Hi folks,
Hope you’re well out there, appreciating the later light and early blooms amongst these deeply challenging times.
It was great to see some of you at our recent Collective Intelligence session. For those who weren’t there: we were reflecting on how shared values of freedom, care, fairness and security, and issues of home, health and nature might offer a basis for unifying narratives in the UK, in support of the deep/meta narrative shift from ‘alone’ towards ‘together’. If you want to share thoughts about this, please reach out to us at inter-narratives@greenfunders.org
This week we’re delighted to share more details about our upcoming Public session, when Vanessa De Oliveira Andreotti will be joined by Chief Ninawa Inu Huni Kui to present an overview of The University of the Forest.
Shared in solidarity
Session
The University of The Forest, with Vanessa De Oliveira Andreotti and Chief Ninawa Inu Huni Kui
Mar 28th, 17:00-18:30 GMT | Online
“The University of the Forest (physical campus) is a gathering place in the Amazon where the Huni Kui Indigenous People of Acre come together for the intergenerational transmission of the wisdom that binds them inseparably to the Amazon biome. It is this profound connection that gives the Huni Kui the courage to place their lives at risk in safeguarding the rainforest and its delicate ecosystem.
The University of the Forest (international digital campus - universityoftheforest.org) is a collaborative initiative between the Huni Kui forest guardians, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective, the T5C network and the University of Victoria. The digital campus is an educational and artistic intervention aimed to inspire institutions to take a much bolder approach in climate education, recognizing the importance of the relational sciences and technologies developed by Indigenous Peoples across millennia.
Chief Ninawa is a hereditary Chief of the Huni Kui Indigenous People of Acre, in the Amazon. He is also the elected president of the Federation of the Huni Kui People of Acre. Vanessa Andreotti is the dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. We are grateful to the Musagetes Arts Foundation for their continuous support in creating the conditions for this long-term collaboration.”
Shares
Key: ⚙️ Tool | 📝 Article | 📋 Report | 🎙️ Podcast | 🎬 Film
Feminist Influencing Basket Of Resources
Rukia Cornelius, Isabel Crabtree-Condor, Mela Chiponda; Oxfam
“Brings in a transformative feminist approach to influencing by challenging the status quo in small and big ways, through disrupting power and privilege, and bringing in radical healing, love, and care to shift dominant narratives and strengthen our movements… By using popular education feminist exercises, we hope to make real and tangible how power operates, how intersectionality can strengthen our advocacy and how narrative power can support our collective actions.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
⚙️ See here
Communicating For Change: Framing Your Messages
Sheila McKechnie Foundation
A simple and accessible guide to effective communication design, offering six clear principles beginning with ‘Lead with shared values’. “As communicators, we need to remember that the people who make up our audiences aren’t blank slates. They interpret our messages through the lens of their existing beliefs, associations, hopes, and fears. ‘Narrative framing’ refers to a process by which we adapt our communications to reflect these deeper values and emotions. This allows us to challenge unhelpful narratives and encourage more constructive ones.”
#narrativestrategy #messaging
⚙️ See here
Why The World Cannot Afford The Rich
Richard G Wilkinson, Kate E. Picket; Nature
“Equality is essential for sustainability. The science is clear — people in more-equal societies are more trusting and more likely to protect the environment than are those in unequal, consumer-driven ones… Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion… Reducing economic inequality is not a panacea for health, social and environmental problems, but it is central to solving them all.”
#insight
The Art of Hope: Fine Acts & the Power of Visual Communication
Hope-based Communications
“We need to ensure a constant flow of engaging, visually pleasing, and stimulating content that resembles activists' social change values and ways of thinking.” All around the world, when imagining the future they want “people consistently come back to a set of themes: parks, community, dinner tables, people hugging or holding hands. Naive? Cliché? That’s what I thought at first - I questioned the method. But then I realised that these are things we are working for: and they are just unfamiliar to us because we were afraid to talk about them, so we allow those images to remain distant from politics. If that is the world we want, we need to make it common sense through repetition that makes it familiar.”
#narrativestrategy #messaging #tactics
How to talk about climate change and the problem with doomerism
The Power Of Us
What fosters more apathy, doom or optimism? Obviously it is not as simple as that but the conversation about how best to mobilise ‘climate action’ sometimes suggests it is. Evidence tends to support the need for an attitude that is both realistic and ‘can-do’, grounded in morals, values and emotion. This piece of research, based on “a global megastudy conducted on a sample of 59,440 people from 63 countries” finds that “doom and gloom messaging” encourages information sharing but not action, and that “messages with moral foundations yielded the most motivation for positive climate action”. Whether the actions are sufficiently transformative is not covered. (Also see)
#insight #messaging
📋 See here
Life Affirming Organisational Practice
Beyond The Rules
Recap of a collaboration between Dark Matter Labs, Healing Justice London and The Transformational Governance Collective, at an “In-person practice lab” held last year. “This recap aims to share some of the key assets, conversations and insights from the event. With around 120 people across a full day we know there is still loads we can’t capture here but we hope it provides a deep dive into some of the themes and topics.” The framing is inspired by abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who “speaks about the abolition of carceral systems as an act of presence, not absence; one of creation, not destruction”.
