The Intersectional Storyteller’s Toolkit – A FREE resource from Media Trust, Autumn 2023

Media Trust have launched a FREE storytelling toolkit specially designed for charities to help them improve and expand on their intersectional approach in communications and media.

The Charity Sector writes about diversity and inclusivity for social change, and to build understanding they will talk about community groups that are excluded for one reason or another. When we do this, it is also important that we show the complex ways that communities experience systems of inequality, or their lack of access to resources or the opportunity available in society.

Intersectionality Revisited
Intersectionality relates to the ways that people identify themselves, like through their race, their gender, sexuality, and class, and the different ways that these characteristics interact and affect each other.

As reported previously, it is these “intersections” which go towards creating or describing the experiences that are distinct and unique to those who have this intersectional identity.

The challenge is trying to recognise these different identities that interact which do overlap each other when talking about, say, lack of access to services or opportunity to be part of something.

Storytelling is one of the best tools we have available, which we can use to talk successfully about big, systemic issues like racism, classism, and transphobia.

It is said that we will think in stories. We need that narrative; that description which helps to tell us how to think about an issue or given scene or situation.

But when the narrative is inaccurate, is incomplete, or just too abstract, we will often, if not naturally, fill in the gaps with our own general knowledge or experiences.

The risk at that stage is the stories we build in our own minds can sometimes miss the message being delivered, or be full of biases and assumptions.

So, how does a charity become more intersectional in their communications and media work to recognise multiple identities, and how those identities are affected?

National Creative Industry partner and trainer Media Trust have created a FREE Storyteller’s Toolkit designed to help charities become more intersectional in their communications and media work.

Delivered as a FREE 5-day email series in December 2023, and including guidance from contributors at Stonewall, Inclusion London, and The Guardian newspaper; the Toolkit is designed to enhance a charity’s intersectional approach in communications and media.

To sign up for this FREE toolkit, visit the Media Trust website.