{"id":30612,"date":"2025-12-18T16:42:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/?post_type=blogpost&p=30612"},"modified":"2025-12-18T16:42:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:42:14","slug":"project-spotlight-urban-alliance-detroit-storytelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/project-spotlight-urban-alliance-detroit-storytelling\/","title":{"rendered":"Project Spotlight: Urban Alliance Detroit – Storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Once Upon A Time\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ok that\u2019s not really where we are going to start, but <\/span>we are <\/span><\/i>the Storytelling Team! Our team included Joelle Sanders, Rachel Kowalczyk, Shruti Nahar, Kwesi Huffman, Zack Bissel and Izzy Redmond. We spent the last seven weeks working with Urban Alliance Detroit on their storytelling process.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kicking off our first Challenge Project, our team spent several weeks understanding UA\u2019s mission and goals with regard to storytelling. Our design prompt was, “H<\/strong><\/span>ow might we capture student, alumni, partner and funder stories more consistently and effectively?”<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We recognized early on that there is a wealth of stories to be captured\u2014students, alumni, partners, mentors, volunteers, staff and parents. We wanted to create deliverables to support the UA Detroit team in capturing and sharing every story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

During our stakeholder interviews, we had the opportunity to talk with stakeholders and UA Detroit staff, as well as participating in a mentorship immersion experience to get a full understanding of UA Detroit’s current processes with storytelling. <\/span>Through our conversations, we <\/span>got an inside look at the full program and came away with some key insights that directed the remainder of our design process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Rachel, Shruti and Kwesi engaging in one of our stakeholder interviews with one of Urban Alliance\u2019s current students and an alum learning about their perspective on the programs storytelling.<\/p><\/div>\n

We saw similar ideas reflected in all of our stakeholder interviews, but one really captured the focal point of our team\u2019s objective. When we spoke to Victor Robinson, UA\u2019s Director of External Partnerships, he told us \u201cSeeing the impact [on the students] is the best way to engage people. Showing who they are when they come in and when they leave [the program] really makes a difference.”<\/strong> This became the north star for our work. We also came away from our interviews with three key insights<\/strong> that helped shape the scope of our work and create a clear direction for our deliverables:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Relationships play a major role in gathering\/telling the grounded and authentic impact stories UA wants to focus on.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Capturing the stories that showcase the process of the entire program from all stakeholders perspectives in achieving the UA mission is the most important in showcasing the student impact.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Our team had a real opportunity to assist UA in collecting retrospective, consistent, and accurate stories by providing tools, internal process, and increased capacity\u00a0 that ensured an increase in content capture and underutilization of storytelling moments.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Our goal then, was to create documents, plans, and tools that the UA could implement immediately, <\/span>as well as <\/span><\/i>ideas that could be expanded upon in the future to help capture the important student stories and create a content database to pull from at any time for effective storytelling.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    In synthesizing these insights, our team took an approach that built on the pre-existing foundation of rich relationships and events throughout the year by creating a suite of planning and execution documents to build the framework to ensure content is captured from all stakeholders throughout the year.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"

    Our team posing for a selfie\/an ussie in front of all our sticky notes after completing the ideation phase.<\/p><\/div>\n

    The suite of planning documents can be used to identify storytelling opportunities throughout the year. The documents include:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n