Ep 53: Storytelling as a Tool to Build Connections across Communities

How can storytelling help a city create community? In episode 53 Elizabeth Coffee, the Director of Storytelling of the Know Your Neighbor Program in San Antonio, Texas, talks to us about how this organization is using storytelling as a tool to inspire, create empathy and dialogue across the city. The program which is a part of with The H. E. Butt Foundation, aims to answer an age-old question: “Who is my neighbor?” Through storytelling, developing learning resources, and crafting unique events and experiences, they strive to tell a more accurate story about the economic challenges and gaps in opportunity that exist in the city. We discuss the power of storytelling in building community trust and addressing social issues like economic inequity, educational disparities, health inequities, and urban segregation. Don’t miss this fascinating episode about how storytelling build connections across a community.
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Outline

• (02:00 – 05:00) Elizabeth Coffee is introduced as the Director of Storytelling for the Know Your Neighbor campaign in San Antonio, Texas.
• 🏙️ Know Your Neighbor Campaign Overview (05:00 – 10:00) 
• Focus on building trust and community repair through storytelling.
• 📚 Storytelling as a Tool for Change (10:00 – 15:00)
• Discussion on the power of storytelling to create empathy and compassion.
• 🏡 Economic Segregation in San Antonio (15:00 – 25:00)
• San Antonio’s history of economic segregation and the role of the HEB Foundation in addressing it.
• Upcoming documentary on the Edgewood walkouts focusing on educational inequity.
• Reflection and discussion guides provided with each documentary to facilitate community dialogue.
• 🏫 Educational Inequity (25:00 – 30:00)
• San Antonio’s multiple school districts and the resulting educational inequities.
• 🏥 Health and Well-being (30:00 – 35:00)
• Discussion on health inequities in San Antonio, particularly the disparity in life expectancy between different areas.
• Future plans to create resources around healthcare and social determinants of health.
• 🍽️ Know Your Neighbor Programs (35:00 – 40:00)
• Overview of various programs like Know Your Neighbor Nights, Shared Tables, and Narrative Change Cohorts.
• Emphasis on creating conditions for community dialogue and transformation.
• 🌍 San Antonio’s Unique Characteristics (40:00 – 45:00)
• Cultural diversity and history of redlining and urban segregation.
• The city’s collaborative spirit and the importance of addressing its social and economic challenges.
• 📊 Impact and Measurement (45:00 – 50:00)
• Challenges in measuring the impact of storytelling on behavior and values.

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Vanessa Rogers: 0:07

Welcome, folksy folks. Welcome to fabric of Folklore. I am Vanessa Y. Rogers, your hostess, and this is the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. This podcast is about understanding the importance and significance of folklore. Don’t get me wrong, we love storytelling. We love hearing stories. But this show is show that asks questions to understand the deeper roots, to understand the origins. For instance, I recently learned the story of the chupacabra is not as old as I thought it was. This legendary goat sucking creature from Latin America was first recorded in Puerto Rico in 1995. But since then, the death of thousands of farm animals have been blamed around the world on the chupacabra. Cryptid creature is not even as old as I am, so I was really quite surprised about that. We examine the origins of folklore because when we get down to the deepest level, the oral stories, our holiday traditions, our fairy tales, they all hold more meaning. We feel connected to each other, to our past, to our ancestors, and to those who came before us. And at the heart of the show is connection. We believe that storytelling is a way to build bridges and to celebrate our shared humanity. So if that sounds like a podcast that you want to continue to listen to, make sure you hit that subscribe button and consider writing us a review that is so helpful for independent podcasts like this one for others to find us. We have a really fantastic show for you today that I’m really excited about. Elizabeth Coffey is the director of storytelling of the Know your neighbor campaign in San Antonio, Texas, where I am I was raised in. She has made deep investments in the work of convening connection and collaborating, always valuing the process of incorporating community voice. She believes that community repair comes from the work of building trust amongst each other. The ATB Foundation’s know your neighbor campaign aims to answer the age old question, who is my neighbor? Through storytelling, developing learning resources, and crafting unique events and experiences, they strive to tell a more accurate story about the economic challenges and gaps in opportunity that exists in San Antonio. We’ll be talking about how this organization is using storytelling as a tool to inspire. So welcome, Elizabeth, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show.Elizabeth Coffee: 2:36

Thank you. So glad to be here.Vanessa Rogers: 2:39

So, can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved in this campaign as a director of storytelling?Elizabeth Coffee: 2:46

Yeah, absolutely. So I was actually trained as a journalist. I never worked as a journalist, but I did work inside of nonprofit communication structures and ended up making my way back home to San Antonio. So this is where I grew up and really spent all my time away from San Antonio, trying to get back to San Antonio. And so when I moved back here, still in a nonprofit like strategic planning and communications roles, is a lot of what I was doing, a lot of cross institutional collaboration, and I heard about this work. At the time, it wasn’t called know your neighbor. It was actually a newsroom that was reporting on social, racial, and economic inequity in San Antonio. At the time, it was called follow media. That’s where I first learned about this, in this whole storytelling initiative, and ended up being asked to come in and scaffold out some of our programming that we still offer to the community and then facilitate. And then I was asked to facilitate part of it, and it kind of just folded me into the work. And now I get to direct the whole program, which is a real privilege, and I’m grateful for it. So glad to be here and have been glad to be privy to all the iterations of this storytelling work along the way.Vanessa Rogers: 4:07

