Susie Risho / Ira Byock:
Storykeepers / Missoula Demonstration Project

StoryKeepers

StoryKeepers is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promote and preserve oral and written histories through telling stories of and for Missoula County residents through multi-generational programs, collaborating educational events and community endeavors.

StoryKeepers works with individuals, families and organizations to encourage a community culture to honor our past and enjoy our life stories.

Storytelling

• Brings personal healing and enhances mental health
• Increases respect and empathy
• Nurtures compassion and understanding between generations and cultures
• Builds supportive connections between people in the home, work place and community
• Provides a gift for surviving generations at life's end
• Opens doors for humor and laughter as well as healthy grieving

The Value of Sharing Stories
By Judy H. Wright, Personal Historian

I have been very fortunate in being present when individuals have shared their life stories. The settings were numerous and often unusual: hospitals, canning peaches, drinking tea, washing dishes or looking at photographs. A noticeable spiritual alertness emerges as the storyteller begins to recognize their life has been worthwhile and they have contributed to the world in some small way. A profound and readily evident physical affect takes place as anecdotes unfold and the listener assists the speaker to recognize the wonder and uniqueness of his or her story. The speaker's eyes begin to sparkle, weep or gaze into space as they behold in their mind's eye the drama they had almost forgotten. Whether the language is body, spoken or written, the story is priceless as an oral history becomes a permanent memento of the family's heritage. It is a document that honors all of us, both the storyteller and the story readers for generations yet to come.

StoryKeepers is a non-profit organization originating from the Life Story Task Force of Missoula Demonstration Project. For more information contact Susie Risho, 406-549-0752.

Missoula Demonstration Project
A community project to reclaim and reframe the end of life

The western community of Missoula, Montana is embracing dying as a part of living. They are developing ways to improve the quality of life for dying people and their families through community-wide research and action, an example in one community of what can be accomplished anywhere.

People dying alone and in pain, caregivers being overburdened and suffering from lack of help, individuals grieving in the absence of compassion - these are problems that belong to us all. Likewise, the solutions belong to our communities' workplaces, schools, churches, neighborhoods and social organizations, as well as our health care institutions.

No one can escape confronting life's end. But all of us can work together to insure that individuals have self-determined life closures; caregivers will receive the help they need; people will experience safe, relatively comfortable dying; and healthy grieving will become a part of fuller living among us all.

The Missoula Demonstration Project examines factors that contribute to the quality of life's end:
What do people desire, value or fear at the end of life?
How do people perceive or experience medical care and social support at the end
of life?
What can communities do to improve the quality of life's end?

The Missoula Demonstration Project uses research data to catalyze people to discuss individual and community values and hopes and to work together on innovative solutions. Missoula's diverse task forces conduct community projects and activities such as

• Life Stories
• Arts
• Pain as the Fifth Vital Sign
• Faith Communities
• Schools
• Advance Care Planning
• Caring Circles

A Vision
"Tomorrow's children will see dying as a time of living and will understand that dying people deserve medically comprehensive yet unabashedly tender, loving care. They will learn to gather in support of friends and family during times of illness, care giving and grief. To do otherwise will seem unnatural."
Ira Byock, MD - Co-founder of Missoula Demonstration Project

To contact the Missoula Demonstration Project, write 320 East Main Street, Missoula, MT 59802 or call 406-728-1613.

www.missoulademonstration.org

The Missoula Demonstration Project receives funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, Charles Engelhard Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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