Arts Disaster and Crisis Preparedness Conference 2026

This workshop gives arts practitioners firsthand experience with story circles, practical facilitation training, and tools to use the methodology responsibly in disaster recovery and community healing contexts.


Some of the most important knowledge a community holds about disaster (i.e., what it felt like, what broke down, what held) never makes it into official reports or planning documents. It lives in people's memories and in the stories they tell each other. Story circles are a structured methodology for gathering and honoring exactly that kind of knowledge.
Rooted in the tradition developed by Junebug Productions and later adapted and popularized by Roadside Theater in Appalachia, story circles bring people together around a shared prompt, offering each participant equal time and equal footing to speak from personal experience. No one is an expert. No one is a subject. Everyone is a witness. In communities that have experienced disaster, that quality of mutual witnessing, of not being alone with hard things, may matter as much as any planning outcome the methodology could produce.


This half day workshop moves through four phases. We introduce the story circle methodology, its origins, and its ground rules. Participants then experience a story circle firsthand. From there, we open a collaborative conversation about where story circles might fit in disaster contexts, whether as a community engagement or planning tool, as part of recovery, or simply as a way of rebuilding the social fabric that disasters fray. We give serious attention to the ethical dimensions of this work. When people are still living with grief or trauma, a methodology designed to open deep sharing carries real risk. For example, stories can go darker than anticipated, people may share more than they later wish they had, and facilitators may find themselves holding more than they are equipped to handle.


These are not hypothetical concerns, and this workshop treats them as central, not as fine print. Participants will receive hands-on facilitation training and take home a set of handouts designed to support them in planning and leading story circles in their own communities and organizations. They will leave with firsthand experience of the methodology, practical facilitation skills and resources, a grounded sense of its possibilities and limits, and a more honest set of questions about if, when, and how to use it responsibly.