Exchanging Stories-Changing History is an ongoing Guestbook Project that invites youths from divided communities to meet, to exchange their stories of conflict, to digitally record the experience and to engage in a new, shared creative project. This initiative creates opportunities for young people from communities that have been polarized by boundaries and borders, by religious and cultural beliefs, war, acute poverty or injustice, to use digital filmmaking to record their stories and to imagine a different future.

Storybites are moments of radical transformation. What is the difference between needing to be understood and actively trying to understand someone else? Storybites is a new Guestbook initiative that creates a participatory space for people who want to share stories that highlight a radical or surprising shift in their perspective. The Guestbook Project operates on the maxim, ‘if someone asks you who you are, you tell your story’. Overcoming violence and facilitating conflict resolution involve precisely this: expressing your own story and listening to the story of the other.

Do you work with communities in conflict? Do you work with people interested in creating media about peacebuilding and conflict resolution? Would you like to set up a screening, talk, or other event? Guestbook Project has partnered with organizations from around the world to empower and inspire a new generation of creative peacebuilders to transform conflict through empathic imagination and the use of digital media.