This presentation was delivered as part of the 2012 Boston Mormon Stories Conference held at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as organized by the awesome Boston Mormon Stories Support Community.

To start or join a support community where you live, click on the Support Communities menu option at MormonStories.org.

To plan and host your own Mormon Stories Conference, please email us at MormonStories at gmail.com.

And thank you for listening.

On behalf of Mormon Stories, I'd like to welcome you to our first Boston Mormon Stories Conference. We're excited about this.

My name is Elizabeth Hammond, and I am a member of the local Mormon Stories Group, and a member of the Cambridge First Ward.

I'd like to express a lot of great and heartfelt appreciation for everybody who was involved in the logistics of pulling off this conference and to people who traveled from long distances to be here.

So thank you so much for making the event yesterday possible, and today and tomorrow morning we'll also be meeting again informally if you'd like to hang out and talk some more.

On behalf of Boston, I'd like to welcome Mormon Stories here to Harvard Square.

Boston, Massachusetts and the surrounding areas have a deep history of engaging Mormonism in ways that align with today's conference theme, which is using personal narratives to create spaces where

environments of all levels of orthodoxy can interact authentically. Diversity of belief and practice often poses significant challenges to creating emotionally safe spaces where people can express their perspectives and their experiences out loud.

The differences in belief and practice have caused innumerable conflicts and relationships in both in real life and on the internet, and these conflicts in turn can compromise friendships, ward communities, and the whole spectrum of family relationships.

So to prevent such conflict, individuals often will attempt to silence others or choose to remain silent themselves, which has high costs for everyone involved.

Mormon Stories community seeks to move beyond the notion that a community's members must all agree on belief and subscribe to the same practices, and the goal of our conference is to invite all voices to resonate with each individual's perspective and lived experience without the fear of being dismissed or reproved.

And by doing so, we hope to create useful dialogue, preserve relationships, learn from each other, and ultimately create a diverse inspiring and productive community of all kinds of Mormons and friends of Mormons.

Each of today's speakers has strong lived experience in both participating in and creating these kind of communities that meet these kind of objectives.

So no doubt we have in the audience today traditional believing members of the Mormon Church.

We probably also have in attendance members of varying levels of Mormon belief, people who have left the church, perhaps even fundamentalists, apologists, atheists, agnostics, and members of other religions, and all people from all these groups, as well as women, men, and all people of all sexual orientations are equally welcome and have an equal standing in the world.

So to honor and protect everybody here, Mormon stories conferences are convened in the spirit of the Mormon story shared values, which I will read now, and which you can find printed on the brochures and the back of brochures for today's conference.

Number one, they're not numbered on your brochures, but I'm going to read them as a list here.

Number one, we acknowledge the richness of Mormon heritage, teachings, and community, and all of its diversity.

Number two, we believe that one can self-identify as Mormon based on one's genealogy, one's upbringing, beliefs, relationships, and other life experiences, regardless of one's adherence or non-inherence to the teachings or doctrines of any religious organization.

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