"Hear Our Stories": Young Parenting Women in Holyoke, MA Speak Out

“Hear Our Stories” uses participatory media and strategic communications to explore how young parenting women living in Western Massachusetts experience and negotiate sexual health disparities. The project aims to recalibrate existing conversations about teen motherhood from stigmatizing young moms to promoting their sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice.

The material conditions of young parenting women in Holyoke, Massachusetts typically place them in a tenuous social position, with little opportunity to influence the design of programs and policies directly affecting their lives. To address this gap, “Hear Our Stories” led a series of digital storytelling workshops, in which small groups of students from the Care Center, a GED preparation program, shared first-person narratives about their experiences, gathered images with which to illustrate these narratives, and learned via hands-on computer tutorials how to combine these materials into short digital videos.

In the proposed session, we will share a collection of these stories and talk about the impact of the workshop process on participating storytellers. We will also discuss how repurposed story content has been used to contribute relevant local knowledge to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice-oriented messaging efforts targeting young moms and the program directors, service providers, and policymakers charged with supporting them.

Evaluation:

Published literature on digital storytelling as a public health methodology continues to be limited. Qualitative interviews with “Hear Our Stories” workshop participants suggest multiple benefits of creating digital stories, including but not limited to increased self-esteem, greater ease with public speaking, acquisition of computer skills, and an interest/willingness to take leadership on speaking out on behalf of the rights of young moms. We will share those results from the research that are available at the time of the conference.