Building Resiliency & Community While Telling Our Story – SkillsCommons

By Paul Casey, Director, Northeast Resiliency Consortium, Round 3

Earlier this month, we were proud to be the first TAACCCT grantee to present our story,Voices of Opportunity: Creating Resiliency and Building Community, in a new webinar series in partnership with the TAACCCT Learning Network and the members of the StoryTelling Network IMPACTcommunity. We were humbled by the tremendous opportunity to share our story and we look forward to more sharing and storytelling from others within the TAACCCT community.

This gave us the opportunity to take a good, hard look at the best ways to tell our story. We came up with several different ways of telling our story that enabled us to embody aspects of our resiliency competencies–critical thinking, reflective learning, self-awareness, collaboration, and adaptability. Through this experience, we thought critically about what we’ve accomplished and where we’ve struggled, and it enabled us to be reflective and be aware of what we’ve learned in order to formulate the narrative into the best version of the story possible. In addition, through our partnership with the TAACCCT Learning Network, we collaborated in a way that allowed all of us to adapt to and learn new and different ways of doing things with one another.

With the incredible support and guidance we received from everyone involved in helping to develop this webinar, telling our story happened in part because of the community that supported us. We are very appreciative and thankful for our colleagues Sherwood L. Taylor (Atlantic Cape CC), Alese Mulvihill (Housatonic CC), and Francesca Fiore (LaGuardia CC), who shared their experiences from across the consortium, and to everyone at the U.S. Department of Labor, Jobs for the Future, SkillsCommons, and to our partners, Achieving the Dream.

The experience was worthwhile, and we highly encourage others to take steps to tell their stories. Missed our webinar? Be a part of our storytelling experience.

Finally, we know many of you also have stories to share! This StoryTelling series is an opportunity for grantees to share innovations, insights, and problem-solving strategies developed while building programming. If you are interested in telling your TAACCCT story, we strongly encourage you to submit a TAACCCT Storytelling Proposal.