The Practice of Storyholding™
A Framework for Narrative Strategy, Community Engagement, and Collective Meaning-Making
Developed by Brittini Ward | Eye N Eye LLC
What Is Storyholding?
Storyholding is a ten-step framework I developed through my practice as a storyteller, researcher, artist, and community organizer. It offers an intentional approach to how we receive stories, listen and learn from different perspectives, make meaning from what we gather, and determine what happens to those stories afterward.
At its foundation is a simple belief: People hold the knowledge. I help bring it forward.
Stories are more than content to be collected, interpreted, or shared. They carry lived experiences, histories, relationships, and knowledge that can deepen our understanding of ourselves, one another, and the systems we navigate.
Storyholding invites us to consider not only what a story communicates, but who carries it, what it reveals, who participates in shaping it, and how it can be shared, preserved, or activated with care.
The Ten Steps
Spark: Identify the question, curiosity, experience, or need that begins the process.
Listen + Learn: Create space to observe, listen, and understand before determining an outcome.
Gather Perspectives: Invite different voices, experiences, and sources of knowledge into the process.
Synthesize: Examine what repeats, differs, surprises, or remains unanswered to identify emerging meaning.
Invite Creation: Explore how what has been learned might take shape through creative expression or collective response.
Find a Home: Consider where the story belongs, who it is intended to reach, and what form can hold it.
Activate + Engage: Bring the work into relationship with an audience or community through meaningful participation.
Build Together: Create opportunities for collaboration, shared contribution, and collective ownership of the process.
Document + Archive: Preserve the work, its context, and the knowledge gathered for future access and understanding.
Sustain + Grow: Consider how the relationships, knowledge, and work can continue beyond the initial project.
These steps are interconnected rather than strictly linear. Not every story requires every step, and the process may move forward, return, or pause depending on what the story and the people involved need.
The framework serves the story. The story does not serve the framework.
From Storytelling to Narrative Strategy
Storyholding can be applied across research, organizational communications, cultural production, community engagement, education, and narrative change initiatives.
In practice, it creates a process for moving from listening and gathering information toward identifying patterns, developing shared understanding, and translating knowledge into narratives, experiences, or strategies that people can engage with.
This approach is informed by my professional experience conducting qualitative research and developing narrative interventions at ideas42, alongside my independent practice through Eye N Eye LLC.
Projects including the Detroit Poetry Archive™, Baba Juke™, and community-centered performances and workshops demonstrate how Storyholding can take different forms while remaining grounded in the people, perspectives, and knowledge at the center of the work.
Why Storyholding Matters
Narratives influence how people understand themselves, their communities, and the systems around them. Yet too often, stories are extracted, simplified, or shaped without meaningful participation from the people whose experiences they represent.
Storyholding offers another approach, one rooted in listening, care, consent, reciprocity, and shared participation.
It asks us to consider:
Whose perspectives are informing the narrative? What knowledge is emerging? Who has the opportunity to shape what happens next? And what responsibility do we carry once a story has been entrusted to us?
For organizations working toward narrative or systems change, these questions matter because the process of developing a narrative can be just as important as the narrative itself.
Storyholding is ultimately a practice of turning listening into understanding, understanding into meaningful creation, and creation into opportunities for connection, action, and lasting impact.
Brittini Ward
Narrative Strategist | Creative Director | Storyteller
Founder, Eye N Eye LLC
www.eyeneyellc.com
The Practice of Storyholding™ is an original framework developed through Eye N Eye LLC.
