What Is Front Porch Sessions?
“I created Front Porch Sessions because, in my heart, I believe that it’s harder to hate, it’s harder to hurt, it’s harder to harm when you know somebody. When you know their story.”
— Chris Williams, Creator of Front Porch Sessions
Community Stories Since 2016.
FPS was created to serve the community by bringing people together — friends become closer and people living in the same community become less like strangers, more like neighbors.
FPS is a storytelling event. Each night is crafted to be an opportunity for listening and speaking.
How it works: Three storytellers tell a story they prepared based on a theme. After each performance, the audience breaks into intimate groups to have conversation sparked by the story they just heard.
“I was having a conversation with friends one evening,
and the topic kept returning to fear and frustration with the state of the country. It felt like political unrest, protests, police shootings and other acts of violence were on the news every night and people in my local community were feeling more isolated.
I decided then and there that I would do something to try and bring people like my friends closer to people they didn’t know but lived in the same community. I started with what I’m good at, storytelling, and I began to craft an event that would both create listening and speaking opportunities.
Front Porch Sessions was born in my backyard weeks later. I canvassed my entire social group for referrals of people they found interesting or who were doing thought provoking work in the Portland community.
From this pool of community suggestions I was able to recruit three volunteers to tell a personal story to a group of strangers at my house.
The thing that separates FPS from other storytelling events is that the audience gets to engage with each other.
At the end of each story the storyteller asks the audience a question to inspire conversation. Time is then given for the audience to connect and discuss the question.
Front Porch Sessions should be looked at as an opportunity. It’s a chance to rediscover the things that we have in common with each other as human beings and to celebrate what makes us unique as individuals. Front Porch Sessions helps create community.
— Chris
What People Are Saying…
“We spend money on tickets and a babysitter for a FPS session for two reasons. 1) The storytellers are real people. Often not professional storytellers or fancy people, but always real people who bring their honest bits of the human experience to the table. 2) The community at FPS is filled with people who are interested and interesting. We get a chance to process these human experiences together. Life moves so fast, we don't often get a chance to do that. It is one way we counteract the scroll culture in our family...”
— Jenna Philpott