On the 28th of March, we kicked off the day with a Digital Coffee with our SIRR partners, a good start to the Presentation & Talk, focusing on "Storytelling as a Culture Changer." Our speakers were Oskar Lundgren from Vansbro, Sweden, and Søren Østergård Madsen from Stenvad, Denmark.
Both presentations explored the power of storytelling in transforming the culture in their municipalities municipal culture, each with a unique approach.
Oskar focused more on lifting the different stories and people in Vansbro municipality to change their story from a negative one to a positive one, and that the positive stories show a more successful municipality than one that is in decline.
Oskar from Vansbro Municipality
We started from a solution-focused approach where the basic idea is to reinforce what works and give confirmation to the individual to get them to do more of this and then what doesn't work often follows along with it. At an individual level it is quite easy to understand, but would it also work at a municipal level by having positive stories create more positive stories? That we did not know. We decided to take the positive that happened in our local businesses as the basis for a new story that shows a municipality that is developing in the right direction.
Søren from Stenvad Mosebrug Hub
We would like to create an ownership through history and through shared values. We would like people to share their stories with other people, so they are able to connect with the values that we have found in the history of Stenvad. We would like to build and create a sense of community by story, by inviting newcomers in and letting people that already live here, and with longer history tell those stories to them. Together they create this strong sense of place. Then the big question is: can we by doing that change the narrative of decline that we see in our rural area?
Both speakers showed how storytelling helps build a struggling municipality to be more resilient, and even though it can be hard sometimes they create their own worth by continuing to believe in the story that they are telling.
We thank Oskar and Søren for the very inspiring stories about their respective municipalities!
