanthropy: A Guide for the Curious.

While participatory storytelling offers an opportunity for funders to shift power to communities, there are also potential risks—particularly the threat of repercussions for sharing stories, especially during this current climate. As one way to mitigate that threat, we recommend speaking with participants about the risks and benefits of sharing their stories and building in a consent process. In addition to offering written consent, participants can have control over their own stories. For instance, this could include ensuring participants have agency over how their stories can be used and can change their minds at any time on that front. Gaining trust from participants is critical in this process as well. Evaluators, funders, grantees, and community members should allow time to build that trust when carrying out storytelling projects.

As we continue to apply participatory storytelling as a valuable complement to cross-cutting learning and evaluation activities, we’d like to share these thoughts of a Community-Centered Health partner, which exemplify the benefits of such approaches:

“Real change starts when we create space for people to recognize and use their voice... Sometimes we need to be brave, especially when our voices aren’t welcomed by the systems and structures that have always been in place. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. We do have the power to change things. We’re worth it.”

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Let us know what you think about participatory storytelling. Have you applied any of these practices to your grantmaking or evaluations? If so, how have they worked? Are there additional practices that you’d like to recommend? You can share your stories with us at info@engagerd.com. We look forward to hearing from you.