So when did that transition happen from follow the media to know your neighbor?Elizabeth Coffee: 4:13

So the newsroom was launched in 2017. It was actually, I’ll backtrack a little bit. It was coming out a time around 2015, San Antonio was named the most economically segregated city in the United States. And the he butt foundation in learning that, realized if we’re going to stay true to our mission, cultivating wholeness in people and institutions for the transformation of communities, then we have to care about the reality that San Antonio is the most economically segregated city in our country right now, that is not wholeness. That is actually the opposite. And so what was going to be our unique intervention point, and in a discernment period of a couple of years, realized that storytelling was going to be one of those unique intervention points and interpreted it in a very traditional sense. You know, journalism is a go to for folks as they think about story. And so, launched as this newsroom in 2017, but over the next year, 18 months, really realized that as a nonprofit newsroom embedded in a. In a family operating foundation, that there was really a challenge of being non biased. But then also there was that challenge. And then the other challenge was that were preaching to the choir at the time. So everyone treated us, this newsroom, just like they treat all their news. They turned on what they like and off what they don’t like. And so we realized, in order to truly affect change across the board, not just keep rallying the same people who show up to issues of economic inequity in San Antonio, but to invite new folks in required a new way of thinking about story. And so shut the newsroom down, and we actually relaunched as the narrative change project. And then in iterating and trying new things inside of that project, that’s when I was brought on to kind of build out one of our programs. We learned, gosh, as much as it is important that we have storytelling available in its traditional sense, whether it’s through video or audio or written word, we need story to be embodied. We need people to sit and dialogue across the table from one another, because that’s where true transformation happens. That’s when learning to listen to somebody else’s story live and respond live is where empathy and compassion are built. And so that’s where bridges are built. And so we realized in our storytelling program, we need two things. We need both content and we need convening in order for it to make sense. And so we transitioned our name to know your neighbor. Really leaning into this relational identity. That story is best in context to one another. A story is best held in context to one another. That I can read stories about a zip code that’s 2 miles west of me all day long. But until I go and spend time and make and form relationships with folks who live in that zip code where I eat their food, or they come to my neighborhood and they eat my food and they walk the streets of. Of my neighborhood, we’re really only built maybe gaining awareness. We’re not creating community transformation. And so that launched in about 2019, and then in 2021 is when we launched as know your neighbor officially. So Narrative Change Project 2019, and then know your neighbor in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, so, which I.Vanessa Rogers: 8:20

Would imagine would be quite hard, considering we had so much social distancing during that time.Elizabeth Coffee: 8:26

Oh, it was so challenging. Just as were waking up to the need to be in person, were all, you know, needed to stay apart from one another. We did a lot of work online with folks. We did a lot of work in small groups of fewer. Once were able to gather and groups of ten or fewer, were gathering small groups of people together, outdoor like. We were trying everything we could to get people together to dialogue, because especially in that time, were have. There were too many reasons to be divided, too many. And were grasping onto them as a country and as a society, and so were. We thought, gosh, we can’t just sit by and wait. We actually need this now more than ever.Vanessa Rogers: 9:11

Mm. Yeah. So how come? What do you feel like the reason was y’all latched on to storytelling where can storytelling take us? Where is the end goal? Is there. Is there a goal in mind? Is it just economic, more equality? Or how. When is know your neighbor successful?Elizabeth Coffee: 9:37

Yeah, that’s a really challenging question, because I think that one thing that’s difficult around story is measurement and metrics, is how, as someone engages with story, can you measure if it changes their behavior, it changes their outlook, it changes their value systems? A lot of that is just self reported, right? We just rely on people to let us know. And, I mean, we do. We have traditional metric systems, like surveys and focus groups and things like that to listen and learn. But it’s challenging to know. What we have said is, if we create a culture. So, one, we believe that the answer to economic segregation is economic connectedness. And the only way we can be more connected as a deeply segregated city is to build bridges together and to create the conditions for bridges to be both created and sustained. And so we believe story is the infrastructure to do that. What we ultimately believe about one another, the narrative, inform the narratives that perpetuate in our society, whether it’s a self narrative about what I deserve and what worth I have as a human being or what they deserve and what worth they have as a human being. And if we can begin to mend that brokenness, then I believe that we can build a more whole and just society. But we’ve got to have that foundation even before we begin talking about, like, when people come to our programs, a lot of times they want to begin with the very thing that’s dividing us. Right? They want to talk about housing, affordability, and they want to get down to the nitty gritty. Well, if we’ve built no basis of trust, compassion, and empathy for one another and understanding that, okay, this woman across the table, for me, is saying a bunch of stuff that I don’t agree with. But she’s a mom just like I am. You know, she grew up in San Antonio, just like I did. She cares about the future generations of the city, just like I do. We don’t agree on this, but we can find a way forward, because ultimately, we have more in common than we have different from one another. I think if. I believe story has the opportunity to be a salve for a lot of these wounds, that, frankly, narrative has been leveraged to perpetuate Those wounds, it’s right. These myths, these incorrect narratives about why the world is the way that it is, who somebody truly is, why this structure exists, and why this one is torn down. You know, all of this is based in and around story. And so I really believe that it’s a fabric. It’s the fabric of our society, and it’s what we end up choosing to base our value systems on and what we choose to hold on to, what we hope for, you know, it ends up informing all of us.Vanessa Rogers: 12:53

