Newsletter #3
Collaboration | Climate action | Citizen agency
Hi folks,
Welcome to another sharing of work and guidance from people seeking justice and regeneration in these challenging times.
A quick reminder that we upload all the links we share to our searchable archive, which includes everything we shared in the 35 issues of this newsletter before it was based here.
Sent in solidarity.
Session
Attack, Engage or Ignore? The role of ‘the enemy’ in climate narratives
27th July, 13:00 GMT
Speakers, curated by Adam Corner: Dr Amiera Sawas (Climate Outreach); Funmibi Ogunlesi (NEON); Pippa Simmonds (Countryside & Community Research Institute); and Alex Evans (LargerUS).
The event will be recorded for future reference.
Shares
Key: 📝 Article | 📋 Report | 📢 Campaign | ⚙️ Tool
Moving With Storms
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
This ‘Climate and Nature Emergency (CNE) Catalyst Program’ report offers thorough, practical guidance that “illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, community engagement, and recognition of historical injustices. Offering valuable insights and practical recommendations…(guiding) higher education institutions and stakeholders toward redistribution, reparations, and restitution.” “Instead of placing hope in an idealized, imagined future, we…place hope in work we do in the present to repair relationships and approach the CNE as an ongoing collective inquiry.”
#narrativestrategy #insight
Future Stories, Strategy ‘22-’25
PIRC
An approach (released last year) seeking to “build on the huge potential” of the diverse set of movements that have emerged in recent years “to shift societal narratives and transform policy, practice and culture.” PIRC articulates problems with current civil society strategic comms, and offers practical solutions via a strategy that aims to “diversify, democratise & decolonise civil society’s crucial work on storytelling, narrative & framing...focused on cross-issue, root-cause, movement-building approaches to narrative work.”
#narrativestrategy
Media coverage doesn’t inspire climate action
University of Lausanne (Nicky Hawkins’ summary)
“Even if news media succeed at producing exposure to and popularizing climate change research, this will not necessarily convert into action, however catastrophic the associated future is portrayed to be.” The report encourages a “move away from the ‘knowledge deficit model’ - the assumption that lack of public knowledge on the seriousness of climate change is the cause for a lack of actions.”
#framing #messaging
As the wildfires burn politicians fan the flames of climate delay
Sam Spiers, Green Alliance
“This is serious. Yet our national conversation is becoming ever less serious…Ministers should blot out the noise from know nothing columnists and declining newspapers, remember why they are conservatives and get back to the serious job of making sure we have an environment that can support us and the economy in future.”
#tactics #messaging #framing
A common talking point about climate gets it all wrong
Kate Yoder, Grist
There’s no solid evidence that framing the global problem as a local one prompts people to act. So what does? “Many people already perceive climate change as occurring here and now…You want to give people the sense that they’re not alone in combating climate change…It’s something that a lot of people actually care about.’”
#framing #messaging
The hero of the Anthropocene has 8 billion faces
Mary Ellen Hannibal, Big Think
“The Anthropocene is also a crisis of storytelling, challenging our traditional narratives and myths. However, a new form of storytelling, citizen science, offers a way to create a fact-based, nonfiction narrative of what is happening to the biological world.”
#deepnarrative #tactics
What does the food system serve, if not people?
Beth Bell, Dan Crossley, National Conversation About Food
“The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission’s National Conversation is a timely and necessary intervention which will gather insight, ideas and solutions from citizens, alongside amplifying their voices so we can say with confidence what citizens demand from their food systems - making this unignorable for those making policy.” (Thank you for sharing with us Jane Campbell)
#narrativestrategy #issuenarrative #messaging #insight
Community Action Fund Groups
Civic Power Fund
Civic Power Fund provide grassroots organising support, infrastructure and leadership for those “mobilising excluded communities, and organisations led by women and people of colour” seeing “citizens as agents not recipients of change”. This piece introduces 18 groups, their first Community Action Fund recipients, who “were selected by a panel of community organisers and are doing incredible, grassroots work to build the power of their community.”
#tactics #stories
Climate Majority Project
Various
A new effort seeking to activate the ‘silent majority’ of climate-concerned folk in the UK, who no longer trust political leaders to do what’s required. “The Climate Majority Project is a rallying place for citizen climate action. We help projects to grow, get funding, and connect with as many willing hands as possible.”
#tactics #issuenarrative
📢 See here
Holding Your Own messaging guide
NEON, Liberty
NEON set out with the goal of reframing safety and the causes of ‘serious youth violence’. Following two research phases with young people and public message testing with the general public, working closely with the Holding Our Own project, they have created a guide to support people who want to challenge the toxic government and media narratives around ‘serious youth violence’. (Thank you for sharing with us Funmibi Ogunlesi)
#messaging #issuenarrative
⚙️ Full guide, One pager
Events
Ecological Health in Neighbourhoods
Civic Square | 18 July – 24 March
“A 9 month peer-to-peer learning journey for people interested in addressing systemic challenges to create neighbourhoods that are life-sustaining and provide people and Nature with health, dignity, and justice.”
🗓️ Signup here
Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Course for Everyone
Minna Salami, Advaya | 31 July – 28 August
“Join advaya and Minna Salami on this journey that illuminates nonconventional ideas and norms. Discover how to think about reality in feminist-empowered, non-fragmented and non-dualistic ways that are healing, elucidating and ultimately liberating.”
🗓️ Signup here
Quotes
"We are living in the imaginaries of those long gone before us, one day people will be living in the imaginaries we've created” — Angela Davis
“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.” — Erwin Schrödinger
"I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" — Alasdair MacIntyre
“What I see is just focusing on climate is getting us nowhere and I don’t see any genuine signs of progress on that front that bring us in line with the science-based targets. I think there’s something kind of uninspiring about just the narrow focus on climate.” — Naomi Klein
“If we’re not organised towards what we really want and what we long for, we will always settle into just reacting and trying to stop something bad from happening…we need to be adaptive and in right relationship to change but also with intention. Because if you change all the time, you’re just a mess. You’re just a leaf blowing in the wind.” — Adrienne Marie Brown
Thanks for joining us, see you here again in two weeks.
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