Hi folks,
Hope you’re holding it together out there.
We aim, as ever, to bring you insight, perspectives and strategy that might help us find ways through. This week that includes a recording of our expert curator Amahra Spence’s session on Black Imagination and Liberation Rehearsal, which was a deeply inspiring and moving conversation.
Our February community session will focus on whether there are uniting narratives that could work across movements in 2024. If you are working on this, or know others that are, get in touch as we’re designing at the moment.
In the meantime, we hope you find this week’s shares generative, and nourishing.
Shared in solidarity x
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Session recording
Amahra and her guests explored what black imagination is bringing to these times: a profoundly grounded approach, both in the roots of what is wrong and in the practical work to build different worlds. As Tony described it, “imagination is a practice, it is deeply connected to a way of being”, needing intelligent infrastructure and careful, playful stewarding – “there are implications to this poem” as André put it. For those of us rethinking systems, there was invitation from Blessol to bring back spirit, centering love “as the way we understand our struggles”. This was a beautiful, generous, welcoming and uplifting conversation, both gentle salve and urgent tonic. Please do share the recording widely – the world needs these voices right now.
Shares
Key: 📋 Report | 📝 Article | 🎙️ Podcast
The New Climate Denial
Centre for Countering Digital Hate
“Climate deniers can no longer pretend climate change isn’t happening - so they’ve changed their strategy.” CCDH’s innovative AI-powered research reveals “a departure from rejection of anthropogenic climate change, to attacks on climate science and scientists, and rhetoric seeking to undermine confidence in solutions to climate change,” and comes with an urgent call to action: “it is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counter-narratives accordingly.”
#narrativestrategy #insight
The Strategic Foresight Book
The Solferino Institute
“The humanitarian sector is built on community connections, rapid response and the principles of dignity, kindness and practical action. This will be vital for the future as we face complex crises in a rapidly chaining world. Strategic foresight is a practical way to explore emerging issues and uncover new options for action. It helps us anticipate challenges, engage with uncertainty and sharpen our decision making. It is also a powerful way to connect with communities and imagine new possibilities. This book will not teach you how to predict the future, but it will prepare you for the possibilities. It will not give you definitive answers, but it will help you ask decisive questions.”
#tactics
Funding Justice
Civic Power Fund, The Hour Is Late
“An analysis of social justice grantmaking in the UK, 2021-2022”. Which finds that just “5.7% of UK foundation giving in 2021/22 went towards work to tackle injustice (and) 0.3% of UK foundation giving in 2021/22 went towards building people power through organising… This is despite growing recognition that ‘community organising and local power building is simultaneously one of the best and one of the most under-resourced mechanisms we have to shift power to and secure just outcomes for (and with) communities.’”
#insight #tactics
Climate Conversations Round One – Learning
Larger Us
Essential insight from this training process, in partnership with UNISON, Parents For Future, Tearfund and Grapevine Coventry and Warwickshire, to encourage “hopeful, empowering conversations about climate change”. Included is the crucial lesson that “we need to frame conversations differently – the focus needs to be more specific than “climate”, and instead zoom into issues (e.g. warm homes or the oil and gas sector) or places.” Also see.
#insight #messaging
The Power in Positive Stories
Matt Golding, Future Brew from Rubber Republic
Matt reflects on a collaborative enquiry into how to tell “propositional stories that connect”, to respond to the tide of negative stories, and the forces that benefit from their distribution. “The most important stories we need to share right now (of kind, collective, clever community action) are quite hard to get traction for. And yet the human stories at the heart of these actions are amazing. Can we identify elements of narrative structures that help these kind of stories to cut through?”
#narrativestrategy
Why Transcending Growth Means Fighting Fascism
Pratik Raghu, Post Growth Institute
“Though this shift might alienate some, at least at first, it could win over many more in the medium- to long-term by speaking to the evermore precarious and genuinely life-threatening conditions of their existence under the increasingly crisis-ridden capitalist system. Anti-fascism demands an even broader (albeit well-coordinated) diversity of tactics to cultivate post-capitalist futures, especially as it pertains to ensuring the safety of multiple marginalized populations fighting for these futures.”
#tactics
Beyond Sustainability – Radical Reimagination and Creative Responses to the Climate
Jessica Edwards, Clore Fellowship
“Thanks to the work of organisations such as Julie’s Bicycle and BAFTA’s albert, many cultural institutions and organisations are embracing environmental responsibility, and reducing their carbon footprint. The UK’s 2050 net zero target provides a clear societal goal, regardless of the current government’s prevarication. But flipping the narrative about the inevitable societal transitions that are unfolding goes far beyond decarbonising outputs and mitigating emissions where culture is traditionally housed. Artists and creative practitioners are essential to surmounting society’s imagination deficit. But harnessing this potential is going to require the cultural sector to go beyond sustainability at the highest levels.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
‘It’s Not the End of the World’ book assumptions & omissions spark debate
Hannah Ritchie with Rachel Donald and Mike Girolamo, Mongabay
“Donald challenges Ritchie on assumptions presented in the book, such as the notion that renewable energy will be adopted by low- and middle-income nations simply because it is cheaper… Ritchie says she intended to write an ‘apolitical’ book, declining to discuss policy, but it’s difficult to see how many of the proposals would work without addressing geopolitical roadblocks and challenges that have repeatedly stymied these solutions.” Make sure to hang around for the debrief at the end.
#issuenarrative
🎙️ Listen here
Events
The Rise of the Far Right – and What We Can Do About It
The Conduit, London | Jan 31st | 18:00 – 19:15GMT
“The work to fight back needs to accelerate hard, and it needs to involve all of us – and that begins with a clear-eyed understanding of what’s really going on: where exactly we are, how we got here, and what’s coming down the track. Then we can turn to the work of response, looking at what has already worked and what else might. This will not be a joyful conversation, but it will be an essential one.”
Join Ece Temelkuran, author of How To Lose A Country and Together, and leading political strategists Paul Hilder and Jiore Craig, as they share the stories, the data, and the challenge. Moderated by Jon Alexander, author of Citizens.
Quotes
(This selection of quotes is intended as a resource, in the hope that they may be useful for your own communications.)
“The secularisation of the West has resulted in the loss of something deeply significant. Society is now the most atomised it’s ever been. We live in a plasticised world where belief is siphoned into abstractions, products, and individuals. There is a clear need for an earthbound sense of the sacred and a more inclusive, mycelial infrastructrure for congregation.” – Hannah Close
“Maybe we need to go underground – working in networked, symbiotic companionships, like mycelial arrangements, to generate infinite micro-revolutions.” – Anab Jain
"Forget being either/or, be both and more, and moving." – Vanessa Andreotti
"What if what we mean by repair is less restitution to a lost original than it is a pairing-with-another-composite-body, a re-pair-ing, a borrowing of limbs and organs and tendons from the others around us in order to navigate the complexities of living and dying?" – Bayo Akomolefe
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” – Emma Goldman
Thanks for joining us, see you here again in two weeks.
A reminder that if you have something that you’d love to see in these newsletters, or work you’d like to share in the community sessions, or if you have any feedback, please reach out at inter-narratives@greenfunders.org
Very best,
Paddy & Ella