What we want to do is give our fellow survivors the opportunity to use storytelling to transform trauma and find voice – which ultimately means finding agency. When we, as survivors, do that, we are in charge of the rest of the story, the "what next?" -Michael Patrick MacDonald
The Rest of the Story is a trauma-informed community-based storytelling curriculum, designed to help participants transform trauma to voice, agency and leadership through story sharing. In addition, the curriculum has been utilized for community-building efforts aimed at bridging differences or simply to break down the silos within community organizing efforts. The curriculum is a five-session process, meeting for 2 ½ to 3 hours once a week, including pre-session food and post-session processing for those who need it.
The Rest of the Story is about a process first and foremost. Using Restorative Justice Circle process-style prompts, the experience can be therapeutic for groups with specific community trauma in common. In addition, the Restorative process can serve to connect groups and individuals working toward common social justice and community-building goals. In this way, The Rest of the Story is rooted in age-old Mutual Aid-style grassroots organizing, wherein individuals gravitate to each other around a particular need or issue, find out that they are not alone (that “this is bigger than me”), and work collectively toward a greater goal of community and systemic change alongside personal agency and healing.
Invariably each cohort produce a collection of stories, but each individual in a cohort owns their story. It is crucial to the process that each individual participant feels in charge of their story and any resulting piece of writing, and that each is ultimately in charge of what shall be done with their piece. Throughout sessions, sharing is always optional, our golden rule being Always invitation, never invasion. Always opportunity, never demand. Invariably, a safe space for sharing and listening is developed and maintained collectively.
Cohorts can decide what they would like to do with the collective’s stories, given the permission of each participant. Many groups have produced anthologies and storytelling events as well as public art exhibitions to serve the mission of the collective vis a vis the particular narrative a group wishes to project to the world.
The Rest of the Story works within a trauma-informed framework, prioritizing safety first in the remembering and reconstructing of one’s personal narrative. Facilitators emphasize the need for the storyteller to remain in charge of one’s story at all stages, from remembrance to ultimate decisions about whether one will share their story, and where, when, and how that sharing might happen.
The Rest of the Story was created by Michael Patrick MacDonald, a bestselling author of the memoirs, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie and Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. MacDonald’s thirty-two years of work—as a community organizer, Restorative Justice practitioner and writer—has always been anchored in his lived experience of poverty and personal loss to violence, the drug trade, and incarceration while growing up in South Boston’s housing projects. Having learned to transform his own trauma to voice and agency through trauma-informed, survivor-led community organizing and having ultimately experienced the redemptive power of memoir-writing, he has developed this course to share the personal and community value of memory-work and story sharing.
Three Parts—from Cohort to action-oriented Supergroup to Facilitator Training:
Just like most good stories, The Rest of the Story comes in three parts. Part One is the five-week cohort. Each week, participants meet for a three hour session, arriving for an optional meal to settle in and then participating in a story sharing process using the Restorative model (always invitation, never invasion, always the right to pass). MPM uses prompts for storytelling on and off the page. Each prompt has safety-first built into it, allowing a participant to go where they feel capable of going, where they perhaps want or need to go, always checking in with themselves for safety. They are always reminded that they are in charge of where they go, how they go, and with whom they will share. Each session begins and ends, as taught to MacDonald by indigenous Restorative Justice practitioners, in a good way. That means that we take all the time we need to “circle-in” and to “circle-out,” sitting with anything that comes up.
Groups may be fine with only undergoing the above process–as a one-time-experience aimed at community building for a developing group, or as an ongoing project with repeated twice-annual cohorts aimed at building and sustaining coalitions. The below, Part two and Part Three, are additional beyond the five-week cohort. Part Two, the monthly Supergroup, has been, thus far, always desired by participants in the five-week cohort. Part Three, Training of TRS Facilitators, is optional, and being used by organizations such as The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Boston and Participation and Practice of Rights in the North of Ireland who wish to grow the facilitation and leadership capacity of their participants.
Part Two of The Rest of the Story involves monthly “SuperGroup” meetings of alum from past cohorts. The supergroup acts as a coalition working toward whatever public expression a group wants to do. This has included the creation of an anthology of stories (again, only those who choose to publish, whether named or anonymous), storytelling events where participants do readings in the locale of their choice (City Hall, Assemblies, Community Centers), as well as the creation of prominently displayed visual art & story exhibitions, whether in the halls of power or at grassroots community centers aimed at raising awareness on community issues and/or strengths. In this phase, TRS stewards groups through mapping ways toward collective visions, and edits stories in one-on-one sessions with each storyteller, always maintaining the individual’s voice and agency over their story throughout the process. Beyond that, TRS assists in helping to implement the logistics of the project, whether an anthology book or a public visual display. While Part One’s use of the curriculum with a cohort ought to happen in-person, Part Two, the Supergroup, can happen in Zoom sessions.
In Part Three of the program, the Training of Facilitators, organizations might choose to grow the process, developing facilitators of future cohorts of The Rest of the Story. In this phase Michael Patrick MacDonald will train alumni of past cohorts in trauma-informed facilitation. Alumni will then be certified to facilitate The Rest of the Story cohorts in their own geographic communities and/or affinity groups (e.g. survivors of particular trauma, formerly incarcerated individuals, youth workers, LGBTQ+ groups, refugee and asylum seeker groups, etc). In this way, The Rest of the Story can serve the purpose of developing trauma-informed restorative communities and/or coalitions and movements. This training of facilitators is also five-sessions which can be done in person or via Zoom. All participants should be graduates of a TRS cohort (Part 1).
Where The Rest of the Story has been implemented:
The Rest of the Story was piloted in 2014 at Crittenton Women’s Union (now EMPath) with Greater Boston women transitioning out of abuse and poverty. Since then, the curriculum has been continuously housed and implemented at the Louis D Brown Peace Institute with survivors of homicide victims in Boston. In Ireland it has been implemented with cross-border men’s sheds in Fermanagh and Leitrim, as well as Loughan House prison in Cavan. In 2019, as part of MacDonald’s Fulbright Scholar Award at Queen’s University, Belfast, The Rest of the Story was brought to Upper Springfield Road youth workers in West Belfast (where it will return this year after a two-year Covid hiatus) as well as to Participation and Practice of Rights, in the North of Ireland, where mental health advocates (both providers as well as survivors with lived experience) have continuously used it as a mutual aid tool, assisting in building a mental health advocacy coalition calling for A New Script for Mental Health in the North of Ireland. Most recently, The Rest of the Story has been adopted by Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, to develop a system-wide Parent Advisory Council from among parents of incarcerated youth. All of these groups will now come together via Zoom for quarterly transatlantic story sharing events which result in invaluable transatlantic support as well as coalition strategy sharing. At the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute and at Participation and Practice of Rights, The Rest of the Story is being taken to the next level, using a Training of Facilitators (Part Three) process which allows alum to develop TRS cohorts in their various communities or affinity groups.
“Too often, the lives of people who have been systemically impoverished and marginalized are dominated by a ‘single story’—a story often constructed and told by dominant classes of people in media and policy-making positions. The Rest of the Story is ultimately about reclaiming our individual and community narratives—in all their nuances, multiplicities, and complexities—and the empowerment that comes from being in charge of our story. When we are in charge of our story, we are better equipped to transform and healthfully integrate the difficulties and traumas of that story into our lives and into our work. Ultimately, we are able to use our individual story to connect with others in solidarity, and to build communities at the intersection of healing and justice.”
- Michael Patrick MacDonald