We do this by writing a fortnightly newsletter on Substack, sharing data and insight, strategies and tactics, and examples of narrative work in the world. We cover a broad range of issues and movements, and how they intersect, as representing a diverse range of perspectives.
And we also host sessions once a month. These alternate between recorded Curated Sessions, which are put together by one of our six Curators, and Collective Intelligence Sessions, which we hold as loose un-recorded spaces for people to explore challenging questions together.
Subscribers to our newsletter include over 1,500 people from a wide range of organisations. These include leaders from charities, campaigning organisations, think tanks, funders, media outlets, community groups, activism, creative agencies and policymaking.
Recognising that the converging crises we face are not singular issues, but the setting for the era we live in, this is a place for weaving deep understanding, insight and strategy.
We maintain a ‘movement generous’ attitude, sharing in a spirit of solidarity and reciprocity across diverse spaces, from climate and social justice to new economics and countering hate, seeking to foster more polyphony, less cacophony.
We are not prescriptive or directive, but we do recognise what modern science and traditional wisdom reveal to us about the need to move beyond paradigms of separation and supremacy, towards coordination and humility.
This underpins all of our efforts, as we seek strategically-viable long-term trajectories beyond our current predicament, towards fair, thriving futures.
BACKGROUND
We have been running in some form since 2020, incubated by the Environmental Funders Network, initially as the Reset Narratives Community and as Inter-Narratives since 2022. Our approach builds on learnings from these years, as well as previous work on fostering ‘narrative communities’.
These are some of the narrative communities that are useful:
Sharing information
Enabling research, insight and strategy to be shared between organisations opens up a greater flow of information and allows research to have a bigger impact
Sharing approaches
Enabling organisations to learn from each other’s methods and strategies helps to strengthen approaches across the board and evolve the discipline overall
Fostering coordination
Narrative can be a helpful way of bringing together organisations who might work in different areas and have different agendas, but share overarching goals
Deep Narrative
Depending on the degree of synthesis activities built in, narrative communities can more deeply root their collective efforts, to enhance the effectiveness of different movements.
Our Model
Our model aims to help people identify the different kinds of narrative work and intelligence that they can share, ranging from research, to insight, to different kinds of narrative output.
It does not aim to be comprehensive or conclusive – we recognise there are many, many, types of narrative work.
We try to ensure that both our community sessions and the newsletter feature a range of different components from this model, rather than focusing too heavily on one area:
OBJECTIVES:
- Organise ordinary people
- Influence the establishment
- Facilitate paradigm shift
INSIGHTS:
- Polling / perception
- Values / needs
- Behavioural / emotional
- Movement mapping
- Power analysis
- Root cause analysi
OUTPUT:
Strategy tools
- Framing/messaging guides
- Narrative frameworks
- Narrative libraries
Creative storytelling
- Arts/culture training
- Content development
- Content delivery
Narrative organising
- Spokesperson training
- Community training
- Movement strategy
- Deep Narrative weaving
Our People
ELLA SALTMARSHE
Ella works with narrative and culture to effect change in the world, founding organisations like The Long Time Project; The Comms Lab that has incubated projects like The Purpose Disruptors & The Great Reset; campaigns like ItsOurTime and SHEvotes. See her SSIR article Using Story to Change Systems. She has also been published in The Guardian, The Financial Times, ID, Wired, Monocle, Fast Company & Creative Review. She is the host of the award-winning Long Time Academy Podcast.
PADDY LOUGHMAN
Paddy is interested in how we might awaken to what science and wisdom traditions reveal about our relationships, and the potential of more viable, beautiful worlds. He collaborates with and advises organisations, universities, funders and campaigns, from the high-level institutional, to corporates and grassroots. This has included working with the UNFCCC Climate Champions and various collaborations with Purpose Disruptors. He’s the co-author of Stories for Life, a speaker, former brand consultant (Wolff Olins), and once upon a time he trained as an actor.
Previous Curators
IMRAN AHMED
Imran Ahmed is the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate US/UK. He is an authority on social and psychological malignancies on social media, such as identity-based hate, extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. He regularly appears on the media and in documentaries as an expert in how bad actors use digital spaces to harm others and benefit themselves, as well as how and why bad platforms allow them to do so. He advises politicians around the world on policy and legislation. Imran was inspired to start the Center after seeing the rise of antisemitism on the left in the United Kingdom and the murder of his colleague, Jo Cox MP, by a white supremacist, who had been radicalized in part online, during the EU Referendum in 2016. He holds an MA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Imran lives in Washington DC, and tweets at @Imi_Ahmed.
