Telling Stories

Death and murder have been part of Breanna’s life since she was a child growing up in the drug- and violence-infected neighborhoods in Jacksonville.  Even in a city where the sounds of gunfire interrupt nearly every nighttime hour, where murders mount by the week, Breanna’s story is unusually shocking.

For it’s a story of family tragedy that has few parallels.  

Today her voice doesn’t shake and her eyes don’t well up when she talks about her life.  She discovered her resilience and strength when she began telling her personal story of loss.   And, she’s fully aware that by telling her story, she may be helping another child in similar circumstances.

Breanna takes a deep breath and begins.

Her first memory is of a mattress on a floor surrounded with drugs and paraphernalia.  That’s where she slept with her younger brother in their Jacksonville apartment, attended infrequently by parents whose drug addictions keep them on the streets as much as at home.

It was addiction that eventually sent Breanna and her younger brother to their paternal grandmother’s house for safety.  And for the next several years, life was good, Breanna remembers.  Although her parents struggled with their addictions, they remained important figures in her life with her grandmother providing stability and rules.

Breanna excelled at school, especially enjoying reading and language.  Her grandmother kept her involved in activities after school and in the summer.  

Meanwhile she developed a close bond with her father, and he often walked her to and from school, her small hand in his.  Despite his continuing addiction, he loved his children.

She was only 9 when she became aware her father was ill.  Breanna was finally told he had cancer and he died a day after his 45^th birthday – only five days after Breanna had turned 10.

It was the start of a cycle that would play out in Breanna’s life again and again.

“I was such a Daddy’s girl,” she remembers.  “I just loved my Dad.  For that to be taken away … I was devastated.”

She didn’t have much time to mourn.

Less than a year later, her mother died in a car accident.  Breanna’s grief deepened.

“I was like ‘OK God, OK, here I am 10 years old.  I already lost my Dad and here I am losing my Mom.  Do I really have a reason to be in this world?”

She felt so alone that she began reaching out to her three half-sisters who were much older than she.  They had grown up with a different grandparent but now her three older siblings began attending Breanna’s school events and spending time with both Breanna and her brother.

It was soothing, Breanna says, to have her half-sisters in her life – not to replace her parents but to strengthen the bonds of the family.  Their closeness began to ease Breanna’s sadness.

But that serenity wasn’t to last long.

Breanna remembers vividly the call from her aunt in early November of 2013 with news that would once again rip her world apart.  The aunt told her that someone had broken into her half-sisters’ home, raped and murdered two of her sisters and murdered two young men who were with them.  The third sister hadn’t been at home so had escaped the massacre.

Today she can talk about it.  At the time she was shell shocked with grief.

It was a random crime, she was told.  “It had nothing to do with my sisters.  They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They had the same birthday a year apart and they ended up dying on the same day.”

The final blow, however, was delivered less than a year later when Breanna’s grandmother died after complications from diabetes.  Breanna was only 14.   

“I just lost it.  I screamed.  I cried.  I lost it,” she says.  “My grandmother was my backbone.  I felt like when people started to get close they would be taken away from me.  I just wanted to feel numb.”

Breanna fell into an abyss of grief.  She began cutting herself and taking pills to help her sleep.  She didn’t think she would ever emerge from her sorrow.

Breanna, now 20 and in college, says she only began to heal years later when she began telling her story to others.  She realized that others, too, were dealing with grief and trauma.  She felt like her story and her sorrow were being recognized and understood.

“It also made me realize that you never know what people are going through.  You see them on an everyday basis and you think ‘she’s a smiling girl, he’s a smiling boy.’  But deep down inside they’re hurting.”

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“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

…  Benjamin Franklin

Jacksonville is a tale of two cities – a division that began during the Jim Crow era, was highlighted by consolidation, and exists today between neighborhoods differentially marked by poverty and/or privilege.  This divisiveness is characterized by a chasm of misunderstanding that’s led to further distancing and apathy over the years.   Neighbors are not merely separated by geographic distance in a city the size of Jacksonville, they’re too often also separated by ignorance, intolerance, and indifference.

Overcoming that lack of understanding and creating deliberate opportunities to build individual and community connection is essential to creating the kind of citywide support needed to address the problems of public safety in Jacksonville’s neighborhoods.  It’s a goal that must be met on both the community-wide level – where all residents envision the wellbeing of the city as a shared responsibility  – and at the individual level – where residents from more privileged neighborhoods participate in activities to build connections and understanding by listening and learning from residents who are directly impacted by violence.  These types of interactions are the building blocks of empathy. Empathy is a powerful motivator that if cultivated and focused on solutions, can lead to action. 

