Storytelling for Yourself and Your Community

Patton Dodd is the executive director of storytelling and communications at the H. E. Butt Foundation in San Antonio, Texas. He oversees Know Your Neighbor, the foundation’s initiative that uses stories to bridge economic and cultural divides in San Antonio. A former journalist, Dodd’s writing has appeared in a range of publications including The Atlantic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Christianity Today, and more. He is also the author of a recent memoir, THE FATHER YOU GET: AND THE ONES YOU MAKE, BELIEVE IN, AND BECOME, which uses his family story to explore fatherhood and challenges of father figures in our era.

More information at https://pattondodd.com  

Summary

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange, where we explore leadership, strategy, and impact for nonprofit leaders, clergy, social entrepreneurs, and changemakers who are committed to building stronger communities. I’m Hugh Ballou, founder and president of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, where leaders create synergy with their teams around their vision. and host for this non-profit exchange. I’m pleased to welcome you to this episode. Today’s topic is storytelling for yourself and your community. Leaders often think of storytelling as a communication tactic, but stories are much more than that. Stories shape identity. They influence how we understand ourselves, our families, our organizations, our communities, and even our cities. The stories we inherit, repeat, question, and reframe become part of the way that we lead. My guest today is Patton Dodd, an author, communications leader, and community storyteller whose work invites people to listen more deeply, become curious about the narratives they carry, and discover how shared stories can build understanding across divides, Patton’s work includes his memoir, The Farther You Get, and his leadership with Know Your Neighbor, a storytelling initiative in San Antonio that helps people engage the story of their city one neighbor at a time. Patton, welcome, and tell us what’s behind this title, Storytelling for Yourself and Your Community.

Patton Dodd

Well, yeah, so I have storytelling actually in my official job title. I’m Executive Director of Storytelling and Communications at the H.D. Black Foundation here in San Antonio. And so there’s two things there, two parts of my job. Communications is part of what you mentioned, classic communications, you know, outreach to our constituents, branding, you know, marketing and that sort of thing. Letting people get the word out about our, or getting the word out about our stuff so people can come and engage with us. The storytelling piece, though, is more missional. It’s a strategic kind of storytelling where we’re trying to affect hearts and minds and grow awareness about issues of poverty and economic segregation in San Antonio. And it looks like writing, video making, photography. It also looks like events, small, medium-sized, and large events where we tell and share stories. It looks like all kinds of things. So we use storytelling as a tool for the work that we do in really serious ways.

Hugh Ballou

Well, let’s unpack what is storytelling. And a lot of us are apprehensive about doing this because we don’t understand it. And we think of it as a communication tactic for fundraising or marketing, but in your world, it’s a whole lot more, isn’t it?

Patton Dodd

I mean, so first of all, I would say that we’re all storytellers. You can’t be human without being one. If you’re not using your mouth to do one, or writing one, or using a video camera, you’re still doing one in your head all the time. I just think we are kind of created as storied beings and people who are meant to share stories. We’ve done it from time immemorial. And storytelling is, I think, a way of identifying with one another. It’s a way of sharing our why and getting to know your why. It’s a way of, like, asking questions about where we come from, where we are now, and where we’re going. and putting language to all that. Stories are, I think, fundamentally the way we communicate with one another. It’s not just information. It’s not just ideas. It’s also narrative. I was here, and now I’m here, and I’m going there.

Hugh Ballou

Is this a formal activity or informal, or is it visible, invisible, or is it some of all of that?

Patton Dodd

I mean, I’m giving you a big abstract definition because I think stories are such a universal concept, but it’s all of those things. And certainly it’s also a formula and it can be, you know, you can decide, for instance, I want to, it could be to accomplish a goal. You could say, I want, to all the streets in my neighborhood to be repaved. And what am I gonna do to get that to happen? I could share information about how old the asphalt is and how many cracks we have, or I could tell a story. I could say, you know, these streets used to be this way, and then this happened, and then this happened, and it’s changed things over time. And we’re trying to, you know, do these things as a community. And here’s someone who, this is what happens to them when they drive these streets. And their experience of it and you introduce character and dramatic tensions And you’ll get a lot more done if you bring some story into whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish.

