The power of intergenerational storytelling to solidify community and effect change

(Photo courtesy of the Pueblo County Historical
Society and Heritage Museum)

 

In Pueblo, Colo., a hemp-mâché horse named Lucky stands proudly in the city’s Heritage Museum. He has survived flood and fire — literally.

In 1921, a deadly flood from rising waters of the Arkansas River devastated Pueblo, killing hundreds of people and causing damage that would take years to repair. The deluge also took Lucky, who was serving as a model in a saddle shop. After the waters receded, Lucky was found about 15 miles away, wedged in the branches of a cottonwood tree, a bit bedraggled but, miraculously, intact. With some restoration, he was able to serve again as a saddle-shop model. But in 1989, when a nearby carpet factory went up in flames, firefighters had to rush in and again save Lucky.

Today, children love Lucky because he’s a life-size fake horse with spots, and a good story. Older people love him because he is a symbol of resilience in the face of adversity.

In other words, he brings generations together.

Gregory Howell, the publisher of the Pueblo Star Journal, sees Lucky’s intergenerational appeal, and he’s running with it.

The Star Journal, with grant funding from the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority, is creating a “mobile journalism” (MoJo) training program. The initiative will put Lucky at the center of an effort to connect young and older residents in the city, encouraging participants to create stories on whatever platform they choose. They will then partner with the Pueblo Regional Film Commission (where Howell is a co-founder) to replicate the program in the future with local school districts, the Boys and Girls Club, and online academies.

The idea is to inspire storytelling from all ages, perhaps creating professional career pathways for young people who take to it, while bringing together people who might not otherwise cross paths.

Howell’s project is an example of how news organizations can help forge connections across generations in their communities. By using the powerful tools of storytelling, which convey rich human emotion and texture, the program can connect people of all ages who often operate in their own social or cultural spheres, sometimes unaware of the ties between them.

Reaching people across age groups is a complex proposition for news leaders. It involves identifying issues and topics that resonate with all ages, creating content on multiple platforms, and finding ways for people to move past assumptions about one another.

But the current moment in America demands this kind of work. The United States today is more age-diverse than it has ever been, according to the nonprofit group CoGenerate, which works to facilitate intergenerational unity. Yet despite this generational diversity, we remain socially, culturally and even physically divided by age, a phenomenon reinforced by age separation in institutions like housing, education and social venues.

This age diversity, however, also represents opportunity for news organizations. In a 2022 report, based on a study of what Americans think about bringing older and younger people together to solve problems, CoGenerate identified what it called a pent-up demand for connection among generations.

“A sizable segment of the younger and older populations is hungry for opportunities not only for intergenerational connection, but co-generational action — the chance to join forces in co-creating a better future,” wrote Marc Freedman and Eunice Lin Nichols, the organization’s co-CEOs.

For news organizations, that point of connection could come in any number of forms. It might be a fake horse that’s survived real adversity. Or it might be finding unity on more serious issues like the economy or climate change. Sometimes one can lead to another — storytelling about a seemingly less weighty topic like local sports or music can instill a kind of empathy, understanding and common purpose that can help people find solutions to more consequential ones.

It could also take shape through stories or content that prioritize a diversity of views and quotes from different generations, a community project like Howell’s that brings people together around storytelling, a convening in a physical space where people of different ages can talk and listen to one another, or editorial decisions that give people of different generations space or airtime to share stories in their own voices.

The benefits of intergenerational storytelling

On an individual level, both younger and older people benefit from sharing their stories, said Robyn Fivush, a professor of psychology at Emory University whose work focuses on the power of story sharing across generations and its benefits for families.

Younger people can learn from the experiences of older people because those stories create a shared history, especially at times of stress or life change. While an older person’s story won’t map directly onto the younger person’s life, it will help shape their  understanding of the world and how older generations faced and handled adversity.

Older people also benefit. “They have … a stronger sense of self, more of a sense of pride in who they are, a stronger sense of what we call integrity — that I’ve done something interesting and important with my life,” she said.

Fivush said cross-generational stories are also important outside of families when older people cannot speak to the challenges that younger ones face because they haven’t dealt with the same experiences, citing the LGBTQ community as an example.

Cross-generational stories can serve a community as a whole, too, because they bring empathy and understanding that can help people collaborate on solutions, said Piper Hendricks, the CEO of Stories Change Power, a nonprofit aimed at helping people be effective advocates, including by using storytelling techniques to build connection and empathy.

