Making Home Exhibition - Birmingham Stories

The Birmingham Stories project is a campaign to raise literacy levels and change the life stories of young people and adults across the city.

Introducing Birmingham Stories

Introducing Birmingham stories

Transcript

What is Birmingham Stories?

So the project I'm involved in is called Birmingham Stories, and it's a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and the National Literacy Trust. And the idea is to help people in Birmingham improve their literacy levels, but also just generally to celebrate a love of stories and books across this great city.

Why is the project important?

So this project is really important because on the one hand, Birmingham has some really quite low literacy levels, especially in particular wards. But on the other hand, it's a city that is just thrumming with stories. And we wanted to encourage people not only to improve their literacy levels and embrace the love of reading, but also just to start telling stories and listening to one another and all the great tales that make up this wonderful city.

Why do you work on this project?

And the reason I do what I do is because, first of all, I'm a writer, I'm a novelist, so I love books. I love writing stories. I love reading stories. But apart from just books on a shelf or something, we do on our own personal time. I love the idea of people coming together, sitting down, looking each other in the eye and telling each other stories and listening to what each other has to say.

What does home mean for the people who are involved in the project?

So I think for the people I work with on this project, home is a place where their story belongs, where they feel like their story is part of the fabric of the place. They're not an outsider. They're not someone who's there on a temporary basis. They're part of what makes that place so wonderful. And I think having the confidence and knowing that their story is valuable is so important. And that's what really feels like home.

Birmingham Stories is run as a partnership between the National Literacy Trust and the University of Birmingham - research-led literacy activities are therefore at the core of the hub's work. Birmingham Stories works with local schools, local businesses and community organisations on a series of engaging activities to spread awareness of the importance of storytelling and literacy at every stage of life.

The 'story exchange' methodology was first developed by the global empathy-building charity Narrative 4, which was founded by a group of artists and activists in 2012. Professor Gilligan, herself a novelist, joined Narrative 4 in 2014, working with young people from Belfast, Ukraine and New Orleans to name but a few.

Since its launch in 2019, the Birmingham Studies hub has run numerous story exchanges - both online and face-to-face - between diverse groups across the region.

In 2018, she ran a story exchange project which brought together a group of teenagers from Birmingham and a group of teenagers from Limerick, Ireland, in the hope of breaking down cultural barriers and fostering empathy. This project went on to form the basis of the feature-length documentary Some Stories.