What is True Voices?

Are you looking for a unique team-building exercise for your organization? Would you like a new way to connect to your family, or to commemorate a milestone?

True Voices is a consulting firm that helps organizations and institutions create strong internal relationships through a uniquely creative process. This is not your typical team-building exercise or training. The only requirement is that participants come to the table with curious, open minds. Going through the flexible process, itself, builds camaraderie, connection, and communication, as well as results in meaningful poetry, woven from many voices, that your group can be proud to display. The poems can also illustrate clear topics for continued work to strengthen your organization.

For organizations, we achieve these outcomes through our innovative community-generated poetry process that blends empowering anonymity with creative accountability

For families, the True Voices process encourages creativity, communication, and openness through which each person reveals their true authentic selves. The outcome is a beautiful group-written poem or collection of poems that commemorate a person, event, or another important milestone in a family.

Every project is tailored to each groups’ specific goals and aspirations. Our flexible approach encourages open communication while fostering collaboration and community which allows the newly connected group to take on any challenge head-on, with empowering results!

Who is True Voices For?

We work with state and city municipalities, schools (K-12 and higher education), businesses, community groups, and families who are open to working on strengthening internal relationships, identifying specific challenges, and broadening transparency and collaboration.

Often our primary contacts within organizations are student life directors, diversity and inclusion officers, city managers, human resources directors, health and wellness directors, internal community leaders, and creative project managers.

How Does True Voices Work?

Have you ever participated in a team-building exercise where you dreaded every minute of the uncomfortable activity? Where a couple of people dominated the conversation and everyone else shuffled their feet, looking like they wanted to be anywhere else? I have.

Have you ever been to a family reunion or function where people just stood around talking about who wasn’t there and listing all of their latest medical issues? Me too.

Don’t worry. True Voices is none of that and, unless you’ve worked with us previously, it’s like nothing you’ve ever done before. Instead of the “same old same old”, we provide a flexible yet structured environment for each participant to be fully involved and invested in the outcome. Each group is gently guided and prompted through the True Voices community-generated poetry process which generates meaningful conversations, builds relationships, and creates something that lasts – together!

Poetry Workshop Principles

There aren’t a lot of rules and the structure is very flexible, but TRUST is at the core of success in this program.

Principle #1:
Trust the participants -

Everyone has something to say in their own unique way.

Principle #2:
Trust the process -

For most projects, the creative content is gathered anonymously. Sometimes, powerful, complex, and even uncomfortable themes emerge as the participants weave together all the material. Anonymity provides all involved a buffer allowing them to shine a light on whatever they may find.

Principle #3:
Trust each other -

Participants trust each other to hold space for individual creativity and respect what is produced.

Benefits of the True Voices Process

Flexible Project Planning and Design

True Voices workshops are for any size group. You decide the areas of focus, groups involved, timeline, and project scope – large or small.

Community-generated Poems

You can use the poems created during the project, which incorporate the voices of many stakeholders, to continue the work, encourage focus, and further connect communities.

The Flexibility of Delivery

Your project can be accomplished 100% virtually, 100% in-person, or a combination of both.

Surprise and Delight

Participants invariably are surprised by what they create and how enjoyable and fulfilling the process is at every step.

A Lasting Impression

Communities enjoy seeing their shared creative work lasting beyond the project timeline itself.

Why Does The True Voices Process Work?

Our consultant works directly with project managers and other stakeholders to tailor our dynamic process specifically to their group’s goals.

Institutions, as well as individuals, want to create and build strong relationships in order to address challenges together. They want to be part of moving beyond assumptions and instead move toward actively making positive connections and changes within their organizations.

Families have used this process to become closer and learn more about one another. Our projects have created beautiful commemorative and collaborative poems to honor a loved one or to celebrate milestones such as a birthday, graduation, wedding, or anniversary.

The only thing the participants need is a desire to come together, be creative, and have an open mind.

The Original Voice of True Voices

I’m Barbara McCarty Clauer, creator of True Voices. I found my “true voice” for this process throughout my 22+ year career as an English Professor teaching literature and writing. True Voices is a direct outgrowth of my teaching philosophy and all I value about learning: working collaboratively, being open to new ideas, lifting up each others’ voices, and really listening to what emerges.

While attending an Imagining America Conference in Chicago in 2018, I took part in an exercise where all the conference attendees chose and opened a random fortune cookie. Mine said simply: “nothing is completely new”. I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. That phrase, to me at that moment, meant that the collaborative, re-mix nature of the process that I had begun to develop that is now the True Voices process, is its own kind of new. It certainly works to lead participants to new ways of seeing and thinking about complex concepts.

Guiding others through this process is a fulfilling continuation of my teaching. It is like taking that first deep breath after unknowingly holding it: relief and rejuvenation. Each person who has participated in a community-generated poetry workshop with me adds their own unique voice to the collective TRUE VOICE of our community.

I often think of and am inspired by one of my favorite poems, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”, by Walt Whitman, regarding the hope, trust, and courage it takes to explore ideas as well as seek connections:

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

— Walt Whitman