Connect to meaningful stories from your community. Get ready for Dear World! Storyteller Keshia Hannam will join us for opening and closing general sessions at the European Meetings & Events Conference (EMEC), 9-11 February in Sevilla, Spain, to push our boundaries so that we can undergo a powerful shared, and possibly even transformational, experience.
Robert X. Fogarty took a journalism class in college where the professor gave the students a homework assignment to write their own obituaries. It was a great reinforcement about the value of storytelling.
“Stories are wired into us as a means of survival,” says Fogarty, founder of Dear World. “And I think we’re all living one big story in our life. If we’re lucky, it’s a long one with peaks and valleys that we can look back on with more peaks than valleys.”
As an organization, Dear World designs experiences that help transform communities, campuses and companies through the meaningful stories of its individuals.
“A big part of what we do now is, we don’t share in a vacuum,” Fogarty says. “Participants collaborate by actively working on their stories together by listening and sharing, combining that with a format that helps people develop and deliver a meaningful story that can be transformative when shared within a team or community. Our hope is that our work continues to transform, connect and impact people through hundreds of events conducted in multiple languages around the globe.”
If you were in New Orleans in February 2010, Fogarty says, a few things were inescapable.
“There was a mayoral election. Carnival season was in full swing. Most of all, the Saints were going to the Super Bowl,” he says. “The anticipation was electric.”
Another element cropped up in New Orleans during that time. Everyone was sharing on social media a certain kind of photo: portrait photography where the subject had written a love letter to the city of New Orleans on their bodies, taken by Fogarty.
A man named Ralph Serpas wrote “Cancer Free” during a “Dear New Orleans” event around the same time with Fogarty. That was when Fogarty realized his business wasn’t limited to the city it started from. Dear New Orleans would become Dear World.
“After that, work multiplied and grew in size. Dear World was pursuing a new kind of profile journalism targeted for specific audiences, documenting the stories of CEOs and entry-level employees, university presidents and incoming freshmen,” Fogarty says. “Today, Dear World counts among its clients Fortune 100 companies and top-flight higher-education institutions, as well as many small businesses and community colleges.”
He estimates the organization has taken portraits of approximately 100,000 subjects around the world.
As more people invested in Dear World, Fogarty says, the company grew to the point that it was given the domain http://dearworld.com from Microsoft, which is a now a Dear World client. It also grew the capacity to take on nonprofit storytelling, produced out of dearworld.org, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. These series have covered Syrian refugees, South Sudanese civil society leaders and Pulse nightclub survivors and victims’ families.
“But it’s important to note Dear World is neither a documenter of causes nor profiler of survival,” Fogarty says. “Above all, the company believes stories worth telling can be found in everyone, anywhere.”
