our rationale

workshop process

impact on storytellers

Silence Speaks is an international digital storytelling initiative offering a safe, supportive environment for telling stories that all too often remain unspoken. We hold intensive workshops in which participants share and bear witness to tales of struggle and courage, resulting in short digital videos known as “digital stories.” These first-person stories aim to challenge media legacies of voyeurism and naturalized representation by ensuring that workshop participants, not producers, have primary control over what is shared and how events and people are portrayed.

Our process is modified to accommodate the languages, literacies, and technologies of a given setting. The guiding vision is to listen deeply, facilitate reflection and transformation, and encourage involvement in collective action to support justice. We emphasize work with youth and adult communities that have been denied a voice in decision making that affects their lives, such as people living in poverty, survivors of trauma, those who face social stigma due to chronic medical conditions, etc. Silence Speaks stories are used in training, community organizing, and policy advocacy arenas to promote global health and human rights.

We teach workshops through our parent organization, the Center for Digital Storytelling, and travel throughout the U.S. and internationally. If you would like to explore the possibility of attending or hosting a workshop in your area, please contact us.

We would like to thank one of our original storytellers, Amisha Patel, for generously allowing us to use the project name “silence speaks,” which comes from a poem she wrote and adapted for her own digital story.