In today’s media environment, we often see popular messaging coming from the top down that attempts to solve “problems” in marginalized communities, allowing voices from outside these communities to speak about the health and lives of women, queer, and transgender people. In many ways the mass media can contribute to the inequities and isolation of already-marginalized populations, shaping the ideas and public opinion that impact our policies, our health, and our lives.
As we discussed in our recent post about the Time Picayune’s coverage of Tulane Avenue, too often the mainstream media misrepresents issues, in the process stigmatizing and stereotyping communities of color, LGBTQ communities, and low-income communities. This stigmatization can feed the drive toward increased criminalization, exclusion, displacement, and harsher public policies and enforcement. When women in our communities are not given a voice and when their experiences are invisibilized and misrepresented, too often people outside of the community are able to frame how their stories are told.
To counter this, WWAV is committed to recording and sharing the stories of the women we work with in their continued fight for health and justice. Emerging from our decades-long commitment to listening to the stories of New Orleans’ most marginalized women and their families, this summer Women With a Vision is launching our Digital Storytelling Project as a way to share the powerful stories of the women in our community. Through this project, WWAV seeks to support strategizes to shift the dominant narratives coming from the mainstream media.
Digital storytelling is a media-making process that involves communicating a story in first person using digital media, such as recorded voice, video, audio, still images, and music. WWAV will be recording the stories of our clients, staff, and community members, and we aim to create short digital videos and oral histories to help bring to life the voices of those who are typically not heard.
Storytelling and digital media can be used as a tool for healing and recovery. In fact, digital storytelling has become a new method used in public health promotion across the country, and more and more advocates are using it to address healthcare problems that intersect with social factors, like poverty, race, education, and housing. The power of storytelling and sharing can help in healing from trauma, discrimination, and violence, and it can be used with oral history, expressive art and narrative therapy, and digital media to help promote mental health, and to buffer direct-service provision, health education, communication, advocacy, and other broader community-based public health efforts.
We have several goals for our Digital Storytelling Project:

• to amplify the personal narratives and life stories of our communities and to shine a light on the stories not told in mainstream media outlets;
• to build on and showcase the power in our communities;
• as a tool for outreach, education, and archiving our history;
• to support community-based participatory research to give voice to our communities’ needs;
• to raise awareness and create dialogue around the issues women and LGBTQ communities face;
• to create a safe space for marginalized groups to meet regularly to talk about topics important to them, define issues in their own terms, and to share stories that may never have been told out loud before;
• to share these stories in ways that enable healing, build community, and inspire justice and social change; and
• to craft digital stories that reflect the life experiences of marginalized women and the myriad challenges they face.

For more than twenty years, WWAV has been using a grassroots framework to transform policies that hinder health, well-being, and economic self-sufficiency. We have been successful because we know that for change to be real it must emerge from the community. When people come together and reflect on the issues that make them marginalized, they begin a first step to changing their relationship with the world. We work from that place – from that moment when a person sees that they are not what society has branded them – and we provide pathways for women and LGBTQ people to work to create the world they want to live in.