Grandmother Council Storytelling Workshop Fundraiser

Step into a powerful day of story, community, and transformation. Join the Grandmothers Council and professional storyteller Chaise Levy for an immersive one-day storytelling workshop where lived experience becomes shared wisdom. Through circle practice, guided reflection, and small-group storytelling, participants will learn how to shape their meaningful personal stories into medicine that can nourish family, community, and future generations.

Your $111 ticket sponsors both your place and a Grandmother’s participation, directly supporting her initiation journey in the Grandmother Council.
For an additional $33, enjoy a lovingly prepared light breakfast and hearty homemade lunch, along with fresh baked goods made from the Grandmothers’ hearts and hands using local, organic ingredients. All proceeds directly support the Grandmothers Council.

This is more than a workshop. It is a day of listening, speaking truth, and strengthening the voices that carry wisdom forward for the next seven generations.

If you cannot attend but feel called to support this work, donations are warmly welcomed and deeply appreciated.

Come be part of the circle. Come help the stories continue.

Here is the food menu for the workshop. Come for the food, Stay for the Workshop!

*Breakfast Offerings*• Hearty Breakfast Casserole• Fresh Baked Breakfast Muffins• Savory Breakfast Quiche

*Main Meal*• Classic Homemade Lasagna with Ground Beef• Gluten Free Vegetarian Lasagna

*Soups & Sides*• Rustic Lentil Soup• Creamy Butternut Squash Soup• Seasonal Fresh Salad with Homemade Dressing• Warm Cornbread with Butter• Homemade Sourdough Bread

*Sweet Treats*• Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies• Assorted Homemade Desserts & Baked Goods

*Beverages*• Tea & Coffee Bar with all the fixings• Fresh Spring Water

*If you’ve been thinking about coming, now is the time to register and help us bring this beautiful gathering fully to life. We would be so grateful for your support and presence.

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On the Power of Story

The power of story is, at its root, the power of truth, and truth has a way of ringing through whatever container it is poured into. Whether the words come forward as a poem, a monologue, a fairy tale, or a memory shared around a fire, what changes and transforms the world is not the form but the truth vibrating inside it. A story sings when it has been fully lived, fully felt, and integrated into the body and senses of the one telling it. This is not a metaphor. It is a practice of returning to sensation, to breath, to felt connection with the earth beneath us, so that when we speak, something real moves through the words.

Stories are also like accordions. They can be drawn out into their full expanse or pressed down to their essential breath, and in either direction, beautiful music is possible. Knowing the truth of a story is only the first art. The second is attunement: reading the audience, the space, the time available, and learning to shape the telling accordingly. This is the practice of council: speaking to the heart of the matter with leanness of speech, editing in real time not from anxiety but from presence. It is a discipline. And like all disciplines, it becomes a gift.

Purpose & Intent

Every life contains suffering that was never asked for and wisdom that was hard-won. The late Robert Bly reminded us that our greatest gifts often lie right next to our wounds, and we all carry a deep longing to feed our families, communities, and culture with the experience we have gathered. This workshop is built around that longing: the alchemical work of moving from wound to gift, and then shaping that gift into story that can touch the hearts and minds of those who were not there, carried forward for seven generations and beyond.

Participants will leave with greater clarity about which stories from their lives are asking to be told, how to shape those stories so that their message and wisdom can be gifted to the listener, and what it feels like to be heard with genuine reverence.

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About the Grandmother Council

The Grandmother Council is a community offering in Nevada County dedicated to remembering and restoring the vital role of Wise Woman Elders in guiding, supporting, and strengthening community life. Grandmothers enter the Council through a thoughtful initiation process that helps them deepen and share their lived wisdom. This storytelling workshop is part of that journey, helping Grandmothers reclaim the traditional practice of carrying knowledge forward through story. The Council also hosts Fireside Storytelling Circles and offers one-on-one guidance and mediation in service of harmony and wellbeing in the community.

This fundraiser supports the continued development of these initiation pathways, workshops, and trainings so Elders can more fully share their gifts in service to the highest good of the community and the next seven generations. Your support helps sustain programs that benefit individuals, families, and the wider circle of life we all belong to.

Info: We open in circle with arrival, grounding, and a dedication to the ancestors and descendants who make this work meaningful. The morning’s teaching centers on story as a vessel of transmission: what it means to carry memory across time, how the same event can be told a hundred ways, and why the difference between what happened and what it means is where the real craft lives.

We will also sit with the question of alchemy itself: what it actually takes to move from wound to wisdom, and why that movement is neither linear nor complete before a story can be worth telling.

Info: Participants hear a short traditional or fairy tale and practice retelling it in small groups, working on essence, compression, and the quality of presence that makes a story land. This is playful and low-stakes, a warmup for the afternoon’s deeper work.

Info: Guided by the prompt “What is a story from your life that you would want remembered for seven generations?” participants shape and share a personal story in groups of three. Listeners practice mirroring back the gold: the wisdom, the turn, the moment where something hard became something true.

Painful stories are welcomed here with full care. This workshop holds that stories which have known real darkness are often the ones with the most light to offer, when they are shaped with craft and offered with intention.

Info: The day closes in a communal, ceilidh-style story circle with shared telling, gratitude, and blessing. We leave not as individuals who attended a workshop but as a council that has done something together.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Banner Grange #627, 12629 McCourtney Road, Grass Valley, United States

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