Hugh Ballou

Does that make sense? It makes great sense. If somebody’s just coming by and seeing this video or just turning on the podcast This is the non-private exchange. I have a great guest today Patton Dodd. He’s just opening up a new avenue of understanding for us so Patton What do we do wrong with stories? How do we think of it wrong? And so Connect, you gave us a strategy. There’s a why, which we often skip over. And then we talk about the results of what we do, the impact of our work. Those are both important pieces. So how do we put the story together so that it really resonates with people who are listening?

Patton Dodd

That’s a great question. I think the mistake we make is by driving too quickly to the thing we’re trying to accomplish, it’s good to have a goal. It’s good to know where you want to take people for sure. But I think that we short circuit the path to get there. When we could sit in more curiosity about the problem that we’re trying to solve and why it exists, where we could do a lot of question asking and listening to other people and accumulating their stories into the one that we’re trying to tell, I think that we need more process in our storytelling. Again, more curiosity, more questions. In the work that we do, we ask a ton of questions. If we’re trying to tell a story about, say, a pizza entrepreneur in San Antonio who is trying to bring in a new pizza restaurant to a low-income area and generate jobs for that community. It’s important for me in that process to not just talk to him, but to talk to two or three or four of his employees and people who used to work there, people in the neighborhood who may feel different ways about it, like you just have to accumulate a lot of voices. The other thing that I think we do wrong is that we don’t draft. Every writer and video producer knows that you need multiple drafts to get things done well. Ernest Hemingway famously said the first draft of everything is poop, I’ll say, to keep this G-rated. But the first draft of everything we do isn’t quite good enough yet. And it needs to be redrafted. And we need to get a response to it from someone who we trust to give us feedback. Drafting and redrafting, rethinking it, you’re not going to get it right the first time. So more curiosity, and then more process, and time, and iterating to keep refining the story, I think are two things that would help everybody out.

Hugh Ballou

And you and I were talking before we went on air with this about getting to know the people that you serve. I live in Lynchburg, Virginia. We have the highest poverty in the whole Commonwealth of Virginia. And we have 30 food charities. And often I see how many people we serve. And I wonder, I don’t know this to be true or not true, And I’m thinking of the famous motivational speaker, Jim Rohn. He said, you know, if you want to learn about leadership and success, go interview the bum that’s underneath the fridge that’s homeless and say, what did you do wrong and what did you learn from that? Or could I learn from that? So may not be the best example, but getting to know people and their story, how is that important?

Patton Dodd

I mean, you could give out a lot of food without ever talking to anyone who actually is receiving it and going away and cooking it and preparing it for their family. You could do it very transactionally. You could do it and feel good about yourself because you’re just, you know, you’re handing out all the time. But I would say that if that’s the way you function, you should rethink the way you’re spending your time. You’re not just handing out food, you’re interacting, you know, with your community members. You need to understand more about why they’re showing up. What are the challenges that they’re facing? You might learn some things that rethink your distribution technique. You might learn some things that will help you talk to your funders and other people about why we’re doing this and how to do it better. The food bank here in San Antonio is led by a guy named Eric Cooper. And he’s been here a long time. It’s a great food bank regional food bank, but my favorite thing about Eric he’s kind of known as a great local leader strategist run all these things. My favorite thing about him though is that he asks a lot of questions, and he talks to people all the time, he doesn’t sit behind his desk. He doesn’t even just show up for the food distribution moments. He comes out from behind his desk and his table and out of his building and interacts with people and does a lot of listening. And I just think that’s vital to doing the social change work well.

Hugh Ballou

In your introduction, I mentioned the father we keep. Do you have a copy? Yeah, here it is. Uniquely.