BRIDGIT ANTOINETTE EVANS
Bridgit is an award-winning artist, philanthropy executive, and thought leader in the narrative change field, pioneering the use of pop culture strategies and narrative systems methodology to advance social justice. Fifteen years of work at the intersection of mass audience storytelling and social justice has evolved into a vision for a new, hybrid culture change field in which creative and social justice leaders work together to popularize stories and other immersive experiences that build widespread public yearning for a pluralist culture in which everyone belongs. Since 2017 Bridgit has served as CEO of the Pop Culture Collaborative, a philanthropic resource and funder learning community working to transform the narrative landscape around people of color, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and indigenous peoples in America, especially those who are women, queer, trans, and/or disabled.
ADAM CORNER
Adam is a writer, strategist and independent researcher specialising in climate change communication: narratives and narrative change have been central to his work for more than fifteen years. He’s worked in academic research teams studying public opinion on climate, at Climate Outreach helping to translate and popularise public engagement research, with the Local Storytelling Exchange crafting stories that show ‘this is what the transition looks like’, and on a new initiative called the Climate Barometer that provides the ‘signal in the noise’ on public opinion insights. He believes in the power of stories and culture to catalyse climate action – and the imperative for the climate story to be owned across the breadth of society. www.adamcorner.uk
VANESSA MACHADO DE OLIVEIRA ANDREOTTI
Dr. Andreotti is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism (2021) and one of the co-founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Arts/Research Collective. Most of her published articles and OpEds are available at academia.edu.
CASSIE ROBINSON
Cassie is the Associate Director of Emerging Futures at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, as well as working with the Transformative Wealth Distribution Project in Europe and Partners for a New Economy globally. She’s the founder of Stewarding Loss – supporting civil society organisations to die, and the Co-founder of the Centre for Collective Imagination in London.
She runs a Philanthropy in Transitions Lab for Philea and has Fellowships at both the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University. As a creative entrepreneur and strategic designer, she’s won awards from Nesta as a Creative Pioneer, an Ideas + Pioneers award from Paul Hamlyn Foundation and a Leader in Philanthropy award from the European Foundation Centre.
AMAHRA SPENCE
Amahra is a cultural worker and spatial practitioner, exploring transformation in the context of liberation. Guided by lineages of Black imagination, spatial justice and a more-than-human cosmology, Amahra is particularly interested in how transformation is practiced through narrative, design, space, systems, strategy and governance.
Amahra is the Founding Director of MAIA, an organisation that works with artists to collectively worldbuild and rehearse liberation into being. MAIA prototype life-affirming infrastructures across three mission strands: ‘Sites of Imagination’, ‘Resourcing the Movement’ and ‘Culture x Liberation’.
She is also Organiser for the Black Land and Spatial Justice Project, and currently Visiting Lecturer at Birmingham City University, exploring ‘Architectures of Abolition’ with architecture and design students.
ALICE SACHRAJDA
Alice is a consultant specialising in research, narratives and cultural change. She currently works as a cultural strategy consultant for Unbound Philanthropy and for the Power of Pop Fund housed at Comic Relief. She is the co-author of two reports on pop culture and social change: Riding theWaves and New Brave World. She is an advisor to the PopChange programme at Counterpoints Arts. Alice is co-chair of the trustees of Counterpoints Arts and chair of her local refugee community sponsorship group in south London: Forest Hill and Sydenham Welcomes Refugees. She received a distinction for an MSc in Human Rights at LSE, specialising in migration and displacement.
EFN Incubation Team
NATASHA RATTER
Natasha co-ordinates EFN’s work to strengthen the effectiveness of the environmental charity sector and facilitates the Green Fundraiser’s Forum. She joined EFN from the Natural History Museum where she raised funds for projects that re-connect people to nature, particularly in urban areas. She has also worked in the arts and education sector and is currently a Trustee of Sydenham Garden, a wellbeing centre using its gardens and nature reserve to help people in recovery from mental and physical ill-health. Being both Ugandan and British – and having lived in both countries – she is fascinated by the way our culture and landscapes influence our relationship with nature and how this can shape and inspire healthier people and a healthier planet. Natasha has a degree in zoology. She lives in southeast London with her husband and her little boy.
ALIYAH GREEN
Aliyah supports EFN’s communications and the coordination of the Rapid Response Fund. Previously she has worked with Groundwork London on a refugee integration initiative and before that, as a prison officer at HMP Brixton. She has an interest in intersectional environmentalism and environmental justice. Aliyah works at home from London, but when not at work likes to play netball and spend time with family.
