Storytelling and the Importance of Coffee Diplomacy

"The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them, and learn to give them away as needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. This why we put stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves (and each other).

---Barry Lopez

"Writing becomes an act of Compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our own suffering, set us free.

This is the sorcery of literature: We are Healed by our Stories."

---Terry Tempest Williams

I often place these quotes at the top of my Sociology course syllabi, especially for my Cultural Diversity or my Environmental Sociology classes. These passages came alive for me the year that I created and worked on Project H.O.P.E. (helping other people and the earth), a community collaboration project between the small university where I worked and the tiny Catholic school located in the same town.

The goals of Project H.O.P.E. were to facilitate and enhance community ties between the university and the grade school as well as to provide hands-on, community-based instructional opportunities for both sets of students. We planned to educate our constituents about the Pennsylvania Environment and Ecology standards by building and planting a large native plant garden at the entrance of elementary school, creating an enormous mural of indigenous plants and animals inside, and by fixing up their playground. Our final goal was to “Pay it Forward,” to literally use the good will generated from the little children we were working with to send funding and help to a community in Mississippi whose homes and lives were lost during Hurricane Katrina.

In order to meet our goals, we needed to raise several thousand dollars for materials as well as to make a donation to another Catholic school in Waveland, Mississippi that had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. In that community, 90% of the people had just lost their homes and businesses.  Their community was completely destroyed but they were determined to start over, together. We wanted to lend a hand.

One of the tenets of Project H.O.P.E. was that we valued using local businesses. So for several months, I went out with my then 1- year old daughter Kailasa, and one of my students Michelle, to solicit monetary or in-kind donations from local businesses. We met these folks in their storefronts, or just as often in the back of their homes or on their property. Almost universally, we were invited in for a ‘cup of coffee.’ How could we refuse such hospitality? We needed to engage in coffee diplomacy.

We quickly realized that part of the ‘exchange’ was to sit and listen to people’s stories, and often to share ours. Most people want to give, but often they first need to be heard. They wanted to share their history with either the university or the grade school, and talk how they were personally connected to the communities we were working with. Some of them had their own stories of lost homes, or lost lives. Sometimes, it was as seemingly tenuous as their aunt’s daughter used to work at one place or the other back in the 1980s, but it was vitally important to them that their story be known.

We recognized that they were interested in our story as well: how did Project H.O.P.E. come about; what was motivating a bunch of undergraduate students to take on such an immense project? We revealed how a small group of 15 sociology students travel

ed to the grade school purely to complete an exercise assessing their resources and needs. When they came back to my class, they all insisted that we figure out how to follow through on the evaluation and actually create the changes that the school so clearly needed. Thus, Project H.O.P.E. was born.

Though at first, we merely wanted request a donation and simply obtain the goods or money that we needed. In the end, this coffee diplomacy was an essential part of our community collaboration. We had to plan to give not just our dollars but also our TIME.  By listening to these stories and sharing our own, we were weaving together the tapestry of this joint venture and making the bonds between the members even stronger than before. We became the keeper of the stories and it is our duty to keep telling them.

Everyone needs Stories. Stories can Change your life. Stories can Heal and give HOPE. Hope takes roots in the mind. 
Hope grows in the Heart. Hope is born into the world.