So tell us, so heb foundation is the organization that runs is know your neighbor a campaign? Is its own entity? How is, how does that work?Elizabeth Coffee: 13:03

Yeah, so we’re embedded inside of the foundation. We actually, we had a community listening session before we launched as know your neighbor, and were actually referencing this as a campaign. And all of these community members that we pulled together, many of them leading communities, color, they themselves leaders of color and have been really fighting for economic equity for generations. When were using this language, they said, hey, when you use the word campaign, it sounds like you’re going to be a flash in the pan. This is, this type of storytelling work, and this type of narrative change works is not going to be finished in six months. It’s not going to be finished in a year. It took centuries for us to get to where we are. It’s going to take more than a five year commitment or a few workshops to get us out of this. And that really hit home. We were like, okay, then, this is more than a campaign. So we really reference ourselves, actually as a program of the foundation, an embedded program of the foundation. It’s a long term commitment to changing narratives and to mending the community. And so we aren’t our own separate thing. We are part of the Butt foundation, which has a rich history of responding to the. As the current reality of social brokenness. In San Antonio, in the Hill country area, there’s a long history of programs that have done that. And this is right now, in this time and in this season of our country, what the foundation believes we need.Vanessa Rogers: 14:54

So can you tell us a little bit more about the Heb Vet foundation, what the overall mission is?Elizabeth Coffee: 15:03

Sure. So if you are not from Texas and you’re listening to this, you might be wondering what we’re even referencing. But if you are from Texas, then you probably are pretty familiar with Heb, the grocery store. I’m biased, obviously. I work for the he butt foundation, but I long before working for the foundation, HEb was my favorite grocery store. And for many people, that is still true. Like, they still love Heb as a grocery store. And this, the same family that began the grocery company and still runs the grocery company actually began this foundation. And so, but we are separate entities. So we’re completely fiscally separate. We’re completely organizationally separate. Yet the same family began both. And so it really is from that same kind of heart and drive that both were birthed. And so we, the he Butt foundation was really began focused on mental health and tuberculosis many, many years ago, focusing on those two things. Mental health continues to be a primary focus of our foundation. Throughout, specifically the sixties, seventies, and eighties, camping and outdoor programs were developed and really believing that the outdoors is a healer as well. And not every child has the opportunity to spend time, concentrated time outdoors and get outdoor education. And so we have a lot of programming that allows kids and families to experience the outdoors together out in the hill country at our property there. And also, Howard Butt, who the foundation is named after, was his passion to normalize the conversation of mental health amongst christians. Specifically that as a he at the time when he was stepping, he steps down from leading the grocery company, and he attributes that to really having experienced how he said, a mental break, which we now know was depression. And he realized, you know, we really need to be talking about these things. Well, this was taboo in that time. So he created a retreat center called Laity Lodge, where he, and that’s l a I t y, not Lady Lodge, but laity Lodge, inviting lay christians to come and commune together, spend time together, and dialogue about things that everyone would otherwise be trying to avoid, much of which was mental health and how it was tied. Your own personal wholeness, mental and emotional health. Well, these programs still exist. They have, you know, blossomed into new iterations, but they still are there. The DNA of the foundation is still very much around how uniquely our faith and we are a faith based foundation, how our faith informs our response to these issues in the world and in the community. So that’s a very fast, brief overview of our programs. But we also have a whole community engagement arm that is mostly focused on San Antonio, and the storytelling work is under our community engagement arm. And we also have some other programs for nonprofits and nonprofit leaders focused on capacity building. And then we also have a mental health collaborative for congregations who are wanting to be more equipped and responding to the mental health needs of their community.Vanessa Rogers: 19:02

Yeah, I saw on your website, on the know your neighbor program, it said, h e Bet foundation is a faith based organization rooted in Christianity. And the commitment of neighboring is also at the heart of the gospel. And I thought that was, you know, in a lot of christian organizations, you can focus on lots of different things, but I love that is such a focus for y’all, and that. That where it was pulled from, I thought that was really beautiful. And, yes, I am from San Antonio, and I’ve lived in lots of different cities and lots of different countries, and one of the things I miss every single time is Heb. So I am within those individuals who love Heb. And Heb started in San Antonio. Is that right?Elizabeth Coffee: 19:52

Kerrville. So, it started in Kerrville. The first grocery store was actually in Kerrville, and so in our headquarters as a foundation is also Kerrville. But we have this San Antonio location, as well as the camping location out in Lakey, Texas.Vanessa Rogers: 20:07

And then the grocery store chain has spread throughout Texas and into Mexico as well. Is that right?Elizabeth Coffee: 20:13

Correct. Yeah, it is huge and vast. So it’s really neat to hear its origin story from this very faithful christian woman, serving through her grocery business, her community, to then it become what it has become. So it’s really kind of beautiful.Vanessa Rogers: 20:36

You want to tell us that story? I I don’t know that I know it well, really.Elizabeth Coffee: 20:40

I mean, it’s. I mean, there’s. The simplicity of it is. I think what I’m most drawn to is that the family had a small grocery company in Kerrville. Originally, the butt family had moved down here because their family was suffering from tuberculosis. And we’re told that the hill country air could be healing and restorative. Many of them suffered still from tuberculosis, which is why, as the foundation, it was a focus. But, yeah, just the simplicity of working hard and serving a community, and as people of faith literally keeping their bible on the checkout counter as people were coming in and being. Yeah. Being known as people who cared about their community, to then scale it. Right. To scale it. And I think that while the grocery company is not a, you know, a faith based, for profit company, and there are people of many faiths who are leading that organization and work for that company, the thing that I really love is that they have never neglected caring for the communities that they are in. I mean, I think the way that the grocery company responded during COVID the way that the grocery company has responded to the needs of individual cities, whether it’s in Uvalde with rob elementary shooting, or in disaster areas along the Texas coastlines, they. They are more than a grocery company, you know? And I think that’s. I think that’s a beautiful thing. And they’re the origin story of service, of hard work, of faith and love is still inside the DNA of that company.Vanessa Rogers: 22:38

Absolutely. So, let’s step back a little bit. And for those people who are not familiar with Texas or San Antonio, we have listeners all over the world. Can you tell us about San Antonio? Paint the picture of this city?Elizabeth Coffee: 22:54

Yeah. Well, it’s my favorite city in the world, and I’ve lived in many other places and traveled to many other places. And so I get super excited about bragging about our city. And it also has tremendous pain points. I mean, like any other urban core in our country, it has a history of redlining. By that, I mean it has a history of being divided, literally designed to be divided through urban planning and through lending practices of banks and other lending institutions. So that depending on who you are, the color of your skin or your class, you could or could not buy a home in certain areas of town. That is San Antonio’s story, too. We are, I mean, we are almost, we are majority latino, which I think is beautiful. And so we really, I mean, the mexican food in the city is amazing. I think that we as a city have lift up and embrace mexican heritage and culture in ways that I really respect and honor. And then also, I mean, you were talking about folklore and stories at the beginning. This is Fiesta week right now. We are just beginning Fiesta here in San Antonio, which is a, you know, several day celebration. And that’s complicated. I mean, it celebrates the defeat of Mexico. And many folks that I talk with and who are of mexican descent say it’s a really weird thing to be going to a lot of parties celebrating your own defeat. And yet we’ve all forgotten what Fiesta truly is. We’ve forgotten that’s actually the heart of it. We just all go to the party. And so, anyways, so we are, as a city, love to celebrate. We love the spurs, and so we love an opportunity to get together. And I think almost to the detriment of remembering a lot of our pain. And as a city. And so we’ve, before redlining existed. Our river divided this city. If you have a certain pigmentation, you had to live south of the river, and if you were of a lighter pigmentation, you lived north of the river. Our black community in San Antonio has been forced to migrate multiple times because of urban development and literally forced to sell businesses, to sell their church properties, to sell their homes for pennies on the dollar, to move to other areas of town multiple times. And so we’re a city of great joy and great pain. The west side of San Antonio is one of the, I think, most socially cohesive areas of our country, I would argue, but these people know how to come together to care for one another, to fight for what they believe they deserve to. They stand on the shoulders of their ancestors in ways and honor those shoulders and those stories in ways that are really beautiful. And at the same time, that is one of the most neglected, civically, economically neglected areas of the state of Texas. And so everything is riddled with pain and beauty all at the same time. And I think that is. It’s so human. It’s one of the reasons I’m drawn and committed to staying here and to being part of whatever repair needs to look like in this city. But we have the best. Arguably, if you go further south from here, they would be very upset about this. But while Austin claims to have the best tacos in Texas, they are wrong. I’ve had tacos in the valley, and so, you know, they really do rival ours. But Austin, there’s no comparison. Much better. Everyone go a little bit further south to get their tacos. The further south you go, the better they get, so.Vanessa Rogers: 27:24

And I find that, you know, Texas people, you know, just people who haven’t been to Texas people think of it as one way, but when you look at each individual big city, and we have, I think, three or four of the largest big cities in the nation. Right. San Antonio is the 7th. Dallas is. I don’t know. Second, we have several massive cities. They are all have such strong personalities that are drastically different from one another. And I think that’s so interesting. And outsiders don’t really realize that they see Texas as homogenous when it’s quite diverse.Elizabeth Coffee: 28:02

Yeah. I. Having lived in other parts of the state yet. You’re exactly right. I can’t. Everyone has a very different personality and are known for very different things. I mean, I think it’s Houston, actually, that’s like, the second largest and then the most divert, one of the most diverse cities in the country. And we in San Antonio are one of the only major cities that are majority latino, you know, and so, yeah, there’s a. There’s a lot of unique things. And I think Texas as a state, maybe because a lot of people know us for our politics, we can get painted with one color and so. And broad and broad brushstrokes. But getting to know each city and our rural areas, too. I say this as well. Having. Getting to spend more and more time both in the hill country. In my work before this, I was spending a lot of time at the Texas Mexico border. I mean, every area is just peppered with uniqueness, and so it’s worth exploring.Vanessa Rogers: 29:15

I would add, I worked in city elements for years back, but one of the things that people, outsiders often said about San Antonio is that it was one of the more collaborative cities that they’d ever been to, that city officials and organizations were more willing to work with one another and were less competitive. And I thought that was always really interesting to hear. I heard it time and time again from people who came from Mexico and different places, that San Antonio was a very collaborative city. Okay, so you touched on the housing history a little bit. And I always heard growing up, because I grew up on the northeast side, that was where you moved if you wanted to have a better education, because the education inequality as well is drastically different in San Antonio as well. Is that something that y’all is talk about in your storytelling?Elizabeth Coffee: 30:21