#tactics
📋 See here
Growing a Public Chorus for Change: reshaping democracy with The Humanity Project
Alex Lockwood, Manda Scott; Accidental Gods
A discussion about upgrading our governance structures, which also includes a reflection on the narrative that The Humanity Project is working with, as they aim for a “transformation of the political system that works for ordinary people”. Inspired by David Graeber they are leaning on the “themes of freedom and care, to replace production and consumption”, looking to “translate that into an overarching frame of of ‘the work that we need to do’, and a reevaluation of what it means to work, and why we work”, as well as “getting back to those ideas of how we love one another and how we work for one another to create community.”
#messaging #tactics
🎙️ Listen here
We Need Better Activists in TV Shows
Sho Walker-Konno
“We can ditch the ‘rabbles’, the ‘hypocrites’ and ‘white saviours’, and bring personality, complexity and earnestness into the characterisation of people making progressive change happen. While we’re at it, it will probably make better TV for us all to watch too.”
#tactics #messaging
🎬 See here
How We Fix Wealth Inequality
Gary Stevenson; Gary’s Economics
“One clear true idea: you cannot make this better without fixing wealth inequality… If you are hoping for better soon, you’re not going to get better soon, and that’s a really depressing message to give, but it’s better to know that now that to sit around waiting for improvement that doesn’t come… We only win this if we win the technical battle, and the ideological battle… We need to realise there is a systemic problem that is fucking our young people, that means they will be poor and it's not their fault.” (Also see)
#narrativestrategy #messaging
Courses and Events
Key: 🎓 Course | 🗓️ Event
Org Builders
Neon | Deadline March 17th
“This year-long programme of coaching, practical support and guidance, and structured peer support, supplemented by our detailed toolkits, will support you to identify your organisational goals and priorities and put them into action. It is designed for social justice organisations at early and growth stages or those in a period of transformation who are looking to make changes and improvements to ways of working.”
Mansfield Park: Reclaiming the Narrative Through a Black Gaze
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama | March 18th, 14:00-15:30 GMT | London
“We are pleased to invite Anni Domingo for a thought-provoking lecture that challenges the traditional narratives of Mansfield Park. Through a Black gaze, Anni will explore themes of race and Blackness in Jane Austen's classic novel. Don't miss this unique opportunity to engage in a critical and nuanced discussion.“
The Remix 2024
Becoming Crew | May - October 2024
“Join our 6-month action-learning course centred on composting & re-imagining the story of separation. You’ll take part in building a community of practice-driven change. Practicing & upholding the change you long to see in the world through live, creative experiments & building kinship with all life.”
Everyone Everywhere All At Once – Climate Changemaker Playbook
The Conduit | Apr 5th, 09:15-10:30 GMT | London
A conversation between Agamemnon Otero and Immy Kaur, moderated by Pippa Wheaton, that will go “beyond ‘climate solutions’ to explore the human side: the psychology of change and collective agency,” launching “Ashoka and The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship’s the Climate Changemaker Playbook – a collection of strategies and tactics for how to move people from caring, which so many do, to acting. With a foreword by Christiana Figueres and case studies of five leading social entrepreneurs who have been activating others around the world, this playbook is for anyone who has wondered, how do I get the people around me to act?”
Quotes
(This selection of quotes is intended as a resource, in the hope that they may be useful for your own communications.)
“Before anything different can happen, before people can sense, hear, relate, and imagine differently, there must be a clearing, a decluttering, an initiation into the unknowable; and a letting go of the desires for certainty, authority, hierarchy, and of insatiable consumption as a mode of relating to everything.” Vanessa Andreotti
"To love other humans is not a broken hearts club; it is a philosophical and political responsibility that should be worked on with all the faculties of the mind, sometimes pushing our mental and emotional skills to the limit. It is a perpetual political action and a moral stance that is not for the fainthearted. It is the most serious invitation to challenge the bloody history of humankind.” Ece Temelkuran
“We are family with everything that exists. We belong to these networks of responsive, living, active things around us, to whom we owe our service.” Yuria Celidwen
“I am a woman searching for her savagery//even if it’s doomed” June Jordan, Poem for Nana
"Let us continue to continue." Kogi Elders
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