As five-time state’s attorney Harry Shorstein said in a speech in 2007:  “A solution will result only when the entire community comes together and makes a strong commitment for action.  My good friend Nat Glover perhaps said it best. ‘ We will only make progress in this community when a mother in Ortega cries just as hard for the child in the Northwest Quadrant who is murdered in a senseless drive-by shooting as she would cry for her neighbor’s child.’”¹

The first step in this forward movement involves re-envisioning Jacksonville as a single city, one in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Such an effort must go beyond slogans — “The Bold New City of the South” or “Where Florida Begins” – that appeal mainly to tourists and instead focus on compelling residents to see their city and themselves in it differently. 

That involves a community-wide change in narrative that can only be accomplished via a multi-pronged communication strategy. Importantly, much of this strategy has already been mapped out during a years-long study conducted by the FrameWorks Institute, which should be leveraged.  Those communication strategies paired with the public dissemination of statistics that detail the impact of violence on the community as a whole could begin to repair Jacksonville’s divisions.

The second step is perhaps more complex and involves a micro-level effort to sway residents’ personal beliefs about their neighbors to generate the type of empathy needed to elicit individual support.  

These are both  necessary steps that have been mentioned by many JustJax participants.  “What we really need to do is see and hear our neighbors and understand their complexity.”

Developing “Active Empathy”

We know that infants are born with emotional empathy, able to react to their parents’ emotions soon after birth.  As children grow, they develop empathy for others outside their immediate family, but often that feeling extends primarily to others like themselves.  Both children and adults are less likely to have empathic responses to unfamiliar individuals or groups, a fact that can result in bias, stereotypes, and a perpetuation of disparities.

 While that empathy isn’t necessarily automatic, it can be learned.² Although there are strategies used to increase people’s empathetic responses, often they involve providing individuals the chance to “walk in another’s shoes.” Being able to more fully comprehend the perspective of “the other” increases empathy, and, concurrently, decreases bias.

Jacksonville’s public and private institutions, including nonprofits, have made attempts over the years to bridge local differences and build empathy through listening circles, public forums, workshops, relationship building, and even educational efforts.  But these efforts seem to have had limited success either due to their lack of reach or lack of continuity.  The blame for both can be placed on insufficient funding and insufficient resolve.  The building of empathy requires long-term commitment.  And that requires both money and broad-based leadership.

We recommend that Jacksonville’s philanthropic leadership community provide the funding and daring guidance needed to tackle this problem.  More specifically, we propose a series of steps to help alleviate the misunderstanding, garner empathetic support for affected neighbors, and begin to erase the gap between the two Jacksonvilles.  In other words, to build the type of community-wide empathy needed to open people’s eyes and hearts to the lived experiences of all of Jacksonville’s residents.

But to create the type of community re-envisioning and understanding needed between residents in Jacksonville, what must be generated is something beyond just simple empathy.  Researchers call it “active empathy,” a trait that allows individuals to recognize the pain of others not necessarily like themselves and then engage in actions to help alleviate that pain.³

Such “active empathy” can then be channeled to elicit constructive solutions and supportive actions.  It is the way to move forward for a healthier, safer, and unified community.

“Through empathic interactions, a sense of collective purpose, action, and social participation grow in communities with empathy at the core. Ultimately, individual and collective empathic acts lead us toward resilient communities. In turn, we hope that a resilient community might inspire continuous empathic acts among individuals and the collective as we move toward the future.”⁴

Telling the city’s story

The First Recommendation in this section involves tackling the issue of the division referred to as “two Jacksonvilles” in an effort to reunite the city as a single entity working toward a similar goal.  Many respondents to the JustJax initiative remarked on the tendency within Jacksonville for residents to identify with their neighborhoods and not with the city as a whole. Their disenfranchisement from the larger community has led to a competition between neighborhoods for services regardless of absolute need and a disassociation with residents of other neighborhoods.

The divisions within the city are a simple fact recognized by most residents, and certainly voiced by JustJax respondents.  “People in Jacksonville don’t value the entirety of Jacksonville as their focus; their focus is their own neighborhoods. Both Jacksonville as a whole and other neighborhoods are not a focus.  And, so long as there are neighborhoods in Jacksonville in which people don’t consider other neighborhood’s priorities, there will be problems.”

