Center for Story & Witness Email Format
Non-profit OrganizationsIllinois, United States2-10 Employees
At Center for Story & Witness (formerly The Voices and Faces Project) our mission is to cultivate and share stories that bear witness to gender-based violence and other social injustices in order to change minds, hearts, and public policies. Through our testimonial writing workshops, our narrative advocacy trainings, and our performances, publications and campaigns, we seek to create measurable social change through the power of narrative. For 16 years, we have been awarded the America’s Best Charities Seal of Excellence, a designation given to organizations that meet the highest standards of public accountability and program/cost effectiveness. In the last decade, a growing awareness of the role that stories of witness play in social justice movements has taken hold in the NGO and non-profit space. The world now understands, in ways that it perhaps did not a decade or so ago, that stories of lived experience matter. Testimony creates the space for imagining injustice, so that the world can better understand the effects of violence, marginalization, oppression, and dislocation on victims, families, and communities. A well-told story – a strategically-told story – calls the world not only to compassion but to social action. And action is what our work at Center for Story & Witness is all about. We believe stories of witness aren’t just found. They need to be cultivated. Those who seek to share their often painful, deeply personal stories need to be encouraged, listened to, developed, and supported if their voices are to have an enduring effect in the public square.