Patton Dodd

So tell us about the book. It’s a memoir, right? Yeah, it’s a memoir. The full title is The Father You Get and The Ones You Make, Believe In, and Become. So it’s a four-part memoir about fatherhood. The one you’re born with. So I talk about my dad, who I didn’t really know all that well. He raised me, but he was an addict. a drunk, a mess of a man my whole life. So he was on our home, but I say he was present, but absent. And I didn’t know anything about his story. So part one is me trying to track down the story behind my own dad and to get to know that and why he was the way he was. So part two was the father that you get. That’s about father figures, you know, other mentors and coaches and leaders that you look up to and turn into father figures. I had a really troubled relationship with a father figure in my 20s and 30s, that was a fairly destructive relationship. And so I talk about what I learned from that and how you can sort of, you know, over-idealize somebody and create more harm for yourself, but also keep finding other and better father-like figures to learn from and follow. And then part three, the ones you believe in, that’s about the idea of God the father, the kind of ultimate conception of fatherhood. in my book that becomes really a story about my mom because as is true for a lot of homes she was the one that carried our faith and modeled it and sustained us with my dad doing all the crap he was doing and so that’s really the story of my mom’s my mom’s faith and unfortunately her tragic death and the grief process that my sister and I went through uh in that but how she yeah handed off her faith to us And finally, The Fathers You Becomes, that’s just about my story of being a dad. I have three kids. They were now 22, 19, and 16. And I had a ton of insecurity in being a father. And so I write about my story of becoming a dad and learning to be a dad and love it.

Hugh Ballou

Wow. So the process of writing that memoir, what did you learn from that about being a storyteller?

Patton Dodd

So much like I’ve been a writer for a long time and I’ve written other books and lots and lots of articles but and you can sell this as a, this is a small book but it took me almost four years to get this small book to come to life. Writing about myself turned out to be a lot harder and a lot slower than I thought it was going to be. I mean, like I said before, part of it was that I didn’t know a lot about my dad. And so I had to sit with the pain of my own story with him for a long time. And I also had just had to do a lot of work to track him down. He had cut us off from his family a long time ago. And so I did some reporting. I went on a road trip in the deep South and knocked on doors and tracked down people and finally got some folks to talk to me and fill in some blanks for my sister and I. But mostly the work of this book was like excavation. Sitting with my own story, my own questions about myself, choices I had made, failures that I’ve had, relationships that went well and ones that went south. And again, like I said before about social storytelling, getting curious about my story and those people and trying to ask better questions of myself about why things went the way they did. And then finally trying to put it all into a narrative that, you know, would turn pages and make sense to people. So it took a lot of time to pull it all together.

Hugh Ballou

know your neighbor exists to help San Antonio’s engagements in story. Yeah. Talk about that a minute. Why that is so important.

Patton Dodd

Well, I see storytelling as a, as a strategy for social change. I, I, you know, when I think about big change movements over the course of the last say, a couple of hundred years, abolition, you know, environmentalization or environmentalism you know, the, the, child labor laws, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. These are massive social changes that we all know that many of us celebrate. And when you study the history of those movements, a lot of what you see is storytelling. You see culture being made, you see songs being sung and articles and books being written and photographs being distributed. I mean, the early abolitionists in Great Britain The way they pricked the conscience of a nation to care about what was happening in the colonies and slavery in Britain was by storytelling. They sent people to the foundations and had them come back and report on what they saw. They sit up in the street corners and told stories of what was happening in the slave ships. They published the first images of the belly of the slave ships. They told stories about what was happening to African people in the colonies. break the conscience of a nation. And you can see that again over and over in these movements. And so I’m inspired by all those histories. And I think for the things that are, those are big things that were broken, global things in some cases, but even in our own communities, the things that are broken, I think we can use some of those same strategies and tell stories to each other about what’s happening to try to have better conversations about it and bring about change.

Hugh Ballou

That’s a bridge builder, isn’t it? So what makes a story capable of building trust and building that unity rather than reinforcing division?

