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StoryBank™

What Story is this
System Telling?

You can be seen, but not acknowledged. 
Present, but not powerful—yet.

Institutions invite story but stop it just short of change or the transformation it requires of the systems or people within them. The result: lived experience is treated as compelling but not capable, and the harm it survived: compelling, but not credible.

Why Has the System Been Built This Way?

Because story was always seen as too much—and never enough.

We’ve been taught not just to distrust story but to distrust the people telling it.  Necessary—but not enough. The problem isn’t whether story gets used. It’s who’s trusted to tell it and who’s allowed to lead with it.

What Are We Building Instead?

The platform where lived experts, institutions, and creatives prove story is both spark and structure.

StoryBank™ brings everyone together but doesn’t assume they know how to build together. Each campaign becomes a site of re-learning and unlearning for everyone involved. Our credentialing pathways don’t exist to validate lived expertise. They amplify it—because it’s already enough.

Instead, we teach systems partners, creative amplifiers, and lived experts how to transform systems through story by learning with Experiential Systems Leaders, on purpose, and on record.



 

Our Blueprint in Action:

Here’s how we bring the StoryBank™ vision to life—through campaigns, certification pathways, and collective learning across the network.

Campaign Hosting + Design

We curate and implement trauma-informed storytelling campaigns rooted in lived experience, community truth, and institutional partnership.

Training + Certification Pathways

Through the NSD Impact Studio, we train and certify lived experts, creative amplifiers, and institutional partners to lead narrative change with rigor and care.

Team Matching + Activation

We assemble cross-functional campaign teams and match them with organizations ready to rebuild trust, transform systems, and act on story.

Living Story Archives

Every campaign builds a living archive—documenting truth and possibility, then mobilizing those stories to shape public memory, guide practice, and drive policy transformation.

Cross-Campaign Learning

We host narrative salons and collective learning spaces to elevate best practices, reflect on outcomes, and grow a national field of NSD-led transformation.

Narrative Impact and Evaluation

Each campaign tracks resonance and repair—not just reach—using stories as both data and diagnostic to assess transformation across communities, partners, and policy.

Core Campaign Models:

StoryBank™ supports a growing constellation of campaign models—all guided by trained fellows, aligned to community goals, and designed for impact at all levels.

Narrative Healing Campaigns

Intergenerational story labs exploring trauma, repair, and healing through collective storytelling, led by certified lived experts.

Policy Story Mapping Projects

Institutions partner with lived experts and researchers to document systemic harm, trace its design, and co-create new pathways for change.

Youth-Led Civic Story Labs

NSD-trained youth lead campaigns across schools, detention centers, and afterschool programs—reclaiming voice, memory, and futures.

StoryBank™ Residencies + Creative Collaborations

Amplifier teams embed with local partners to produce multimedia exhibitions, oral histories, and narrative assets that shift public memory.

Assessment and Evaluation

Regional collaboratives where multiple campaigns interlink—building infrastructure for long-term narrative equity and systems transformation.

Where Story Sparks Transformation

Join us in reimagining how stories move systems—not just to inform, but to transform. Whether you’re a lived expert, artist, policymaker, educator, or youth leader, there’s a place for you. From local coalitions to national movements, StoryBank™ is where stories aren’t extracted—they’re mobilized. Not just heard, but held. Not just shared, but designed for change.

Work with us

Healing By Any Means (HBAM) is the home of Narrative Systems Design—a new field where story becomes infrastructure, healing becomes measurable, and care becomes an engine for economic and systemic transformation.

Through our six initiatives—StoryBank™, LitCanon™, LitIndex™, HEALIT™, the Healing Literary Futures Network (HLFN), and the NSD Impact Studio—we build tools, train leaders, and generate real-time insight to design more just, imaginative, and healing-centered futures.

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The Healing Literacy Framework

In 2019, Keith F. Miller, Jr., observed something remarkable while running creative writing after school programs in Savannah, GA: Students from all backgrounds didn’t just step outside their comfort zones—they learned, led, and thrived with unmistakable joy. Despite this, Keith heard from students and families that school, even for the high-achievers, was a place they survived, not thrived. This led Keith, through his studies in Educational Psychology, to explore why young people felt empowered to learn, lead, and heal in some spaces but not in others.

Through a qualitative research study involving interviews with high schoolers, fellow teaching artists over a year, in addition to examining creative works from youth journals and performances, Keith found that when young people engage in arts-based healing practices with trusted others (peers and adults), they don’t just cope with their struggles—they transform them, becoming vibrant leaders in the process.

Drawing inspiration from the process of rainbow formation—reflection, refraction, and dispersion—and building off of groundbreaking research from scholars like David Kirkland, Gholdy Muhammad, Bettina Love, Bianca Baldridge, and Shawn Ginwright, Keith developed the Healing Literacy Framework, illustrating how arts-based, community programs are vital in supporting young people as they overcome educational trauma, and, in doing so, can result in transformative partnerships in school and beyond that prove healing is possible for everyone.

Enter, HEALIT

In 2019, Keith F. Miller, Jr., observed something remarkable while running creative writing after school programs in Savannah, GA: Students from all backgrounds didn’t just step outside their comfort zones—they learned, led, and thrived with unmistakable joy. Despite this, Keith heard from students and families that school, even for the high-achievers, was a place they survived, not thrived. This led Keith, through his studies in Educational Psychology, to explore why young people felt empowered to learn, lead, and heal in some spaces but not in others.

Through a qualitative research study involving interviews with high schoolers, fellow teaching artists over a year, in addition to examining creative works from youth journals and performances, Keith found that when young people engage in arts-based healing practices with trusted others (peers and adults), they don’t just cope with their struggles—they transform them, becoming vibrant leaders in the process.

Drawing inspiration from the process of rainbow formation—reflection, refraction, and dispersion—and building off of groundbreaking research from scholars like David Kirkland, Gholdy Muhammad, Bettina Love, Bianca Baldridge, and Shawn Ginwright, Keith developed the Healing Literacy Framework, illustrating how arts-based, community programs are vital in supporting young people as they overcome educational trauma, and, in doing so, can result in transformative partnerships in school and beyond that prove healing is possible for everyone.