The Storytelling Institute here at SMCC is rooted in oral traditions… I think that's what's the difference. The ancestry, the history, the cultural aspect that is what the institute's focus is on.
Lorraine Calbow blazed a lot of trails during her time at South Mountain Community College. She was a founding faculty member of SMCC and a co-founder of both the Storytelling Institute and the STARS Foundation.
When Calbow was first hired as a counselor at SMCC in 1979, she became one of seven original faculty members.
“Doctor Cardenas,” she mused to SMCC students in 2018, “chose me because I wasn't a part of the system.”
Calbow had been working for “less than a year at Phoenix College,” but was from California.
“I had been involved in the University of California system, whereas most of the other counselors” in Maricopa Community Colleges “were local and in and kind of homegrown.” In her first year at South, Calbow registered students for classes and provided mental health support.
Several years into her tenure at SMCC, Lorraine Calbow helped launch the Storytelling Institute. While she was on sabbatical studying experiential therapies, she became intrigued by the power of storytelling as a method of therapeutic healing. She and Liz Warren attended a storytelling event to see the power of storytelling for themselves. “But they didn't do it from a therapeutic standpoint. They just told stories like folktales, fairy tales and all this other kind of stuff.” Warren and Calbow were immediately intrigued. They began attending conferences and other storytelling events. They recruited other interested faculty members and sought international experts to train them in the art of storytelling. Then they introduced storytelling to the rest of the campus.
It was 1993 and, in Lorraine’s opinion, “the energy of the college was very depressed. I had come back from my sabbatical, I knew the college was in a state of depression, and I didn't know why.”
The college was, indeed, facing a crisis of sorts in the early 1990s. The founding president had been transferred to Paradise Valley Community College, and in his place the PVCC president had been traded to South, along with top members of his administration. At Convocation, Lorraine and several other colleagues demonstrated storytelling to the SMCC faculty and staff, and “the energy in that room went way up.” Storytelling, Lorraine thought, might help the campus culture recover. A group of administrators and faculty members across campus agreed. “We've got to do something. Let's create a storytelling institute.”
The Storytelling Institute was truly a cross-campus project. Faculty from all disciplines including Anthropology, English, Math, Sciences, Music, Counseling, and Education helped develop the curriculum and provided financial support. The dean of instruction helped develop pathways for students. Campus administrators and the District Chancellor provided funding.
Lorraine remained proud of the Storytelling Institute and its influence. “The Storytelling Institute here at SMCC is rooted in oral traditions… I think that's what's the difference. The ancestry, the history, the cultural aspect that is what the institute's focus is on.”
Lorraine Calbow retired from SMCC and was later awarded faculty emeritus status. She died on September 10, 2021. She was interviewed by SMCC students Stephen Loper and Tommy Pham in 2018 on behalf of the South Phoenix Oral History Project.
Click here to read Calbow’s student-written profile or request to view the complete interview.