As an example, a San Marco resident might oppose the allocation of more funding for infrastructure improvement for New Town, unaware and unconcerned about the crumbling sidewalks and leaking septic tanks that characterized the latter.  Or, residents of Mandarin might be against a restructuring of law enforcement that would provide additional officers for violence-affected neighborhoods but perhaps deprive their neighborhood of the kind of coverage to which they’d grown accustomed.

And, it’s a theme we heard numerous times from JustJax respondents.  “A unique problem to Jacksonville is that community members behave as if the city is instead a series of villages. That makes for very little understanding between these villages.”  

The inability of Jacksonville residents to conceive of the city as a single community has hampered efforts to enact public-safety solutions in the past – and will continue to do so in the future.  Although pockets of concerned individuals are well aware of the community-wide consequences, it seems the larger community is not.  In 2015, after years-long study of Jacksonville, The FrameWorks Institute identified the problem when writing specifically about the needs of the city’s children.

“While experts are attuned to the importance of community-wide and population-level risk and protective factors, and to the role of public policy in addressing those factors, Jacksonville residents are largely unaccustomed to thinking about children’s well-being from these broader vantage points,” according to the report “All Aboard: Explanatory Tools to talk about Children’s Well-Being in Jacksonville.”⁵

It is an observation that can be understood beyond the specificity of addressing children’s well-being, offering a frame that can allow discussion on why efforts to move Jacksonville forward in the past have been largely unsuccessful.

Frameworks researchers also identified three other community perspectives that may also hamper Jacksonville’s ability to conceive of itself as a unified community.  While also addressed in the context of child well-being, these same factors can also relate to efforts to deal with public safety and violence at the community level.

1. Family Responsibility–which holds parents and children exclusively responsible for many problems, without regard to circumstance and larger social deficits. This makes it east to, and summarily ignores the responsibility of community-level responses. “The public’s focus on the family as the center of all responsibility precludes any productive attention to population- and systems-level approaches to improving outcomes …,” the report stated. This belief may translate into the realm of public safety, as residents simply regard adolescent violence as the responsibility of the family. 
2.  Common Fates–perpetuates “othering” and assumes people from different parts of the community will share different fates.  Such a perspective leads to a widening of the sense of difference between people and communities residing in different areas, furthering the alienation neighbors in different areas feel from one another. 
3. Fatalistic Attitude–a pervasively negative attitude–an air of inevitability–challenges any possibility of positive outcomes of social projects.  Such an attitude inhibits efforts to move forward.  “When the public feels that poverty, crime and other problems in Jacksonville are inevitable features of life in the city, they are not inclined to think that investing in systems and institutions will yield any useful results or spark positive change.”

So how does Jacksonville move beyond a perspective of fractured and separate neighborhoods?  How do documented negative community-level outcomes translate into shared community responsibility?  And how can Jacksonville tackle the shared fatalistic notion that no inroads can be made as far as improving people’s lives and public safety?  

The way forward is to create a common perception that casts public safety and the elimination of violence as a shared concern for all residents of Jacksonville and to impress upon residents that change is possible.

The FrameWorks Institute has developed several ways to change the narrative within Jacksonville and has urged nonprofits to develop and share a common language that leads to a common understanding. This can be accomplished through metaphors and explanatory means of breaking down unhealthy ways of looking at the city.  These same communication strategies should be utilized by not only nonprofits, but other Jacksonville institutions, including city government, to help cast the need to move forward toward a safer community as one that is possible but will require the buy-in of all residents.

To move forward, the entirety of Jacksonville must be involved.  That means the residents who believe “violence is a problem that ‘other’ people face,” in the words of sociologist and author Thomas Abt⁶, must be moved from that assumption to the notion that violence is a problem that impacts everyone in the city.  Importantly, it may be helpful to engage the help of the newly reinstituted JCCI and its focus on creating meaningful community discussion  to achieve this goals.

The problem of violence in Jacksonville can be reframed  in terms of its economic consequences. “Violence prevention is often presented as ‘the right thing to do’ without also being presented as the financially responsible thing to do.”  There are numerous sources to draw upon to reach these types of dollar-based calculations.  For example, a study by Shapiro and Hassett⁸ used data from Jacksonville among a sample of cities to draw several economic conclusions about the dividends of a reduction of crime in the city.

1. “A 10 percent reduction could save $4 million per year, reduce the direct costs to victims by nearly $8 million per year, and avert more than $80 million in annual, intangible costs to victims—reducing total government costs by an average of $122 per resident per year.
2.  “A 25 percent reduction could save nearly $12 million per year, reduce the direct costs to victims by nearly $20 million per year, and avert more than $200 million in annual intangible costs — reducing total government costs by the equivalent of more than $305 per resident per year.
3.  “This 25 percent savings could enable a mix of cutting its property taxes by up to 2 percent or increasing local spending on economic development by up to 26 percent.”

