“If we didn’t have a system like Trint it would require so many more volunteers, like 10 times minimum.”
When non-profit organization Witness Change founded the 1000 Dreams project, they set about to support marginalized groups in reclaiming the narratives of their lives, and allowing refugees to become the authors of their own experiences.
Projects Director at Witness Change, William Lounsbury, talks to us about the important work that the organization does and how using Trint has helped to support the storytelling and workflows within the 1000 Dreams project.
“We use Trint across the organization. 1000 Dreams was the project that uses it most.”
“The 1000 Dreams project launched on World Refugee Day on June 20th 2021” Lounsbury tells us, with the development of the concept starting around a year and a half before that. The way the project works is by giving refugees the tools, training and skills to become authors of the refugee experience and to share those unique stories with a wider audience.
“We do storytelling workshops where we train a group of usually around 10 people with a refugee background… refugees, asylum seekers, former refugees, anyone who has a forced migration experience. And we train them in how to make a very specific type of portrait, how to do an interview, and then we provide them with the equipment to do this work.” From this training, these refugees are able to “go out into their communities and document these stories.”
Lounsbury also speaks about how the starting point is an “educational campaign, because the concept behind the project is that the team of professionals, storytellers, journalists… are not actually the ones doing the work.” It’s the people who have been trained with refugee backgrounds, who will be doing the actual reporting and interviewing. “They ask questions, interrogate stories, and then [we] put together images and text that reflect the authentic story.”
“We’re here to tell complex, interesting, and compelling stories.”
“It’s a diverse project that reflects the diversity of the experience of refugees.”
One of the most powerful parts of the 1000 Dreams project is its focus on covering a variety of stories from a wide array of perspectives and experiences. Lounsbury notes that “from the very beginning, we do our best to make sure that we have equal representation of men and women… and we always try to work with a diverse group of people that reflects the refugee community and the place we’re working.”
These interviews can be complex and in a range of languages. But by using Trint, the 1000 Dreams project can easily capture these stories and focus more on the people behind them. Lounsbury also says, “so often refugee stories are misrepresented or shown in a more limited way. We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to represent their language authentically.”
“Trint allows us to do that first step of the transcription basically instantaneously.”
Lounsbury then goes on to cover the ways that Trint’s transcription features help support the next steps as he says, “we then use Trint to transcribe about 90% of the interviews. Interviews are done in whatever language is most comfortable for the interviewee, so this means it can be a wide variety of languages.” With “over 30 languages represented” by the project, Trint’s multi-lingual feature is a crucial tool here that helps “make the whole workflow much, much faster.” Lounsbury says “it removes, at a minimum, two steps and in some cases three steps” in the process and optimises the workflow.
Security and privacy are crucial to the 1000 Dreams team, as they deal with sensitive information and stories that must be dealt with care and consideration at each step of the process.
“We think that respecting people’s privacy and security is extremely important. So we take a lot of steps to make sure we’re not going to accidentally release private information that somebody wasn’t comfortable having out there.” Part of 1000 Dreams’ success comes with the safety of the information being handled and Lounsbury recognizes this as a shared value seen in Trint’s ecosystem.
The security benefits of using Trint and its approach to data protection and confidentiality, aligns with the educational and editorial sides of the project. Lounsbury states that “we use the exact same kind of principles and ethics as journalism because that’s the background we came from. So it’s 100% an editorial project at the end of the day. The educational component is the step to get to that editorial output.”
“There's so many different elements to verify and review, that the fact [we] know that Trint is not going to train its AI, that it’s a secure system…means that it’s one less thing to worry about.”
When reflecting on how the storytelling process would be different if the organization was not using Trint, Lounsbury explained that ‘it’d be a lot slower, as a bare minimum. It would probably require more people to get the same job done.” He also mentioned that “for the vast majority of the languages in which we work, it can all rest self-contained within Trint. We don’t have to have multiple different systems to work with different people. And because everything exists within Trint, it means everybody has to work on the same system.”
As a non-profit organization, “the project relies on volunteer work and people who believe in the mission of the project”, however for more tedious, time consuming tasks like transcriptions, that’s where having Trint on hand can really benefit organizations like Witness Change. “By having that hardest part, the most tedious part of the job done, it makes it easier for people to stay engaged and excited about doing the work.”
“I think Trint has been a really key part of our workflow and it’s benefited us greatly.”