So, actually, we’re going to be talking a lot more about it in the third quarter of this year. It’s actually our focus. We have a documentary coming out focused on the Edgewood walkouts, and Edgewood is a district on the west side, but Edgewood High School is an actual high school, and there were walkouts in the sixties. There’s a walkout in the sixties that really transformed educational equity for the country. And so stay tuned for that documentary. But we have something like 17 school districts. I don’t know where we’re up to now. I mean, it’s wild. And I want to just name, just because I lived in Dallas before moving back here, and there’s one school district, and it has its own inequity problem. So I’m not saying that 17 versus one is necessarily better, but our version of inequity is baked into the reality that we have 17 some odd school districts, and with property taxes obviously benefiting our schools, you can just do basic math or use basic logic to figure out that. Then what that does is certain schools have more funding than others, depending on how valuable that property is. This is true. I think it was it last year any ISD teachers got a raise. And at that, literally the next week, they announced how many San Antonio ISD schools were closing because of funding. You know, and so I. And I want to just name all teachers deserve a raise no matter where you are teaching. I believe that across the board. So this isn’t throwing shade at any ISD, but it is showing, like, our inequities that now numbers of schools closing in one district, while another one is able to give its teachers raises that every district should be doing. Teachers are losing jobs. Teachers are getting paid more. And so we don’t it’s a huge problem. And I think that one, the thing that I remind people of that, yes, the people that carry the burden of that are our teachers and are our school administrators, but they’re our kids. Our kids in our future generation carry the burden of us not figuring out how to be a more equitable city. And so, and that is not fair. And every child deserves a good education. Every teacher deserves to be paid a living wage, not just living wage, I would say thriving wage. They deserve to take a vacation if they want to take a vacation. And so, yeah, it’s a huge problem, and it can be very much tied into politics, which is also a shame. And so I think that 100% education is definitely tied. It’s all a big web of issues. It’s easier sometimes for us to focus one topic, whether it be housing or wage disparities or education, but they can only truly be understood together. And so our hope is that over time, as we’re building these resources, while they’re specific to different spheres, that people are able to hold them in context to one another and see how they’re interrelated. But, yeah, during August September timeframe, we’ll be launching our new documentary on the Edgewood walkout, along with some resources to know how to dialogue about inequity in our school system.Vanessa Rogers: 34:09

Well, when that comes out, we’ll definitely put that up on our website. Can you tell us, and one of the other things that you talk about is health and well being and how the inequity really affects that? Can you talk a little bit about that?Elizabeth Coffee: 34:26

Oh, yeah, this is another one. And actually, this is going to be our focus near the beginning of 2025. We pace out all of these things, because I would, if I had 100 staff, we’d get it all done next week. But our hope is to actually come out also with a resource around this topic. If there is a physician doctor, Lisa Ochoa, who is a surgeon on the south side of San Antonio, she has developed a series of clinics called the Save Clinic, and she does a lot of education on this very thing. She essentially shows how if you draw a line down across the middle of San Antonio, if you live below that line or are born below that line, you’re expected to live 20 fewer years than the people who live above that line. And if you then layer on top of that, all of our healthcare institutions, they’re all above that line. So if you want, if you need to go to a hospital, you need to drive north. Some people 15 miles from where they live. And they closed last year, another Southside hospital. And so her commitment is to provide quality health care to Southsiders because it is designed to be this way, that this isn’t a choice. People are not choosing to live 20 fewer years, or they would make a choice for healthier, longer lives if they could, if they had more access to healthy food, if they had access to proper health care, if they weren’t, if they could find healthcare that was affordable, many of them having jobs that aren’t giving them health insurance and things like that. Anyways, yeah, we’ll come up with a resource all around healthcare and other topics like social determinants of health as well. And how do we think about health, not just from a medical perspective, but from a social perspective.Vanessa Rogers: 36:43

So tell us about your solution. What are the different programs that you’re doing? Obviously, you’re doing several different documentaries that are giving information. What are the other things that you’re doing?Elizabeth Coffee: 36:57

