Imagine Festival: Erin Fornoff Story of Self Workshop

This March, we are delighted to welcome Imagine Festival to The Crescent for a series of events.

This workshop, led by a former Obama campaign staffer and Imagine Festival's Artivist in Resident Erin Fornoff, will guide you through the ‘Story of Self’ process so that you may teach others.

As 2008 staff for Obama’s first presidential campaign, Erin was trained in Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now methods of storytelling for social change, as created by Harvard professor Marshall Ganz and used throughout the campaign, including presidential addresses, and in community organising in the 60s, including such movements as Cesar Chavez’ farmworker rights campaigns.

Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now is a method of helping people who may not be firm in their own voice to learn to tell their own stories, explore their own motivations for leadership, and build empathetic calls to action around causes that matter.

Erin has led trainings in Story of Self to hundreds of Obama volunteers in Georgia and North Carolina in the USA, as well as using the method for her own speaking on stage with James Taylor. She has advised Irish presidential campaigns, taught workshops as a keynote in Farmleigh House in the Undergraduate Awards, led social entrepreneurs across Europe in the method, trained the Ashoka Europe staff of 150+ at their AGM, at WaveChange events for young leaders, Google staff, hundreds of college students across Ireland, and for many other organisations here and abroad.

In her role as Imagine's Artivist in Residence, Erin is delivering a number of events during the festival including an evening performance, a lunchtime talk and writing workshop.

Erin has published a poetry collection Hymn to the Reckless (Dedalus Press) shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award, as well as a chapbook Folk Heroes (Stewed Rhubarb Press). She has performed her poetry at hundreds of events including three times at Glastonbury Festival, RTE Culture Night at Dublin Castle, national Irish tours with Danez Smith and Hollie McNish, and performed at Hozier and James Taylor concerts.

She has featured on BBC3 and her poems have been included in Best New English and Irish Poets 2016. Her essays have been featured in The Journal, The Irish Times, Architecture Ireland and Winter Papers. Her filmpoem Home won the Beats and Rhymes category in the Berlin Underground Film Festival. She wrote and performed We Are An Archipelago in Dublin Fringe Fest 2022, a one-woman poetry show set to a live score, which told the semi-true story of a 99-year old man moving to the island of his birth, which received a four-star review in The Irish Times. The text of the play will be published as a poetry collection in late Spring 2025. She has served as the inaugural Writer in Residence for Ireland’s Inland Waterways. She is currently finishing her first novel, a satire based in the nonprofit sector.

Imagine Festival is Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics which takes place in Belfast every March and presents a unique way of imagining the future of this great city — and the wider world. They present high-quality showcases for the discussion of contemporary political and societal issues including new ideas on politics, culture and activism from some of the world’s leading contemporary thinkers.

But it’s not all brain-melting policy discussions: there’s something for everyone in the form of exhibitions, humour, family events, music, theatre, tours, workshops and film and whatever else they can find to fire your imagination. Visit ImagineBelfast.com to discover more.