Owning Your Own Voice

Owning Your Own Voice is a community-based storytelling project designed to increase resiliency, build community, and combat stigma one story at a time. Your story matters and together our stories have the power to generates courage, hope, healing, and change. Our past and present does not define our future.

We can begin to heal trauma and pain in ways that shape our futures, on our own terms, through the act of storytelling and sharing. Working collectively with community organizations, Owning Your Own Voice seeks to connect people with one another and available resources to provide a community of care and resiliency.

This next iteration of Own Your Our Voice, happening at Talbert House's Parkway Center over the course of 8 weeks in 2024, is a writing workshop with poet and writer, Jamie-Lee Elizabeth at the helm.  Writing sessions will explore themes of identity, love, growth and more through song lyrics, poetry and book excerpts. Participants will have the opportunity to write independently and discuss collectively during the workshop.  

The intention of these workshops is to give participants an opportunity to reflect on their journeys and write about it in a creative way. By creating a brave space for these stories to be told, the writer hopes that the participants will feel confident to continue writing and sharing their creativity in the future.

The project was funded by the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.