So the content will always be something that we’re putting out. And our goal is not just to put out, like, not just to put out a documentary. We also put that, put it out with a reflection guide. How do we help people process what it is that they’re engaging with? How do they synthesize all of these stories that they’re hearing in context to their own story? So we always will put out a reflection guide. If you go to knowyourneighbor.com housing, you can find our housing documentary along with our reflection guide. And then we will also put out with each resource, a discussion guide. How do you begin dialoguing about these issues with people in your own community, whether it’s your book club, your school, your church, your neighborhood, your PTA, whatever it is? You could lead discussions on housing in your context that we’re trying to equip people to say, we don’t need to be the only conveners around this. We want to give you every tool that you need to do this yourself. What we are also putting out soon a facilitator’s guide to help people know. How do I host conversations that could be contentious? And how do we begin to practice working our muscles out that we’ve allowed to atrophy, that allow us to have without debate? So anyways, we’re putting all those resources out. But then we have programs people can sign up for. We have know your neighbor nights, which we just had one last night, informing people about the history, the complicated and layered history of Fiesta, inviting them to go and engage with fiesta events with asking better questions of themselves, like, why are things the way they are? What? What? Who told me this story about Fiesta? And why does it resonate with me the way that it does? So anyways, we have know your neighbor nights sporadically throughout the year. The next one that we have planned is actually with the principal on the east side of San Antonio later in August to kind of talk about, actually, education inequity and her experience as an educator and principal in on the east side of San Antonio. Then we also have something called shared tables. This happens four times a year, and this is essentially where we take one of our resources and we model how it’s supposed to be used. So you can sign up for one of. Anyone can sign up for one of these. It’s over dinner. So we pay for dinner for everyone. And you sit at tables of five or six. You have engaged with the video resource, like the housing documentary, and then you are at a table with a table host who’s leading you through dialogue around that. And so it’s really meant to model what we’re asking everyone else to do, and then we give them, equip them, and challenge them to go and do likewise. Lead this in your own community. So that’s shared tables. And then the final thing that we offer is our narrative change cohorts. And this was actually originally why I was brought onto the foundation was to scaffold this program. So I’m really grateful to continue to get. To facilitate it. But this is a 15 month commitment of anywhere from twelve to 15 San Antonians at a time, to learn about social, racial, and economic inequity, both its history, its current realities, and then to explore what does it mean to be a change maker going forward. And so we spend 15 months together all over the city, working with different community storytellers and nonprofits, reading different books, listening to podcasts, watching documentaries, and dialoguing with one another. We intentionally make that a diverse group of people from various zip codes, various political and social perspectives, various faiths, oftentimes races. Like, we’re really trying to bring a diverse group of people together. Because if the value, and we tell people this, the value is that tension does exist, we have to actually create that tension and learn how to work through it as a community in order to move things forward. We will not agree on everything, but we can learn how to respect where somebody else is coming from. And this is really where we begin to see the deep work of narrative change happening in the hearts and lives of people. This is a very uncomfortable thing. Narrative change doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel. It’s not like a massage, you know, is uprooting deeply held narratives that you have about people, place and yourself. And so this provides people a community to do that within and then 15 months of being able to work through that out loud and. And internally, some people, I’m an introvert, so I get that internally to figure out, what does it mean to be. Yeah. What does it mean to be a change maker?Vanessa Rogers: 42:02

Yeah. And what do people say when they come out of these narrative cohorts?Elizabeth Coffee: 42:08

They say a lot of different things and they do a lot of different things. Oftentimes it’s not for like several months later that begins acting on. But we’ve had people who were not involved in any civic work before getting into a cohort or any nonprofit work who now work for nonprofits, who give to nonprofits that they didn’t give to before. Or we’ve had one person started a mentorship program for youth of color at their surgical center who want youth of color who want to pursue surgery. And we’ve had pastors go through this and they exchange pulpits, or they create church partners, long term church partnerships with churches from different areas of town. We’ve had parents rethink where to put their kids in school. We’ve had families rethink where they purchased their house or if they purchased this second property to make an Airbnb or not. Like, do they reconsider that choice? Anyways, there’s been lots of expressions of what good looks like. We are really clear upfront with everyone that because everyone is on a different point of their journey in regards to social, racial and economic inequity. And we are all very different people. We’re not prescriptive as to what they need to do at the end. We are just going to give them all the tools they need to take their next most faithful step. Yeah, there’s been a lot of cool things to come out of those. And we’ll launch our 8th cohort later in November.Vanessa Rogers: 43:45

How cool? I feel like this is something that politicians need to be involved in. Like, not as in, like, outsiders, but, like, in the discussions, like, seeing and hearing conversations like these, because oftentimes politicians are so removed and they don’t. They don’t hear this. And I. And I feel like that would be so useful. Is that a discussion that y’all have had as well?Elizabeth Coffee: 44:11

Yeah. You know, when we’ve tried to get some different people involved, it’s really hard we. To prove that spending this much time, and that’s one thing we don’t compromise on, is that this takes time. And I think people want efficiency. And so that’s been challenging to get certain groups of people involved with. What’s hard is I think people in politics are, if they’re vying for a new position, then, you know, well, it’s been difficult to have them participate truly and fully and not as a, not with a particular angle. And so, yeah, that’s been, honestly, unless they are retired, that’s been a hard audience to capture with this work. So we’re committed to it.Vanessa Rogers: 45:08

So, yeah. Have you heard about any other shared tables? I asked that because directly after the Trump election, I remember hearing a lot of discussion around this echo chamber that so many people were surprised that Trump was elected, and in part because they were surrounded by people spouting the same information and having the same opinions. And there wasn’t any diversity in thought. There was some diversity, but not enough so that it was clear that people were hearing the wide range of stories. And so at the time when Trump was elected, I was living in Columbia, Maryland. So I listened a lot to the Baltimore NPR station, and I remember hearing about an effort that they called shared tables to kind of address this exact issue because we realized that there was so much division where people were just not hearing one another and not being exposed to other perspectives. Is that something that you all had seen prior?Elizabeth Coffee: 46:29

