Dr. Gala True and I were high school classmates, so when I got a message from her in 2019 about helping on a consulting project to share her work with professionals beyond academia, we had a lot of life to catch up on.  

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The first project was to transform what had been an academic research presentation into an interactive workshop.  

 

I still remember the power of her work as she gave voice to the personal narratives of veterans through art such as you see here. Those stories conveyed everything one needed to know about the importance of her work.  

So we remixed the talk.  Instead of the stories being one part, they became scattered throughout as continual reminders about why what they were doing was important. The opening, transitions, the close, ever 7 or 8 minutes there was another story to be shared.

 

The results were good enough that 6 months later she called me to help with another project, one in which her friend was the lead.  Ostensibly it was a reporting back on VA funding for pilot project work with veterans on the edge. But really it was a competition for the next round of funding, 300k/year for the next 3 years.

 

We got together and transformed what had been a statistics focused report on the characteristics of the people they served into personal stories about the lives they had transformed. 6 weeks later, they got their funding, all $900k.