The Power of Perspective: A Guide to Intentional Community Entry, Building Trust with Marginalized Populations, and Informed Consent in Ethical Storytelling

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to target or blame any individual, group, or entity, but rather educate and open the discussion for how we can do better as individuals as well as a society.

Here is an undeniable truth: we each carry our own set of perspectives, prejudices, and privilege with us wherever we go. As a white American cis woman, my set may differ from an Indian woman’s; just as an Indian woman’s set may differ from an Indian man’s. No two sets are the same.

This is why, especially as development workers, it is important to acknowledge who we are and where we come from before entering a community vastly different from our own. By first acknowledging our differences, we can then move towards finding the similarities that lay between us. Otherwise, the work that we do and the relationships we build may be severely impacted in a negative way.

During my five years as a professional in the NGO sector, I have worked with and for a number of communities: rural and lower income communities impacted by disasters; food insecure children and adults; veterans; and now, a community of lower caste. Each of these communities, having found themselves marginalized by society, faces their own unique daily struggles.

But one common experience among each community remains the same: feelings of distrust and discontent towards the systems and people who claim to want to help them. I have seen and heard many stories from community members in the past about government programs, NGOs, and volunteers taking more than they give and leaving communities worse off than before they arrived.

So how do we, as development professionals, build trust with these communities who have been burned time and time again? This article is your guide on how to intentionally enter a community, build trust with marginalized populations, and utilize ethical practices when sharing stories about these communities.

Intentional Community Entry and Building Trust with Marginalized Populations

These two topics kind of go hand-in-hand, because trust-building is a huge part of the community entry process. If you are intending to or already in the process of entering a marginalized community, trust is the biggest key factor. If a community does not begin to trust you over time, then your entry into the community will be impossible.

Eriks Dunens¹ describes four ways that trust can be built and maintained within communities:

1. Contractual Trust: Are promises kept? Are expectations clear? Do community members believe they can depend on you?
2. Communication Trust: Is there clear and frequent communication? Do you know when to share information and when to keep it safe? Do community members know that they will be told what they need to know when they need to know it?
3. Competency Trust: Are volunteers and staff knowledgeable and skilled in what they do? Is there trust in other people to perform well? Is there acknowledgement happening when people do their job well?
4. Caring Trust: Does the community know that you intend to act in their best interests rather than from a personal motive?

While working with any community – but especially communities who have endured emotional duress – it is important to maintain each of these four levels of trust if you hope to make progress on a project or build relationships within the community. Dunens and Newman emphasize that, above all, trust happens within relationships:

“Two things are generally true,” says Newman. “First, trust is reciprocal. Someone needs to show trust before they get it back. And second, it increases step by step. It is rare for someone to jump in and trust quickly.” ¹

Especially when working with communities who have been burned before, or have a painful past with outside organizations or individuals breaking their trust, it is crucial to be intentional in the ways we approach the community and build those relationships.

Here are some actionable steps¹ that can be taken to build this trust² within community relationships:³

• Exhibit humility and vulnerability: You may already know a lot about the community, but acknowledging what you don’t know and asking to learn more is good practice.
• Ask questions with genuine curiosity: Does the community feel that you have genuine interest in their culture and/or the issues they face?
• Encourage Deliberation and Create Safe Spaces: Does the community have a voice during meetings? Do they feel safe enough in this space to share their thoughts and ideas?
• Gather input intentionally from all groups: Ensure everyone in the community feels that they have an equal voice and are included. Ask for continuous feedback.
• Make it transformational, not transactional: Your engagement should not be a one-way street of data taking, but a two-way street where stories, information, and resources are exchanged among the entire group.

At the end of the day, how we interact with the communities we enter and treat them on a day-to-day basis impacts not only our relationships and level of trust, but it also impacts our perspective on the community and how they perceive us. If we treat this relationship as a mutually respectful relationship in which all parties are equal and autonomous, then the experience for both the development worker and community will be more positive and enduring.

Informed Consent in Ethical Storytelling

During the course of my fellowship, I have been exceedingly prudent about the stories and photos I share about the community I work with because I recognize that anything I share has the power to impact them on a deeply personal level.

Before I ever broached the subject of photography or storytelling, I made sure I was intentional about the ways I interacted with the community, and the first couple months I lived in Jaisalmer were spent building that base level of trust. In fact, it took me almost 2 full months to even ask to videotape them playing their instruments, and even then, those videos were only shared amongst close friends and family.

You might be wondering: Why go to such extreme lengths?

Well, the answer depends on the context of each community.