Yet another study⁹ noted correlations between gun homicides and economic factors in the larger community.  More specifically, within the six cities surveyed as gun homicides surged new business growth dropped, home values decreased, jobs decreased, homeownership rates decreased, and businesses had poorer outcomes.  In Philadelphia, research from the City’s Controller looked specifically at the decrease in property values in relation to its homicides and found “killings in a neighborhood have a sizable effect on nearby residential sale prices, with a single murder lowering sale prices in the immediate neighborhood by an average 2.3 percent.”¹⁰ Clearly, violence is a major impediment to community development.

Moreover, the successful reduction of violence in Jacksonville can be reframed in terms of its investment return and potential for economic progress. For example, Cure Violence, a national public health and violence interruption strategy underway in Jacksonville as an initiative of Mayor Curry, advertises that for every dollar invested in its program, there is a return of $16 in savings to health and criminal justice. 

Public education efforts leveraging such economic facts would reinforce the idea that seeking increases in public safety across the city would improve the financial stability of all.

Telling individual stories

Our Second Recommendation  is related to the first in that its goal is to reduce the divisiveness within the city, however this approach is tailored to the individual, micro-level, rather than the community, macro-level.  The messages here would be targeted to individual residents in an effort to increase personal empathy toward those living within violence-affected neighborhoods.  This recommendation would encourage the utilization of real-life stories of people in these affected neighborhoods to give residents of other areas the necessary insight needed to build empathy. 

The telling of stories has been part of human history since the first homo sapiens settled herself around the fire to tell tales to others in her clan.  Stories are used today in various settings to make complex concepts understandable.  We depend on them to inform us on how to speak and act, what to believe, and ways to interact with unfamiliar others.  It even has a name – “narrative empathy.”¹¹  Certainly, authors recognize the power of stories.

“I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don’t understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world we live in,” says Neil Gaiman, award-winning author.  

But so, increasingly, do scientists.

There has been considerable research that shows sharing people’s personal narratives can foster understanding and decrease racism.  Stories can help break down stereotypes and alienation.  Research has even found that partaking in stories can stimulate the brain to release certain neurochemicals, the same ones that have been associated with empathy.

One of the leading researchers on the neurological basis for linking storytelling and empathy is Paul Zak, an author and scientist who is the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His lab has engaged in studying how the brain reacts when exposed to the telling for stories, including personal narratives.¹²

“Emotional simulation is the foundation for empathy and is particularly powerful for social creatures like humans because it allows us to rapidly forecast if people around us are angry or kind, dangerous or safe, friend or foe,” Zak writes. “By knowing someone’s story—where they came from, what they do, and who you might know in common—relationships with strangers are formed.”¹³

In Jacksonville, the power of storytelling has been underscored by a student-led group known as the EVAC Movement (evacmovement.com).  It was founded by a Jacksonville high school teacher, Amy Donofrio, and shaped into a powerful voice relating young people’s life stories of growing up in neighborhoods where violence and poverty are all too common.

For the students involved, who shared with Donofrio the narratives of growing up in some of Jacksonville’s most dangerous neighborhoods, the effects of storytelling were powerful and positive.  “I originally came up with the idea after having kids tell me what they’d been through,” Donofrio said. “I saw how the telling helped them. And it helped me too. When you know someone’s story there’s context, and that provides understanding.”

Her next step was to spread the stories farther—to stakeholders within Jacksonville—and then even farther to Washington D.C. and Harvard University. Everywhere, the feedback and resulting change was powerful.

Donofrio reflected, “It made a difference in every single person who heard their stories. It is easy to debate politics and ideologies but you can’t debate someone’s lived experiences.  While this may not automatically shift someone’s politics or ideologies, at the very least hearing stories plants a seed of truth that is undeniable and over time it can grow into something.”

Donofrio’s school-based EVAC courses have been eliminated by the school district. The EVAC Movement is currently being operated as an independent entity governed by young adults.  Donofrio  still believes stories are crucial to Jacksonville’s forward movement on things such as race and inequality.  Stories can enable empathy in people not personally connected to the city’s violence-affected neighborhoods by providing a more full understanding of how the context of life in one of these communities can influence an individual.

Stories can also provide a clarion call for help.