You know, and I’ve experienced different versions of it in different particular contexts, whether it was like a faith context, and, but for our purposes, we, I had never experienced it before doing this. And since then, but though I’ve gone and tried to experience other versions of it, there’s, there are tables here in San Antonio called generations over dinner. And they do this, but obviously cross generationally. And I’ve done it with different perspectives inside of the christian tradition. I don’t think they had a name for it, but I’ve gone to some convenings in that regard. But there are other models open. There’s something called open tape. There’s other models throughout the country of people doing kind of similar things over meals. Ours is obviously completely focused on San Antonio and economic inequity. And even though we might end up getting into other things that aren’t specifically that, our work is centered on that topic. And so there’s really no one doing that niche work, but others across the country are doing a lot of similar things. And I applaud all that. And I think we only need more of it.Vanessa Rogers: 47:54

Mm. Absolutely. So when I was looking on your website, there were a couple other things that I had seen, something about a third Thursdays. Is that a program that you are actively doing well?Elizabeth Coffee: 48:06

So we. That’s what we call know your neighbor nights now. So third Thursday, as you can imagine, limits us as to when we can have them. So went to. We ended up changing the name to know your neighbor night. But, yeah, third Thursdays and your neighbor nights are kind of our ongoing speaker series of bringing folks in from the community and allowing community members to hear their story and then to break up and dialogue about how their story rubs up against what they just heard. So, yeah, that’s our ongoing speaker series.Vanessa Rogers: 48:39

And then there was something under your resources. Four ways to bridge the social and economic divide. Is that, have you already gone through all of those, or can you talk us through a little bit of that?Elizabeth Coffee: 48:49

Yeah, there’s a. I don’t know if I’ve touched on all of those or not, but one of the. We tell people that there are a number of ways that you can begin this work, because otherwise it can feel overwhelming and daunting, and that any of these are good ways, good directions to go. And one is just keep getting curious, like, here and here are a bunch more resources for you to dive more deeply into. And so whether so maybe you’re not, you don’t feel ready to host your own dialogue yet, or you don’t feel ready to socialize this in your own context yet, just keep learning and leaning in and asking better questions. But then the second thing is to dialogue about it. So that is another way to bridge those differences, is bring people together and talk about these important topics. For a while, were challenging people to do that, but they kept giving us feedback that they really didn’t know how, which is why we transitioned our resource model to provide them with discussion guides so that they know how to dialogue about it and other things that we say is to give, literally give money. Find a nonprofit that is at the heart of this work, and don’t just give once. Give regularly for a long period of time. We have consistently seen that creates sustainability for these nonprofits. So, yes, get passionate about it, and you give that one big check. Cool. But we challenge you to say, no, I’m going to give monthly to them, and I’m going to give monthly to them over multiple years. And some people have really made it a commitment for, like, the next ten years of my life, I’m going to do this. And we see that has a great impact on the work of nonprofits in the city. And then the other thing is to begin action, right? So whether that’s starting to attend zoning commission meetings or city council meetings, whether it’s starting making sure that you’re going to your neighborhood association meetings and listening and asking better questions about what’s going on in your neighborhood, what they’re preventing from being in your neighborhood or what they’re accepting, whose voices are consistently heard and whose are not. Show up. Show up to stuff and go and, you know, a lot of people have said, I don’t even know how to begin fun. You know, I don’t know how. What I would say if I had to walk up to a mic at a zoning commission meeting and say something, and I was like, then you probably shouldn’t do that yet. You probably should just be going and listening and. And making relationships with folks. But there are also other ways. You know, the San Antonio Area foundation has a great course on how to become a board member. Maybe you want to become a board member. So we encourage people to go to that course. What we’re going to start doing next year is offering to all of our cohort alumni workshops to dive deeper into topics to help activate them. Oh, another organization we tell people to check out is cops, Metro. And it’s a community organizing organization here in town that has fought for sidewalks in areas of San Antonio that don’t have sidewalks, water for areas in San Antonio that don’t have clean water, which is true. Like, this is a real thing still happening, fighting for the basic needs of people in San Antonio whose voices are often silenced so that those things learn, get curious, talk about it, dialogue about it, give. Give consistently and act and give some ideas for how to do that.Vanessa Rogers: 52:38

Can you give us some stories? I was. I was, once again, I was looking through your website and there were lots of individual stories on there that talked about agents of change. Can you talk about some personal stories that you’ve heard or maybe some that are, you know, advertised on the website that are storytelling in a change making way?Elizabeth Coffee: 53:06

Sure. So we don’t only put resources out. We also do these community profiles of folks who are living in close proximity to the very issues that I’m talking about, whether they are a service provider or a everyday San Antonian, a business owner, parent. And so you can go on our website and see those. We put one of those out every quarter in our foundations magazine called Echoes. So you can also go to our website and subscribe to that. And it is free of charge our Echoes magazine. So, but this is on the he but foundation website, h e b fdn.org. And you can find the subscribe button and get our quarterly magazine. And inside of that, there’s articles about all of our programming every quarter, but then we put one in there every quarter about somebody in San Antonio. And so there’s a number of them in there that I’m like. Some people have asked, what’s your favorite? And it’s really hard to pick my favorite. Hubert Brown or streets has become an important voice in our programming. He’s featured in our housing documentary. He has a story on our website. He is an entrepreneur who owns a great barbecue joint in San Antonio that everyone should check out. Bahogs barbecue, but employs youth from the east side. And he talks about the purpose is not just to give them a job, it’s to teach them how to work. It’s to get instilled principles of employment that he believes are important. He really functions as a mentor for a lot of them as they’re navigating many complicated and layered issues on the east side of San Antonio. So streets is a great example. So everyone should go check out his story. Another one that I really love is Christina Gonzalez. She is a mom. She is a recipient. She was a recipient of direct cash investments through an organization called up together. I encourage you to look into this organization. They’re doing great work. Our foundation supports them. And we really believe in direct cash investments for families experiencing poverty, believing that families know what they need, many of them know what they need and that they know how to spend their money. They don’t need a bunch of strings tied to that money that make it harder to receive. And so she was a recipient of up together funding and now is the director of UP together in San Antonio, working with families in her same situation. And it’s another beautiful story. So, yeah, those are two examples that I really love.Vanessa Rogers: 56:13