“Storytelling shifts us from a me-centered way of thinking into a larger ‘we’,” she said. “Stories help tap into the larger community identity as we figure out what is going to work for us. That can be incredibly powerful and absolutely can lead to not just solutions, but solutions that have wider support.”

“Without a story, everything can feel very disconnected,” she said. “In some fields, we may talk in terms of data points, when at the end of the day, what matters are our lives. …  How do we make sense of things? How is the world around us being impacted?”

Another benefit of storytelling across generations is that it allows communities to ensure the integrity of their own narrative — deciding what to emphasize, how to frame the story, whose “gaze” gets prioritized and how to best provide a truthful perspective.

Who we can learn from

Among those who have experience in ensuring the durability and accuracy of narratives across generations are news organizations that serve diaspora communities. They have deep experience in what Frances Medina, the communications and community networks strategist at the publication 9 Millones, calls “rescuing” stories, to ensure that generational experiences are not lost.

Medina says the team at 9 Millones, whose name represents the 3 million Puerto Ricans living on the island archipelago and the 6 million elsewhere, emphasizes a type of journalism that is “less extractive and more regenerative” — in other words, not just extracting information from the community but using it to bring about solutions, including ones from the past that might be worth revisiting.

As part of that ethos, it used a Solutions Journalism Network grant last year to create a “memory circles” project, an oral storytelling event held in four installments — three in Puerto Rico and one in Philadelphia — that allowed the community to explore solutions, like how to come together to repair the damage after hurricanes, while at the same time helping people to feel more connected.

“We’ve seen it be transformative in so many ways, not just for ourselves, but for the people who are sharing their stories,” Medina said.

Similarly, The Haitian Times, which covers and serves Haitians all over the world, has partnered with the AI company Cortico as part of a listening tour across nine different cities in which interviews were conducted with people of all generations and at different stages of their diaspora journey.

The interviews were then analyzed using Cortico’s AI platform to identify trends — what people are talking about in which cities, and how issues overlap among places. Those similarities can then be used to identify systemic problems in health care, said publisher and editor-in-chief Vania Andre.

The news organization has more recently embarked on a project with StoryCorps to hear voices from different generations that can be used to capture their knowledge in a way that might not otherwise be happening. Without this work, these stories are gone forever, she said.

Finding your Lucky

Intergenerational stories are powerful because embedded in them are lessons about how we arrived at our current moment, physically, culturally and economically. They tell us about what we stood for — and what and whom we stood up for — as individuals and as communities.

In Denver, Rocky Mountain PBS works with the Youth Documentary Academy on a series of films to illuminate issues that young people are thinking about — and which ones they’re not seeing represented fully enough or with enough nuance in the media today.

The premise, said CEO Amanda Mountain, is based on a simple question: “How can we bridge a generational gap by sharing with an older audience the voices and perspectives of younger audiences in ways that help everybody learn more about how people are viewing the world today?”

At the Mississippi Free Press, editor Donna Ladd has established the Youth Media Project, which trains primarily underserved high schoolers during the summer to share their own stories and report on potential solutions. Each summer they tackle a different topic. Last year, they analyzed election coverage and how it could be more effective in helping people, especially younger and future voters, understand what’s at stake. This summer they’re looking at health disparities.

Ladd believes that getting young people to engage on these issues is easier than it seems. “I don’t share the same stereotype about teenagers that a lot of adults do, that they’re not interested in issues, and so I and our team don’t believe that,” she said. “And probably because we’ve done youth media projects for so long … we realized that once you get them talking, they start to become really engaged.”

It helps to treat young people with respect, to “shut up and listen,” Ladd said, and also to pay them for their work.

This is a philosophy that Howell, in Pueblo, shares. “Meeting young people where they are,” he says, is a primary aim of the Star Journal and its MoJo project. He says putting young people in a room and buying them pizza can elicit more insights about what a community needs than a highly paid consultant.

Howell also believes most communities probably have their own Lucky —  a touchpoint that news organizations can use to bring generations together for deeper understanding across ages, their communities and their histories — the point of his storytelling project.

“At the end of the day, this is our opportunity now to partner these kids with someone who is older, more mature, who could be a parent level, grandparent level, a great grandparent or aunt or uncle, and connect them,” he said. Lucky and his story are the means to getting these generations to connect with one another.

As for Lucky, today he is not only in the Heritage Museum; his visage is included on a mural in downtown Pueblo that depicts the story of the flood. The building on which the mural is displayed is the former home of the saddle maker, R.T. Frazier, where Lucky originally served as a saddle model. In one section of the mural, Lucky can be seen up in the corner, wedged in that cottonwood tree.