Ex Fabula, a community-based storytelling nonprofit group in Milwaukee, is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. The organization is hosting a birthday bash at The Cooperage on Thursday, March 21 to celebrate.
In October 2009, the five founders of the group got together to talk about a storytelling series in Milwaukee. The five of them, in agreement that personal stories create community connections, saw there was a lack of space to share. From that, Ex Fabula – meaning “from stories” in Latin – was born.
Alea McHatten, the program director and a storytelling coach at Ex Fabula, has been working for the nonprofit for four years. In November of 2018, they joined the team as the event producer, but worked their way up to become the groups first program director in 2021.
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McHatten, an artist, said their poetry and painting has helped guide them in curating a safe place for anyone and everyone to tell their stories. “It was all community members from Milwaukee who were interested in continuing the rich culture that already exists in Milwaukee,” McHatten said. “And really, creating a hub for it.”
They did what they could with the group of volunteers they had, but Milwaukee community members were asking for more.
“They wanted more sustainable programming, they wanted more frequent programming,” McHatten said. “So that’s when we got to make [Megan] McGee, who was one of the original founders, … our first executive director.”
McHatten said McGee really changed the group into what it is today. McGee began looking at Ex Fabula through a lens of equity and equality. “[She] really [made] sure we have rich representation to highlight the voices that go underrepresented in our community, or even misunderstood,” McHatten said.
While Milwaukee is highly segregated, McHatten said it’s also one of those cities that’s deeply connected. “The people love each other,” McHatten said. “That’s why we have the whole phrase ‘small-waukee.’”
McHatten said Ex Fabula has spent these past 15 years utilizing that “small-waukee” culture to further build their storytelling community. “We’ve been able to reach even more people,” McHatten said. “We’ve had some really great success with projects like our Equal Access Project, where we specifically cater our programming to folks who experience different disabilities.”
Along with the equal access project, Ex Fabula created their Brave Space Project. The brave space project is specifically about creating affinity spaces for BIPOC. “This space really does make it possible to remove stereotypes and possible harm from white culture in order to really allow people to take up space,” McHatten said.
In 15 years, Ex Fabula has expanded far beyond what the original five could have imagined. The staff is still small, but McHatten said they are mighty. “It’s a labor of love and we play to the strengths of our team,” McHatten said. “We really utilize that collective power in order to get things done, but we’re brilliant.”
Over the past 15 years, the core of Ex Fabula’s mission has stayed the same – connect communities through the power of personal storytelling – but the approach evolved. “[The original founders] didn’t know just how rich storytelling could be,” McHatten said.
McHatten said through Ex Fabulas first event series, the founders realized they were learning just as much about their community as they were helping people connect – and that came with confrontation of their personal biases.
“They started to think about ‘what does it mean’ to actually connect Milwaukee? Who is Milwaukee?” McHatten said. “They realized white is not the default.”
Over time, the group created bylaws, wrote down their core values, created a board with equitable turnover rates, and got more voices involved.
“We started addressing hard things directly. How do we talk about race? How do we talk about birthing stories and maternity rates? How do we talk about accessibility issues,” McHatten said. “And then what happens when you give people the opportunity to really be heard, without judgment, to just have that moment to really speak truth to power, and allow each person’s perspective to be real and to be valid.”
Ex Fabula has opened up a safe space for many to come and be truly vulnerable with a group of peers. McHatten said these story sessions are time to “learn out loud.”
“We are just humans being humans, making space for other humans to be humans,” McHatten said. “We love our community, we love Milwaukee, and we want to continue serving them in the best ways that we can.”
Tickets are available online.
