Everyone wants to sleep peacefully at night

Living in the Shadow of Violence

Our twenty-first century life is saturated with violence.

If we live in the middle of war, or suffer domestic abuse, or experience the traumatic aftermath of a mass shooting, then violence likely defines our lives.

For those who are more fortunate, violence pervades our lives through the imagery, sounds, and doom predictions that enter our living rooms and the phones we carry in our pockets.

Is all this violence “human nature,” and therefore unavoidable?

Or is there something we can do?


We believe there is a gentle, non-invasive, yet radical antidote to violence.

Everyone has a mother

Nothing is more universally human than mothers: those who give life.

World Mother Storytelling Project is an educational organization and global movement that seeks to end violence in a gentle yet radical way: by teaching people how to tell and listen to stories about mothers. Both our individual mothers, and our collective mother: Mother Earth.

The universal and heart-opening quality of mother stories leads people to regard each other and our environment with tenderness and compassion.

Ending the Cycle of Violence

We envision a world where all victims of violence experience healing, and where the nurturing quality of the mother overcomes aggression: toward our fellow human beings, and toward our Mother Earth.

When we share mother stories, we naturally become averse to violence and do everything in our power to find alternatives

Our Priorities


Education in Compassion & Understanding

Teaching the values of empathy, humanity and nonviolence to children and adults - namely through the power of storytelling.

Gender-Based Violence

One in three women worldwide have experienced physical orsexual violence. Their suffering is usually shrouded insilence. Mother storytelling has the power to break thissilence, and to foster trust and healing.

Environmental Violence

By sharing stories that honor our planet or mourn her degradation, we promote empathy for our collective mother and love for those whom we share her with.

The Narativ Method of listening and storytelling

In 1994, Murray Nossel created an original method to teach dying AIDS patients how to listen to and share stories with one another. Left behind as personal legacies, these stories led to a social campaign to advocate for research and services for AIDS patients. Murray then co-founded Narativ, whose mission is to implement the listening and storytelling method in a wide variety of contexts to effect social change. Narativ has since spread its method internationally, working with organizations such as Open Society Foundations and UNICEF.

CENTRAL AMERICA PILOT PROJECT:

Breaking the Silence in El Salvador

The cycle of gender-based violence

Breaking the cycle of gender-based violence

In 2022, funded by the U.S. Department of State, we embarked on a pilot project to reduce gender-based violence in El Salvador. In partnership with local NGO Glasswing, World Mother trained Salvadoran community workers to empower and uplift 9- to 18-year-old girls across the country.

WE TAUGHT THEM HOW TO:

• Create safe spaces for self-reflection and self-expression

• Listen openly without judgment

•Tell their own stories

•Listen to and retell their mother’s stories

• Apply and adapt the method throughout El Salvador

Sofia’s Story

After listening to her mother’s story, community worker Sofia Mangandi shared the story with her peers:

“Through my love, I understood my mother better. I understood that the time had come to accept things, to see what had happened to me and lovingly embrace it, to lovingly embrace myself. Before then, the emotion I had felt most throughoutmy life was loneliness, feeling utterly alone. Now, I don’t feel alone any more.”

As of September 2023:

49 community workers have been taught how to use the method

15 organizations have expressed interest in incorporating the method into their programming

191 girls have participated in storytelling workshops

“I am what I could have been,” someone once said. So, in telling their story—in discovering it— people can become something they weren’t before but that they were always meant to be.”

MATT BOLAND

Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy San Salvador

Highlights of World Mother Storytelling Project

Impact

“At a moment of profound cultural and political divisions, the World Mother Storytelling Project has devised as tangible a creative intervention as they come. I can say, without reservation, that this is an effort that the world needs now. Very few stories in life are at once universal and wildly divergent—a mother’s story is one of them. It is one of the few life arenas that is shared by everyone, and yet also strangely obscured from our close attention. Mothers, at last, merit this.”

SARAH STILLMAN, Staff Writer, The New Yorker

“At a time of great peril to humanity, we are engulfed in uncertainty and fear. We are compelled to socially distance when our natural inclination is to reach out and connect. The World Mother Storytelling Project comes at such a fitting moment. Here is the opportunity to connect in a most fundamental way, between mother and child, a universal connection. Now more than ever, sharing mothers’ stories and wisdom can nourish and bring comfort to our anxious souls.”

WAFAA EL SADR, Director, Columbia World Projects, ICAP

Who we are

Since we embarked on the World Mother Storytelling Project, a diverse group of passionate, committed people have stepped forward and offered their time, energy, and expertise.

Strategic Plan

Our overarching goal is to bring as many people as possible into the mother storytelling movement and to end violence throughout the world.

We aim to achieve this by first setting up our team to raise funds from foundations, and to manage and market the project so that we can reach as many people as possible.

Join the movement to end violence from the ground up.