Storytelling Learning & Practice Series for a Northwest Michigan Homelessness Coalition
ROLE
Workshop Designer, Facilitator & Storytelling Coach
CLIENT
YEAR
Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness
2025–Present
summary
A learning and practice series designed to support coalition members in crafting stories that illuminate the systemic nature of homelessness—and to equip them with the language, frameworks, and tools to sustain that practice.
Storytelling is critical to the work of the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness (NWCEH), though members had primarily centered their stories on individual experience. What they sought was support with widening the aperture to show how homelessness is a systemic failure rather than an individual one. Ashley Halladay-Schmandt, NWCEH’s Director, brought a question with a long view: how do we tell more accurate stories, and how do we build the capacity to keep telling them?
In response, the engagement took shape as a three-part arc: a workshop series to establish shared language and practice, coaching sessions to support participants in applying the learning to real narrative challenges, and a systems storytelling rubric (still in development) to give coalition members a lasting tool for assessing whether their stories reflect that lens.
The two-session workshop series, delivered in March 2025, moved between theory and practice for a group of fifteen participants spanning coalition leadership, frontline staff, donors, and partners. Together we traced a path from the foundations of ethical storytelling—consent, power, psychological safety, coherence—through a critique of the hero's journey archetypes that dominate nonprofit storytelling, to a set of techniques for building a "narrative bridge" from individual experience to systemic cause. Participants left with shared language, a set of frameworks to experiment with, and a clearer sense of the shift they were trying to make.
Since late 2025, coaching sessions have given coalition members space to apply that learning to the specific narrative challenges they face: a shelter consolidation effort, the case for an integrated care team, and a county millage campaign for deeply affordable housing. The coaching has functioned as narrative strategy, helping participants identify protagonists, anticipate audience objections, choose a story frame, and surface the feedback loops that keep the problem in place.
key contributions
01
Designed and facilitated a two-session, virtual workshop series for 15 participants, developing original curriculum grounded in ethical storytelling theory, narrative change research, and the systems change frameworks at the heart of my practice
02
Provided narrative strategy coaching to the Coalition's Director, Goodwill Northern Michigan’s Chief Philanthropy and Communications Officer, and a consultant supporting NWCEH’s regional Task Force with storytelling challenges spanning shelter consolidation, integrated care, and affordable housing advocacy
03
Currently developing a systems storytelling rubric to give coalition members a durable tool for evaluating whether their stories illuminate systemic causes of homelessness and support the conditions for change
impact
The workshop series gave coalition members a shared language and a clear frame for the shift they are trying to make from stories centered on individual experience to stories that connect that experience to systemic conditions.
Participants left with an understanding of why that shift matters for moving the audiences they most need to move—local and county government officials, funders, and skeptical citizens—and a set of practices they could begin experimenting with right away.
The coaching has extended that learning into the coalition's most pressing narrative challenges. Sessions have worked through some of the hardest questions in systems storytelling: how to choose the protagonist for a structural story (where the system itself, rather than a person, may be the best fit), how to navigate NIMBY-ism and bootstraps narratives, and how to name historical context in ways that invite accountability to the future.
The rubric, when complete, will give the coalition an evaluation tool they can continue using as their storytelling work evolves.
Related links
Stories of Change for reference – a prior body of work:
Testimonial
“Bringing storytelling learning and practice into the Coalition’s work has helped me connect to it in a new way. Through Jessica’s coaching, we've learned how to share stories ethically and truthfully, in ways that honor the dignity and resilience of people experiencing homelessness. My hope is that the way we talk about this work helps shift mindsets, build understanding, and move our community toward better solutions.”
— Ashley Halladay-Schmandt, Director, Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness