Storytelling with Data for Cultural Creatives—Parish Stories

Data-to-Story Labs Project

When numbers and neighborhood stories meet, something powerful wakes up.

Parish Stories: Data-to-Story Labs is a field guide for cultural creatives who want to work with data without losing their voice, their humor, or their community in the process.

This book was built in and for places like New Orleans—and for every parish, county, borough, and neighborhood that knows it is more than a statistic. It treats “cultural creative” broadly: not just artists and writers, but anyone who carries culture into their work and connects it back to the people they serve—teaching artists and clinic staff, librarians and youth workers, nonprofit teams and neighbors who keep showing up.

You do not have to be “good at math” to use this book. You bring your lived experience; the pages help you add tables, charts, maps, dashboards, and public datasets to your creative toolkit.

Inside, you’ll learn how to:

• Read basic tables, charts, maps, and dashboards without jargon
• Turn one number into a story fragment, poem, comic, or one-minute audio piece
• Use assignments like “What This Number Means” to ground creative work in local data
• Pair numbers with memory, photos, oral history, and place
• Build peer circles and feedback rituals that center clarity, context, and care
• Treat accessibility (alt text, captions, contrast, formats) as a creative practice, not an afterthought
• Design and run small “data-to-story labs” for your parish, classroom, clinic, or community space
• Grow new facilitators through a train-the-trainer model so the work doesn’t depend on one person

The book is written for both cohorts and solo readers. Each chapter includes practical examples, prompts, and exercises you can adapt for youth, elders, mixed groups, and different geographies and issues—housing, storms, transit, health, environment, culture, and more. It keeps the language plain, the structure flexible, and the focus on dignity and belonging.

By the end, you’ll have more than theory. You’ll have drafted pieces ready to edit—poems, vignettes, comics, audio scripts, visual concepts—and a repeatable lab pattern you can bring to your own parish or neighborhood.

If this book helps you create something—a workshop, a zine, a reading, a mural, a podcast episode, a lab of your own—we’d love to see it. When you share your work, mention Parish Stories: Data-to-Story Labs and link back to crownlegacyprogram.org so others can find their way into this practice too.

You don’t have to become a data expert. You just have to be willing to look at what the numbers say, listen to what your people know, and build stories sturdy enough to hold both.