While I was working with disaster-impacted communities in the United States, we had systems in place that ensured we were communicating with homeowners ethically and obtaining their informed consent before taking photos or videos of their impacted homes or starting volunteer work. I remember painstakingly going over my memorized script each time I spoke to a new homeowner, explaining how and where their photos might be used and giving them the space to make an autonomous decision about whether to sign our work release form and media release form or not.

Here in Jaisalmer, tourists coming and taking photos and videos of my community playing their instruments is a frequent, persisting problem. Their art and music is often treated as a commodity, yet the artists and musicians are never fairly compensated for their music or time. Being treated as an attraction is commonplace – both in the city and in the desert – where people feel that they have the right to take photos and videos without asking for consent or compensating the performers.

So, in response to the above questions of why: It’s because I understand the community’s experience and am aware of my own privilege to know I have the power to cause further harm.

In this case, how do we approach storytelling in an ethical way?

1. Show Empathy: While working with marginalized communities, one must put themselves in the community’s shoes: If I were the one impacted, would I want photos taken of me or my property? Would I want my vulnerabilities or trauma to be on display to the world? Would I be okay with those photos showing up online without my knowledge or consent? What verbiage would I not want someone to use to describe me?
2. Preserve Autonomy: Treating these communities and individuals with the due dignity and respect they deserve means treating them as autonomous beings who have the right to say “yes” or “no” to things that are within their control. Just because you are working within the community or have built trusting relationships within the community, it does not automatically grant you the right to take photos or tell stories without consent.
3. Do Not Assume Consent: The greatest mistakes are made when consent is assumed, or when consent is obtained but through dishonest means (either by lying or omission). Taking photos or videos without asking for consent is just reinforcing the idea that people from marginalized communities are “less than” and that you don’t respect them enough to ask for consent – and this can severely damage any relationships you may have built along the way.
4. Protect Privacy and Identity: In certain cases (e.g., with children), uninformed consent or no consent can also put an individual’s privacy and identity at risk.
5. Involve the Community: Ethical storytelling is rooted in informed consent and involves the community during each stage – creation, production, and distribution – of the story’s cycle. Allowing the community to have a voice in the creative process and to correct any mistakes and/or choose what is shared to the wider audience is the most important part of ethically sharing community stories.

According to Deborah Swerdlow, an ethical storytelling approach⁴ should raise questions like:

• Do we have the person’s consent to tell their story, for this purpose and in this medium?
• Whose needs and desires are at the center of how the story is presented, the person whose story it is or the audience for the story?
• Who is the protagonist of the story, the person or our organization? Who is empowered, and who is disempowered?
• Are we telling the story in a way that reinforces harmful stereotypes or stigmas about a social issue or the people who are affected by it?
• What will happen to the person after we tell their story in this way? Could it cause them harm? Are we going to continue to help them and be in a relationship with them, or are we leaving as soon as we “get what we need?”

Asking oneself thoughtful questions about the content you are creating not only serves as an act of respect towards the community you are trying to portray, but in my experience, storytelling – both the way in which we create and share these stories – has the power to build (or break) the community’s trust.

Not only that, but storytelling has the power of perspective.

But you must first ask yourself: whose perspective is being shared?⁵ Is it yours? Or is it the community’s? If you cannot answer, then it is worth taking a step back and re-evaluating what story you are trying to tell,⁶ and the impact it might have on the community.

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Sources:

1 Hoelting, Author: Joyce. “Building Trust in Communities.” UMN Extension. University of Minnesota, 2022. https://extension.umn.edu/vital-connections/building-trust-communities.

2 Jennifer Simpson and Vinton Omaleki, “Community Entry Best Practices at Project Concern International: Experiences from Implementing Staff,” Project Concern International, May 31, 2019, pp. 1-30.

3 Chanel Grenaway, “Making The Invisible Visible: 5 Ways to Build Trust with Communities,” Chanel Grenaway, January 23, 2020, https://www.chanelgrenaway.com/post/making-the-invisible-visible-5-ways-to-build-trust-with-communities.

4 Deborah Swerdlow, “Ethical Storytelling: Communication without Exploitation,” Idealist, April 13, 2022, https://www.idealist.org/en/careers/ethical-storytelling.

5 Doug Cronin, “Transformational Ethical Storytelling: How Does This Impact the Storyteller and the Communities Represented?,” LinkedIn, September 22, 2019, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/transformational-counterstorytelling-how-does-impact-doug-cronin/.

6 Santa Clara University, “Ethical Storytelling on Social Media,” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, September 24, 2019, https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethical-dilemmas-in-the-social-sector/ethical-storytelling-on-social-media/.