Patton Dodd

Well, I mean, at one level, if you use media to tell a story, if you write an article, if you do what you’re doing right now with a podcast, if you put a video online, I mean, you can literally collapse space and time by reaching people you wouldn’t otherwise reach through media. So that’s the one kind of basic answer. But the more human answer to your question is that, Storytelling provides a way for people to connect. At Know Your Neighbor, a lot of what we do, we do all kinds of storytelling, but one of our favorite things, one of my favorite things that we do is something called shared tables, where every other month, We get together with about 50 people from all across San Antonio. And we might be talking about some topic like education or affordable housing or food insecurity or something else. But we are really deliberate of trying to gather people from different zip codes in San Antonio. We care a lot about what we call zip code diversity in these events. Because like every other big city, we’re hugely segregated here, economically, culturally, in terms of opportunities that exist in one neighborhood or another, they’re wildly divergent in San Antonio. And so we try to fill those rooms with people who would not encounter one another in their day-to-day life. Maybe across a counter at like Whataburger, they would, but they wouldn’t in their cars and in their schools they go to, the churches they worship at, whatever. They would mostly be with their own kind, like most of us are. We all live in relative bubbles. And so these events are meant to, again, gather San Antonians who wouldn’t normalize encounter one another, and they don’t get together and then just start debating or talking about the idea or hearing from the speaker, they get together and we facilitate them in conversation with each other. And what’s really important about that. is that they have an opportunity to speak in first person. They have an opportunity to answer a question about themselves, to tell a little bit about their own story. And there’s good social science behind this that says that people are more open to learning after they’ve had an opportunity to tell their story, to, as I said before, speak in first person. It just opens you up. to hearing from someone else, and to maybe having your perceptions challenged and open to shifting. And so, for us, storytelling includes moments like that, where we’re getting people together and facilitating a rich conversation.

Hugh Ballou

Well, how do leaders create this place of trust so that we can be vulnerable and the people can be vulnerable? And along with that, we tend to talk a lot as leaders, the listening part of this. So talk about creating the safe space and then being able to listen. And how should we listen to the story?

Patton Dodd

The most important thing that a leader can do, if you have a convening, maybe it’s just a meeting of your staff or whatever, But certainly if you have a meeting with your community, the most important thing you can do is to testify in some way. Tell your story. Find a way to open up to people and to share a little bit of yourself. Be a little bit more vulnerable than maybe you’re comfortable being. If you model that, people will mirror it. I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again. I think the most important aspect of creating this kind of space and making it possible is by modeling it yourself.

Hugh Ballou

So we are, I mean, as a conductor, musical conductor, what they see is what I get. So the culture, it really is shaped by us.

Patton Dodd

I’m sorry, I interrupted you there. No, that’s okay. No, that’s, I think that’s a really, a really key component. There’s a lot more I could say about how we’ve seen that work here. The other thing that over time you have to do as a leader. is recruit other people who are thinking in that same way and train them to do the same thing in their settings. Everyone’s leading small groups in one way or another, whether it’s at these tables, at a shared table like the event I’m describing, or in the teams they work with, or within their peer network. And again, if you can model that and then be intentional about encouraging your people To do the same thing, share yourself. Just make it a common thing, normalize it. That you talk about yourself, and then you listen to other people talk about themselves. You begin to create the cultural conditions for doing more and more of this. Does that make sense?

Hugh Ballou

Absolutely. We’re going to go look at your website. But before we do that, and then we’ll come back and have some fun with some rapid fire questions, you talk about re-narrating. You invite people to get curious about stories, interrogate them, reconsider them, and as he did, re-narrate them. What does that mean?

Patton Dodd

It means telling a new story quite, you know, literally. You know, we are living And we’re all living in paradigms. Like you talked about Lynchburg. I’m sure there are dominant paradigms in Lynchburg about why things are the way they are. Some of those are no doubt wrong. They’re mythical. Like they exist maybe for political reasons or, you know, fables or folk tales that just end up shaping the culture and the mentalities of people in Lynchburg. That’s what I mean. Like identifying what the stories are in your community. and then beginning to question them with your community. Why is this story told the way that it is? Why don’t we believe this about Lynchburg when this other thing might be true? And then re-narrating it is like actively attempting to tell a fresh story. Why is there so much food insecurity in Lynchburg? People might think that they know. But I would bet that they have some wrong ideas about why there’s so much food insecurity. And there’s a fresher, truer, more whole story to be told. And you have to take a swing at that. It’s not going to happen on its own. You have to actively do it. You know what I’m saying?

Hugh Ballou

You might even have to have an open mind because you might, and I moved here eight years ago, so I got a chance to experience it differently. So your website, interestingly enough, is your name, Patton, P-A-T-T-O-N-D-O-D-D, and you can find him at PattonDodd.com. So Patton, for people that are just listening, explain what they’re going to find there.

