About What's Your Story?
At Heartlines, the Centre for Values Promotion, we believe that getting to know each other’s stories is the first step towards breaking down the misconceptions and prejudices that divide us. What’s your Story? is our initiative to build greater understanding, cohesion, trust and reconciliation through the sharing of stories.
Personal storytelling provides a non-threatening foundation from which we can have authentic conversations that help us understand one another better. What’s Your Story? equips individuals, groups and organisations with skills and opportunities to grow in story-sharing and cultivate connections in their communities.
Four pillars
What’s Your Story? has four foundational pillars: the Beyond the River movie, Bridge leadership engagements, an extensive set of resources to help facilitate story-sharing, and an online platform for featuring personal stories.
Beyond the River
Inspired by true events, this is the nail-biting story of two men from different backgrounds whose quest to win gold in the connects them on and beyond the river. Regarded by some critics as “the most spectacular South African cinema experience of our time!” Beyond the River is the film to kickstart What’s your Story?
Email us to book a group or corporate screening of the film.
Bridge leadership trainings
The Bridge leadership engagement is a two-day, offsite initiative that uses personal storytelling and dialogue as tools to build bridges between key leaders of a system or sector. Once these leaders have gotten to know each other’s stories, they can work together to solve critical issues within their system or industry.
View testimonies from Bridge engagment participants.
WYS resources
Our team has developed a wide range of resources to help people use our story-sharing approach in many different contexts, from churches to schools, workplaces and beyond.
Sharing stories
Read, listen to and watch the stories of ordinary people making an extraordinary impact in our nation.
Our reach
To date, we have distributed over 8750 resources, trained 3540 leaders in personal storytelling, and conducted leadership engagements for hundreds of sector leaders.
We have undertaken more 300 events in faith-based organisations spread across 124 towns in South Africa, training over 12500 people in the methodology. We have also run over 50 sessions in 20 workplaces, reaching around 1500 people.
To find out more about the impact of What’s Your Story? in different contexts, read our WYS 2020 evaluation report.