“When people have heard my kids’ stories, there’s always been a call to action,” Donofrio said.  “Most people are like me, until they heard the stories they didn’t know what exactly was broken.  Without hearing the stories, you make a lot of assumptions. Stories humanize. Stories build relationships. These are the only things that will ever fix this.”  

The FrameWorks Institute also acknowledges the power of storytelling to change attitudes and beliefs and calls for using stories to frame social issues as policy issues. 

The media that could be called upon to amplify the stories of individuals and families affected by violence in Jacksonville are many.  They could include written stories, video stories, strictly audio stories, and images. In fact, the use of images has been used as the major medium for Juvenile-in-Justice, a project created to connect human faces with the problems facing incarcerated youth.  Yet another medium, artworks, can also be utilized to instill empathy.¹⁵

The platforms on which these stories could be shared are also highly variable and could be provided as the results of partnerships forged with national as well as local media and institutes.  For example:

• Both the local nonprofit public radio station (WJCT) and its affiliate StoryCorps could be enlisted to create short audio interviews that could be broadcast periodically. StoryCorps has traveled to Jacksonville on several occasions previously.
• The local print media (The Florida Times-Union, Folio magazine, the Jacksonville Daily Record, and others) could be engaged in a partnership to print both written accounts and images.
• The local broadcast television media (WJAX-TV, WJXT-TV, WJXX-TV, WCWJ-TV, and others) could be engaged in a partnership to broadcast video stories.
• The other local radio stations (Cox Radio, Clear Channel Communications and others) could be engaged in a partnership to broadcast audio stories.
• Local blogs could be engaged in a partnership to place numerous items online.  
• Artwork created by affected individuals and families (visual art, poems, spoken-word art, art-photo collages, and so on) could be shared at local workshops and placed within businesses, museums and other institutions.  
• Violence-affected individuals (including children) could be empowered to document their own lives on video, still image photography, or by audio recording.  This is a method that has been utilized in numerous sociological research projects and more broadly through the UK nonprofit PhotoVoice.
• Free-standing websites could be created to host individuals’ stories, images, artwork and other content.
• National podcasting outlets could be approached to carry podcasts developed locally.
• Publishing companies could be contacted to publish low-cost books suitable for school-age children as well as adults.
• Stories can also be presented in face-to-face context with affected individuals presenting their stories to local organizations and groups. Examples of this include the EVAC¹⁶ program, as discussed, and Holocaust Memories: Sharing Family Stories, in which the local children of Holocaust survivors share their stories.¹⁷
• More traditional marketing materials – fliers, brochures, pamphlets, billboards – could also be deployed to spread stories and images.

The city of Belfast in Northern Ireland has been particularly active in its use of storytelling to increase understanding and acceptance.¹⁸ Here, it was the differences between Protestants and Catholics that resulted in stereotyping and, eventually, armed conflict.  Since the conflict ended, Belfast institutions have utilized stories effectively as a force to bring people together.

Many partners have been drawn into the Belfast initiative in the same way Jacksonville institutions could join together in a local storytelling project using a variety of content ranging from oral histories to written content.  For example, the Belfast library system has run a summer storytelling program, storytelling groups have been established, an organization was created to record people’s stories, and the British Broadcasting Corporation established storytelling programming. 

 Storytelling groups were set up in prisons, homeless shelters, community centers, nursing homes, schools and elsewhere.  The participation of local creative writing groups was harnessed.  A storytelling festival was launched.  Books of the stories were published.  

The success of the effort was underscored by storyteller and librarian Liz Weir, who had helped mount many of the storytelling efforts in efforts to encourage peace during Northern Ireland’s decades of violence (referred to as the “Troubles”). 

“When we started off the Troubles were at their height, and somebody would get up and tell a story about an Orange Lodge dinner, and somebody else would tell a story about going to Mass. The fact was we were all listening to each other’s stories, and respecting each other’s stories, and I think that’s very important. If you listen to someone’s story, you’re giving the utmost respect.”¹⁹

As  with many of the efforts recommended in this report, these efforts should not be undertaken as a short-term strategy.  We believe they will be most effective if publicized over an extended period of time and to as wide an audience as possible. In addition, the effort should be multi-pronged to deliver life experiences across a variety of media and platforms, ensuring broad reach and accessibility.

Getting storytelling help

Our Third Recommendation involves the use of marketing/public relations/storytelling professionals to put together this community-wide effort. We believe the above two recommendations cannot be effectively carried out by communication staff already employed by the nonprofit community, whether they be in-house or paid contract professionals. The scope of the above two recommendations is simply too large.