Patton Dodd

Yeah, this is a business card, basically. It has, in the top right corner, my day job. I talked about Know Your Neighbor, which is part of what I do at the H.E. Butt Foundation here in San Antonio. And then the top left is a link to my substack called StoryInk. And I get that a couple times a month. about the stuff we’ve been talking about today, and then you’ve got links to my book, which you can get really anywhere books are sold. That’s the publisher’s website. You can also get it through your local bookstore, and you can also get it on Audible if you’re an audiobook listener. I made an audiobook version of it. So that’s basically what you’re going to find there.

Hugh Ballou

What fun. What fun.

Patton Dodd

So writing a book is quite an experience, isn’t it? It sure is, yes. I can’t tell my wife that the next time you hear me telling you I have a book idea, I want you to punch me in the face because it’s so hard. I’m not sure I ever want to do it again, but I probably will because I don’t think I can stop.

Hugh Ballou

I’m finished. I’m finishing my 18th book and it’s oh my goodness 170,000 words. It’s everything I know about running a nonprofit. So let’s have some fun some rapid-fire questions. Okay. Okay. Okay. What is one word that describes the power of story? Vulnerability. What is one question every leader should ask about their own story? How well do I know it? What is one story communities often need to revisit?

Patton Dodd

The story of the way your community is designed, who lives where and why.

Hugh Ballou

Yeah. What makes a listener trustworthy?

Patton Dodd

I’m going to go back to vulnerability. And you have to double check that sometimes because it can be faux vulnerability, but if someone’s being honest about who they are, then I think they’re being honest about everything else that they’re saying.

Hugh Ballou

And that’s the key to a lot of things. It’s so important. What is one mistake leaders make when telling stories?

Patton Dodd

I think they cut to the chase too quickly instead of building up the tension and the drama and letting people sit in that tension and drama. That’s good for people. It’s hard to do. But letting people sit in, I mean, think of your favorite movies or books you’ve read. Part of what’s great about them is that they don’t resolve quickly. You know, they take you through an arduous journey to get to that, to get to the end. And I think we can do a little bit of that too as leaders in the way that we tell stories.

Hugh Ballou

I can hear people in the audience saying, well, I’m not a good storyteller. So how do they get better?

Patton Dodd

Practice. It’s a skill like anything else. Just take a chance. You are a storyteller. Like I said before, it’s happening in your brain. You’re living in stories, whether you know it or not. The other thing I would say is read. Be a reader, even if that means listening to books, whatever. The more story you consume and think about it as you’re consuming it and how is this working, the better you’ll be as a storyteller.

Hugh Ballou

Patton, this has been a rich conversation about stories that shape us personally and the stories that shape our communities. That’s so important. You’ve invited us to slow down, become curious, listen with more intention, and consider whether the narratives we carry are helping us live, lead, and relate. to greater truth and compassion. For our audience, take one story you’ve been caring about yourself, your family, your organization, or your community, and ask, where did this story come from? Is it fully true? Who else needs to be heard? And what might need to be re-narrated so that a more faithful future can emerge? And you can find Patton at PattonDodd.org. and knowyourneighbor.com. Those links will be on the page for this interview. So Patton, I’ve learned a lot today. It’s been a lot of fun and you’ve impressed a lot of people to then tell their story. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our guests on the nonprofit exchange today.

Patton Dodd

Thank you. It’s been a great pleasure.

Hugh Ballou

Always hunt for that.

Patton Dodd

Cheese. Cheese.

Hugh Ballou

Was that okay? Yes, sir. Thank you very much. That was a good time. Yeah, you know, I don’t do anything unless I have fun. I’m 79, you know, if it’s not fun, the hell with it. Yes, indeed. I hear that. I really appreciate you having me on. That was great. So you’re on my list. You’ll get an occasional email. It’s not it’s not a marketing email. It’s just inviting you to look at things if there’s any. OK, and you can unsubscribe you want to. But, you know, we’re connected. We have what you talk about is what we teach every day. All of that is so resonant. So good leaders, I find, have very similar messages that work. So if you ever see something that you want to have a conversation about, just respond to that email that comes to me. Okay.

Patton Dodd

That sounds good.

Hugh Ballou

Thanks very much. Thank you so much. This has been great. All right. Take care.