Yeah, there was one other that I was looking at. The gardopia. Gardopia teaches where they teach how to garden in schools.Elizabeth Coffee: 56:23

Yes. Gardopia Gardens is located on the east side of San Antonio. They do garden education across the city and really love those. Love the two guys that lead that are awesome. And you can go for gardening days at their garden on Saturdays on the east side. But they have gardens all over the city. A lot of, like you already mentioned, a lot of schools, a lot of community centers, churches, other organizations have used them to build out their gardens. But something that Stephen Luckey, the executive director has said before that he really believes that dirt provides and gardening provides, is that when you put that spade in the soil together on a Saturday with different people from all over the east side, the neighborhood association meeting that went awry doesn’t matter anymore. You know, the discussion that you had, the heated discussion that you had across the street with your neighbor, all of a sudden dirt is an equalizer. And he sees it as an opportunity to bring the community together, to put hands in the soil, to understand where your food comes from. And then he obviously is. They’re also doing advocacy work around food availability, healthy food availability across the city. So they’re a great organization, and they’re an organization, I would say, hey, if you could give to and give consistently to, it would be catalytic to work in San Antonio, to pick an organization like our Dopia gardens.Vanessa Rogers: 58:11

So if there are other cities around the US or around the world that want to model what you are doing, what suggestions do you have for them?Elizabeth Coffee: 58:22

You know, I think regularly, I remind myself that this is not rocket science, that people want and desire connection. And I think that, like in our cohorts, for example, we do very ordinary things over and over again together, so that cumulatively, they’re unforgettable. Right. We don’t do anything. That’s crazy. I mean, like, we cook together, we walk together, we eat together, we read together, we dialogue together, we bird together, we go birding like we do all very ordinary human things that we use to then prompt us into dialogue and discussion with one another. And again, when we’re doing shared tables, we are eating dinner together and discussing at know your neighbor nights, we’re listening to a story and then we’re telling our own story. This is not rocket science. And we contextualize all of this inside of a San Antonio narrative. And so, obviously, if you’re in a different part of the country, there are things that will be in common, but also things will be very unique. And so I think that it’s not that complicated. I will say that I’m grateful to work and be doing this work at a foundation that believes that isn’t necessarily looking at a traditional ROI because it costs a lot of money to do this and invite and be able to pay for dinner for all these San Antonians or to people who are in cohorts don’t have to pay to be part. We cover all those costs. Yeah, so there’s costs like that. We have a whole staff that they’re paying for that we don’t get any proceeds from this work. And so I’m grateful that this foundation is open to taking a chance and put their money where their mouth is and say that this is really worth doing. And so I think that would be a challenge in another city. But I would hope that funders could step up and say this is a unique opportunity for philanthropic organizations to convene community members together in a transformative way. But, yeah, I think that it’s completely replicable. So.Vanessa Rogers: 1:00:51

Well, do you have any last words? Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you feel like needs some highlighting?Elizabeth Coffee: 1:00:58

Your questions have been thorough. I’ve been grateful to be able to share. No, I feel full, and I feel like this is, for the most part, a complete representation of the program. So I’m grateful for the opportunity. And if any of y’all who are listening, Reverend San Antonio, hit me up.Vanessa Rogers: 1:01:21

Well, thank you so much. I am really inspired by the work that you’re doing. I think it’s beautiful, and I’m especially in love with it because it’s within my own city limits and it’s a city that I love and I see such beauty in and also such pain. But I, like you don’t see a lot of that because, well, I didn’t before because of where I live. It’s like you said, very divided city. And so I really appreciate you bringing that to light. And I, and I imagine this is very much the case. Maybe not quite as drastic in other cities, but it is still a reality in many other cities, not just in the US, but across the world. And so I think this is just such a relevant conversation to be had. And so I’m. Anyways, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about it and talking to us about solutions. Not necessarily easy solutions, but solutions that are manageable solutions that people can do themselves. So, anyways, thank you very much for coming on this show, and hopefully others will find inspiration.Elizabeth Coffee: 1:02:38

Thank you. It’s been good to be here.Vanessa Rogers: 1:02:42

And thank you, folksy folks, for joining us on this storytelling narrative change journey. Do you have a program in your own city that utilizes storytelling? We want to hear from you. We have, these podcasts are on YouTube. They’re also on our podcasting platform. So if you’re watching on YouTube, you can comment if you have things that you want to say. After hearing this conversation, we have a Facebook page where we continue the conversation. And so we encourage you to visit our Facebook community group where you can talk about what we have discussed on this podcast. And we also are on other social media platforms. Like I said, Facebook. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. So you can follow us in all of those places. And once again, you’ve been listening to Fabrica folklore. My name is Vanessa Y. Rogers, and until next time, keep the folk alive.