Creating greater empathy and inclusion in the workplace

Principal partners with the Facing Project for storytelling book

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When you know someone’s story, it’s hard not to feel a connection. 

For the past six years, an Indiana-based nonprofit group called the Facing Project has worked with communities across the country to help tell the stories of individuals in often forgotten groups — the poor, the homeless, people with addictions and those facing serious disabilities, among many others. 

Recently, Principal Financial Group launched “Beyond Face Value,” a collaboration with the Facing Project that the company’s leaders hope will spark a communitywide movement toward greater awareness, understanding and empathy for the challenges that people face, whether they are living with a mental or physical disability or care for a family member who does.   

Although the Facing Project has worked with more than 100 communities across the country, the nonprofit has until now focused on pairing college students with community members to tell people’s stories. Principal’s project is the organization’s first foray into working with the corporate world, and may serve as a model for expanding the project to more companies. 

“The power of the Facing Project is to bring someone who has a story with someone who’s ready to write about that story,” said Heather Schott, Principal’s assistant director of diversity and inclusion. 

“And there’s amazing growth that happens, both in telling your story and the power of actually listening to them tell that story, that really changes our perception and helps us think differently about individuals and their stories,” she said. “It opens us up and creates empathy, which is the key to what we’re trying to do — create empathy and understanding.” 

With the guidance of the Facing Project’s team, Principal paired 18 people with disabilities or who care for someone with a disability — a mix of Principal employees and clients of Easter Seals Iowa, Goodwill Industries and the Iowa School for the Blind — with another person to interview them and write their stories. The result is a soft-cover book featuring those stories, which Principal has also published on its website as an audiobook and in Braille. 

The collaboration began through Mandi McReynolds, Principal’s director of community relations and foundation director, who through her previous roles in higher education worked with J.R. Jamison, co-founder of the Facing Project.

“Mandi started to ask, ‘Well, what would this look like in a company if we used this model?’ ” Jamison said during a visit to Des Moines earlier this month. “So she contacted us and we chatted about what this would look like. So it was new for us, the first we had ever worked with a corporation in this model. There were learning curves on both sides along the way, which was really great.” 

Principal’s leadership in the project could result in opportunities for other companies to use the model to advance their diversity and inclusion programs, said Kelsey Timmerman, who co-founded the Facing Project with Jamison. 

“Principal is really piloting our corporate project, so we can learn how to help other corporations do similar projects,” Timmerman said. “It’s been great to talk to the organizing team to learn how we can better help them. So we hope to help corporations run similar projects in the future.” 

Principal on Aug. 16 hosted an unveiling event and roundtable discussion featuring some of the project’s participants at its headquarters as part of the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s Multicultural Reception and Roundtable Series. 

Among the participants in the project as one of the story writers was Gary Scholten, executive vice president and chief information officer with Principal. 

“In order for Principal to be the best it can be and serve our customers the way they deserve to be served, we need to have the best talent, and to do that we need to cast a wide net,” said Scholten, who also chairs Principal’s Diversity Council. “Then once you find somebody here, they have to be able to bring their whole self to work. 

“As I think about this project, storytelling is the best way to deal with inclusion,” he told an audience of Partnership members filling the company’s auditorium. “It’s hard to not have a connection if you know somebody’s story. So I love the project side of it; I saw how it could help with the whole inclusion mission that we have.” 

Principal’s chairman, president and CEO, Dan Houston, called the project an “incredibly powerful topic.” 

“If anyone can make it through this book without crying, I think maybe you need to think about doing something else in life,” said Houston, who said he cried “like Niagara Falls” when he read some of the stories. 

“My biggest takeaway from this project is that these are people who have incredible grit.” 

As part of the roundtable event, audience members were asked to provide their feedback on ways that their communities and workplaces could better support individuals and families with disabilities and caregivers who face daily challenges. 

“The excitement for me is that we start this and it grows,” Principal’s Schott said. “We’re starting that conversation and will collect some ideas at the end and take those back to the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s Diversity and Inclusion Council to move this into the next phase. … I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. We absolutely don’t want to see it stop after today.” 


Principal’s “Beyond Face Value” book can be viewed online at this link: https://bit.ly/2ORQjBL


About the Facing Project 

J.R. Jamison, who has spent the past decade promoting community engagement in higher education, in 2012 paired up with best-selling author Kelsey Timmerman for a project examining poverty in their community of Muncie, Ind. What the two thought at the time was a one-off project developed into a model and toolkit for communities to build awareness of people with life circumstances that deserve to be shared. 

The toolkits help communities pair a team of writers to take on the voice and persona of their subjects to write from their viewpoints to bring their stories to life. Each project culminates with a book to be shared throughout the community, and acted out by local actors through community theater and monologues to bring a face to the voice. 

For more information, visit the website at www.facingproject.com.