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Community Story Holding and Caretaking
This webinar explores how ethical storytelling can empower rather than exploit, centring the voices of those with lived experience. The presenters share their experiences in co-developing the Transformational Ethical Story Telling (TEST) framework, designed to shift power in storytelling by embedding values-based, anti-oppressive practices into everyday communications, branding, and policy.
Summary
This webinar explores the real-world challenges and opportunities of embedding ethical storytelling in social enterprise practice, including:
- Why ethical storytelling is essential for building trust, integrity, and long-term relationships with communities.
- How to recognise and avoid extractive or harmful storytelling that can exploit lived experience.
- Understanding and applying the Transformational Ethical Story Telling (TEST) Framework.
- What relational, free, and ongoing consent looks like in practice and how it differs from traditional one-off consent forms.
- How to align communications, branding, evaluation, and legal processes with ethical storytelling principles.
- Ways to co-design consent and storytelling agreements that honour storyholders’ rights while meeting organisational obligations.
- Real-world examples of ethical storytelling in action.
- Strategies for creating safer spaces and resourcing storyholders throughout the storytelling process.
- The role of governance and compliance in embedding care and ethics into organisational storytelling policies.
Show notes and quotes
Dung Tran: “Traditional metrics around reach, engagement or brand uplift are not enough. Ethical storytelling redefines success to include dignity, agency, informed consent and long-term relationships with storyholders. It's not transactional, it needs to be relational.”
“This is about challenging power. It's not enough to give someone a mic. You need to make sure they control the volume, the message and the stage that they're standing on.”
“When we talk about ethics, we're talking about justice; we're talking about restoring control to the people who've had it taken away from them.”
“Exposure is not payment… If you're asking for someone's lived experience, you're asking for expertise and that expertise deserves fair, non-exploitative compensation. This principle reminds us that ethical storytelling is not just about how stories are told but how story holders are treated.”
Doug Cronin: “There is power in who gets to tell the story, who uses or abuses someone else's story for their own benefit, and which stories we choose to tell or not tell for the fear of how it may impact us financially, socially, and even with our families.”
“Transformational Ethical Story Telling (T.E.S.T) reminds us that every story sits within a broader structure of power. That's race, gender, class, language and ability. This is why the framework doesn't just outline what we should do; it calls out what we must stop doing. Tokenism, trauma mining, performative inclusion, and unacknowledged bias.”
“What does consent look like? How do we rebalance that power through consent policies, processes and practices? This means having consent check-in points, not just at this one point. It's got to be relational, not just transactional.”
Juju Ortiz: “...mainstream branding and marketing isn't just selling products. It's selling the colonial story …. It shapes how we see race, gender, politics, land, and consumption while muting the voices that it exploits.”
“The same system that labelled my photo cheap and un-Australian and made my harmful creative practices feel normal still shapes every story your organisation tells today. It influences what you build, how you treat your team, who gets a seat at the table, and how your brand shows up in the world.”
“The weaving process teaches relational strengths and perfectly maps the collaborative work of Our Race, Tatak and For Purpose Advisory.”
“Honour the TEST principle of ongoing consent and the principle of empowerment. Because communities, not just creatives, retain real control over how their stories live in the world. For consumers, words like sustainable, honest, and inclusive actually carry real weight. For organisations, [T.E.S.T] is a compass. It's not a threat. It's guidance that keeps your purpose, process and practice in sync.”
Jennifer Johannesen: “We came to the realisation that you need to think of it holistically and it's a multi-pronged approach. It's not just doing the practice or having the process or alternatively just having the consent form. You need to do everything.”
“I was actually complicit in disempowering storyholders by drafting those consent forms and not challenging that status quo. The standard consent form is generally that there's little or no payment for lived experience, little or no say in how images or stories are used, and broad rights for the [organisational] client…it's so important to get consent right if you're truly committed to embedding the rights of a story holder”
“It has to be undertaken at every stage of the organisation to fully embody the TEST principles. In the sense that you need to update the processes, the practices, and the legal terms come last.”
“I think one of the ways that we generally recommend undertaking the process is starting with a project or a distinct piece of work… Seeing how it's implemented in one area then allows the organisation to have a blueprint effectively. Once you develop the processes, it's just a matter of following them.”
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