Trading Places

Trading Places: Story Exchange comes to life in new Mountjoy-Maynooth partnership

By stepping into each other’s shoes and telling each other’s stories, students from Maynooth University and a group of young prisoners realised they had much in common

By Kathy Donaghy

A ground-breaking Story Exchange Project saw 10 students from the Maynooth Access Programme (MAP) and 10 inmates from Mountjoy Prison’s Progression Unit come together and learn that while they might inhabit different worlds, in reality they weren’t all that different. The project, which began last spring with Gaisce - The President’s Award scheme, was the first formal activity in the newly formed Mountjoy-Maynooth University (MJMU) Partnership, which aims to promote new pathways to university for prisoners, former prisoners and people with convictions. The project saw participants aged between 19 and 25 come together using global organisation Narrative 4’s Story Exchange tool as a way to build empathy and understanding. The story exchange works by randomly partnering people from the group and getting them to tell each other a story from their lives. When everyone comes together again as a group, they re-tell their partner’s story in the first person. For Erika Savage, a 20 year-old post-graduate student and MAP ambassador from Dublin, the project has had a massive impact on her life. “It gave me a sense that we’re not that different. If we’d met in different circumstances we’d be friends,” she says of her experience of going into Mountjoy’s Progression Unit and working with prisoners on the project. “The Story Exchange means you connect on different levels – it’s bringing out those shared experiences. The different experiences were just as important because they made you appreciate what it’s like for someone else,” she says. As MAP ambassadors, Erika says they were able to dispel some of

They’re not seeing us as scumbags, as we thought they probably would see us. But then again we thought we’d see them as ‘poshies’ – they’re far from poshies and I think we’re far from scumbags with the things we’re doing,” says Eoin*, a Mountjoy inmate.

the inmates’ ideas that you have to be ‘rich’ to go to college. “I’m in college full-time but I also work at weekends – it wasn’t handed to us. I think they realised college is something they could do, that it’s really attainable,” she says. “It was such a privilege to get to know them. There was no judgement and we were all on the same level. That connection came from sharing something really personal with someone and hearing that story back. It’s not easy to do that – to trust someone you don’t know with a story.” Recalling the first day students came into the prison, Eoin*, one of the young men from Mountjoy’s Progression Unit who took part, says he was very nervous initially and didn’t know what to expect but inhibitions and preconceptions quickly fell away. “For prisoners being there – you don’t have to put on a front like you do on the landings, like you have to be this tough guy or anything. There was none of that. It was just sitting down, being normal, just working with normal people,” says Eoin. “They’re seeing us as normal as well. “People are trying to change their ways. There are people who’ll look at all the bad you’ve done, but you can’t grow without making mistakes. Courses like this will help people see prisoners are trying to change and move on with their lives,” he adds. Progression Unit Governor Donnacha Walsh believes the Story Exchange format could be more widely used across the prison system if more higher education institutions were willing to come on board. “The Story Exchange was a powerful tool – it’s a case of ‘I tell your story and you tell mine’. The group gelled and they bonded and they became a very powerful group of young people sharing each other’s experiences of life,” says Walsh. According to Grace Edge, manager of Maynooth’s Access Programme, the project provided an effective way of bringing higher education into the prison in an informal way. “It’s all about breaking down barriers between custody and college. And while we want to promote and facilitate higher education, it’s also about developing our MAP ambassadors and our own students. It’s a two-way street,” says Edge. She believes the Story Exchange Project is a model for how higher education and prisons can work together and perhaps more partnerships, like the MJMU one, will be formed in other parts of the country with other prisons and other universities. A report on the Story Exchange project by researcher Sarah Meaney, states that: “Much of the power of a project like this lies in the revelation, through dialogue, of all they have in common. This deepening insight into themselves and their lived realities is a process of self-transformation.” Or, as one of the participants on the project summed it up for the report: “It just goes to show that we’re not that different at the end of the day. Our circumstances are different, but we’re not different.”

*Asterisk indicates name has been changed.