A successful strategy to alter the community’s beliefs about the city itself and the residents who live in Jacksonville should be organized by a team that possesses many different skills including the public relations ability to guide such a project.  Other individuals – writers, photographers, website builders, artists, videographers, and others – can be brought into the process as partners as needed.  Jacksonville is rich in human resources ready to be tapped and deployed for such an important endeavor. 

Resources have already been devoted to understanding and moving on from the impediments that perpetuate a city divided. This research is instructive and should not be left on the shelf. Jacksonville should leverage this information to bridge divides long identified as impediments to move beyond inaction. 

“From individual neighborly acts to collective acts whose reverberations are felt worldwide, empathy is a driving force tying physical and virtual communities together. The empathic acts, whether large or small, individual- or organization-driven are shaping our world. … Communities can work together to encourage the prosocial behaviors and community connections that will lead to a positive future for all.”²⁰

Citations

¹Shorstein, H. (Feb. 26, 2007). The Tale of Two Jacksonvilles – The safest and most dangerous city in Florida [Speech transcript]. 

²Van Berkhout, E.T. and Malouff, J.M.  (2015, July 20). “The Efficacy of Empathy Training: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.”  Journal of Counseling Psychology.

³Dolan, P. , Boylan, C. , & Berardi, M. K. (2017). Activating empathy: Facilitator guide, U.S. revisions (Vol. 1). State College, PA: King’s Printing.

⁴Berandi, M.K., White, A.M., Winters, D., Thorn, K., Brennan, M., & Dolan, P.  (Aug. 24, 2020).  “Rebuilding communities through empathy.”  Local Development and Society.

⁵Fond, M., Lindland, E., Morgan, P., Simon, A., & Kendall-Taylor, N. (2015). All Aboard: Explanatory Tools to Talk About Children’s Well-Being in Jacksonville. Frameworks Institute. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.frameworksinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/jax_metaphor_report_final_2015.pdf

⁶Abt, T. (2019). Bleeding Out, p. 11.  Basic Books, New York.

⁷Landman, K. (2020, June 4). Studies show that violence prevention saves cities money — lots of money. Youth Today. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://youthtoday.org/2020/06/studies-show-that-violence-prevention-saves-cities-money-lots-of-money/

⁸Shapiro, R.J., and Hassett, K.A., (2012, June).  The Economic Benefits of Reducing Violent Crime:  A Case Study of 8 American Cities, Center for American Progress.

⁹Ivin-Erickson, Y., Lynch, M., Gurvis, A., and Bing, B. (2017, June).  A Neighborhood-Level Analysis of the Economic Impact of Gun Violence, Urban Institute.

¹⁰McDaniel, J., and McCabe, K. (2019, October 23). Philly’s controller: gun violence could cost the city millions in lost tax revenue, property value. The Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-gun-violence-home-prices-property-tax-controller-rhynhart-20191023.html

¹¹Keen, S. (Jan. 22, 2013).  “Narrative Empathy.”  The Living Handbook of  Narratology.  

¹²Zak, P. (2013, December 17). How stories change the brain. Greater Good Science Magazine. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_stories_change_brain

¹³Zak, P. (2014, October 28). Why your brain loves good storytelling. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-loves-good-storytelling

¹⁴Savage, K. (2021, Feb. 3). Reforming juvenile system for girls requires stories, three experts say.  Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://jjie.org/2021/02/03/reforming-juvenile-system-for-girls-requires-stories-three-experts-say/

¹⁵Caldwell, E.D. (2018, Jan. 16).  Can art help people develop empathy. JStor Daily. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://daily.jstor.org/can-art-help-people-develop-empathy/

¹⁶EVAC http://evacmovement.com/

¹⁷Soergel, M.  (2021, Jan. 25). ‘So it won’t be forgotten:’ children of Jacksonville-area Holocaust survivors tell their families’ stories. The Florida Times-Union. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/2021/01/25/children-holocaust-survivors-jacksonville-tell-parents-stories/4171807001/

¹⁸Weir, L. (2003). Storytelling on the path to healing in Northern Ireland. In A.M. Cox & D.H. Albert (Eds.) The Healing Heart – Communities. (pp. 199-202) Canada: New Society Publishers. 

¹⁹McCloskey, K. (2013, Aug. 20). Meet the teller: Liz Weir. Timpanogos Storytelling. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://timpfest.org/meet-the-teller-liz-weir/

²⁰Berandi, et al. (2020).