Healing Story Alliance is a not-for-profit, educational, arts organization which provides online resources and concert, workshop, and community programming in support of storytelling as a healing art.
Description
‘Kindness is having the ability to speak with love,
listen with patience, and act with compassion.”
-Random Acts of Kindness Foundation
Join the Healing Story Alliance for a special gathering to share and explore stories of kindness in its many faces and forms. Through folk tales and personal stories, we will dive deeply into multiple experiences of kindness. What is it? How does it impact us and our relationships to ourselves, to each other, to the world? Come and listen to “kind stories” shared by both professional tellers and community members and see what memories of kindness emerge for you.
Featured Tellers
Jessica Piscitelli Robinson is the Founding Executive Director of Better Said Than Done, the organization behind the Women’s Storytelling Festival. In addition to producing storytelling shows since 2011, Jessica has performed at Exchange Place at the National Storytelling Festival, on WGBH’s “Stories from the Stage,” and for Artists Standing Strong Together, Six Feet Apart Productions, Mostly True Things, and three National Storytelling Network (NSN) Conferences. Jessica was featured at the Stone Soup, the Washington Folk, the Allegheny Highlands, the Florida, and the Hampton Storytelling Festivals and is a 2023 ORACLE Award recipient from the NSN. Jessica is a teaching artist, leading workshops for Story Crossroads, The Story Center at the MCPL, local Libraries and Community Centers, and through Better Said Than Done online. Jessica’s “Guide to Personal Storytelling” (published October 2024) is available through Story Crossroads. Jessica is the author of the urban fantasy novel Caged (p. 2019), as well as the memoir-in-stories, Stages: My Life in Stories. (p. 2024) JessicaPiscitelliRobinson.com
Jim Brulé is a transformational storyteller, death doula, teacher, and mentor. He teaches spiritual storytelling for healing and growth. His workshops address multicultural wisdom and end-of-life themes. Co-authored with Rebecca Lemaire, his book 'Stories of the Heart' presents 18 global tales for navigating life and death. He is one of the co-producers, along with lead producer Peter Blum, of the Woodstock Story Festival in October, 2025
Rishi Nixon is a Maryland spoken-word storyteller and performing artist. For over ten years, he has performed for audiences from the Washington Folk Festival and National Parks Service to Artists Standing Strong Together and Irvington Peace Park’s annual summer camp for West Baltimore city youth. He was a performing member of award-winning youth touring group The Twinbrook Tellers from 2016 to 2020, after which he became an independent professional storyteller. Since then, he has been inducted a lifetime member of regional storytelling guild Voices in the Glen, served on its board, co-chaired the 2025 National Storytelling Conference, and is the incumbent president of the National Storytelling Network—the youngest person to hold that office.
Emcee
Lee-Ellen Marvin has explored storytelling as a performer, audio producer, educator, folklorist, and community advocate. She has told and taught storytelling to thousands in colleges and universities, developed and published Story Shifters, a non-competitive game, and holds a PhD in Folklore and Folklife. Lee-Ellen lives in Eco Village at Ithaca, New York. 607-229-8429
Community Tellers
Liz Walker co-founded EcoVillage Ithaca (EVI) in 1991, and dedicated her full-time work for the next three decades to bring this internationally acclaimed project from vision to reality. She's written two popular books: EcoVillage at Ithaca: Pioneering a Sustainable Culture, (2005, New Society Publishers) and Choosing a Sustainable Future: Ideas and Inspiration from Ithaca, New York, (October, 2010, New Society) which have been translated into several languages. In 2022 Liz was interviewed about EVI for a YouTube video, which now has 2.1 million views. People are hungry for community! Liz lives with her husband at EcoVillage Ithaca. Whenever she gets a chance, she loves to go biking, or hiking in the beautiful gorges in the Finger Lakes region of NY.
Elan Shapiro has explored the integration of meditative practice with social and environmental activism since living in the SF Bay Area in the 1980’s. He was part of the birthing of eco-psychology and the flowering of the deep ecology and bioregional movements. He has taught about the intersection of social justice and sustainability through the Environmental Studies department at Ithaca College and co-founded Sustainable Finger Lakes, the Building Bridges coalition, and the local chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice.
Date & Time
Sun, Oct 5, 2025 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM