Newsletter #33
Authentic stories | Building practice | Trauma weapons
Hi everyone,
As we await Labour’s new budget, we’re looking forward to our next session on the 24th with Cassie Robinson, which will explore wealth inequality and the narratives that might help us challenge it – see details below. Labour have been clear about wealth taxation (or have they?) what are the ways through?
This week our thoughts are with those who have been affected by the storms in the US, anyone voting in the coming election, and those suffering colonial violence around the world.
Shared in solidarity,
Public Session
What Narratives Will Help Us Challenge a World Where 7 People Own 70% of the World’s Wealth?
Cassie Robinson, Jake Hayman, Sarah Kerr, Wealth Hackers
Feb 27th (UPDATED) | 13:00-14:30 | Online
Cassie Robinson will be in conversation with Jake Hayman, author of ‘Wealth Unpublished’ and co-founder of the Good Ancestor Movement, Ten Years Time and Impatience Earth; Sarah Kerr from the Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice team at LSE's International Inequalities Institute and author of ‘Wealth, Poverty and Enduring Inequality: Let's talk Wealtherty’; and someone TBC from the Wealth Hackers.
Shares
Key: 📝 Article | 🎬 Film
The Assumptions That Underpin Climate Philanthropy: A Call for Debate
Carne Ross; Culture Hack Labs
Is philanthropy helping perpetuate the very crisis it sets out to solve? When “good quality empirical evidence of the effectiveness of philanthropic strategies is, overall, very scanty”, this can be hard to figure out. What does seem clear is that “everyone now claims to seek ‘systems change’ but…focuses on the outputs from the system – the mitigation of carbon emissions, perhaps through technological change or policy shifts, rather than examining the system itself." And so “by failing to question the existing system, the ultimate effect of contemporary philanthropy may be covertly to reaffirm and perpetuate the beliefs and mechanisms that have produced the climate crisis.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
Britain Can’t Afford Rachel Reeves
Steve Keen; Building a New Economics
The first of seven posts which break down how modern economics – not just neoliberal – is disconnected from reality, more of a religion than a science, yet forms the basis for most mainstream political-economic thought and practice. This, alongside Keen’s articulation of economists’ denial of the role of energy, exposes severe flaws in how politicians understand our world today. “If you’ve uncritically accepted what you’ve been taught in economics textbooks about how money is created, you have been misled. That is the situation for Reeves, and it’s why she’s doing bad things with the best of intentions… her policies will backfire, and actually reduce rather than increase economic growth.” (Or is Reeves a degrowther in disguise?)
#insight #deepnarrative
Helene destroyed my hometown. I don’t want climate change stories of false hope
Anna Jane Joyner (Good Energy); LA Times
“At NYC Climate Week… the dominant theme was: We can solve this! We need to tell hopeful climate stories! But there’s no ‘solving’ a hurricane wiping out western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the sea… At best, it comes across as out of touch; at worst, it feels callous… We cannot minimize the horrors unfolding now, or that it will get worse in the coming years… Right now, what I desperately need are authentic stories that help us figure out how to be human in this changing world, to face this overwhelming crisis with bravery. Stories that make us laugh — not in ignoring our reality, but in the midst of it — and stories that remind us there’s still so much beauty here to fight for. That capture how, in the living nightmare of climate disasters, people demonstrate extraordinary kindness and creativity… as I grieve an unimaginable loss, the last thing I want are optimistic stories about hope. As climate scientist Kate Marvel says: “We need courage, not hope, to face climate change.”
#narrativestrategy #stories
Why Citizen?
Baratunde Thurston; The Citizens Guy
“The subtext of this project is to prepare us, to practice the moves and the muscles and the coordinated sets of movements to create something new… this whole building might fall down, and we’re going to need some builders, and we’re going to need people who understand people, who understand power, who understand relationships, who understand commitment to the collective, to forge society which we will always have… We’re trying to create an alternative path to that authoritarian over-promise/under-deliver. To the idea of not just patching up an institution but maybe we have to wholesale build a new one. We’re not going to be able to do that if we don’t have practice building with each other.” See the full recording here.
#tactics
🎬 See here
Rehearsing Freedoms Festival Highlights
Healing Justice LDN
“Rehearsing Freedoms focuses on politicised health, healing, movement-building, arts and culture, centring the experiences of marginalised and ‘global majority’ people. Its title draws on the US activist-scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s provocation to ‘rehearse the social order coming into being’ in order to build futures free from oppression” Catch-up on what happened last year in advance of a full film, currently in the works. You can also watch full sessions here. “Each session explores at least one of four key themes: safety, dignity, belonging, and life. Rehearsing Freedoms is the culmination of a broader two-year programme of community-led health and healing, which asks: ‘How can we root visions for radical and just health in safety, dignity, and belonging, in order for us all to live whole and flourishing lives? What capacities, skills, and strategies do we need to practise to help us get free together?’”
#deepnarrative #tactics
🎬 See here
When History Overflows, Build a Lifeboat
Micah L. Sifry; The Connector
“Instead of thinking of our times as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (ie., VUCA, an older framework that arose in the late 1980s)… we need to see ourselves as having entered a phase change where things are boiling… Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible (BANI)… Brittle gets countered by Bendable, as in flexibility and resilience, such as alternative sourcing and disaster plans. Anxiety can be met by Acceptance, empathy for what others experience, and an attempt not to use anger and fear to respond to anger and fear. Nonlinearity needs Neuroflexibility, the capacity to improvise, think critically, and reject scripted responses. And we can push back against Incomprehensibility with Inclusion of multiple, diverse perspectives and ideas… The waves of change that are coming are too big for any of us to stop. So build lifeboats: build community, strengthen friendships, and look for ways to involve people different than just your own tribe in shared activity.”
#tactics #framing
Convenings, Cohorts + Communities: Notes On So-called "Impact" Gatherings
Renee Lertzman; Becoming Guides
“How we gather people matters deeply. Convenings, circles, groups and communities are the engines of change – if done skillfully and intentionally... We are in-between paradigms, between older and more emergent, newer formats… The previous, established rules and models of conferences, summits and events are getting blown up and replaced with an array of experiences, interventions, connectivity practices and celebrations to foster deeper engagement and more substantial change work… This is the time to creatively, thoughtfully and carefully consider how we design and foster our communities of impact.“ Lertzman offers ten learnings from her recent experiences, along with a list of practical recommendations for impact convenors and curators.
#tactics
Israel Has Made Trauma A Weapon Of War
Naomi Klein; The Guardian
“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?… Israel is right now in the grips of a nuclear-armed colonial revenge frenzy in the lineage of earlier colonial punitive expeditions, ones that also used art and collective sorrow as potent weapons of annihilation. Identifying these deep historical throughlines – what the UCLA Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg has termed ‘multidirectional memory’ – is work of re-membering, and it holds out our best hope of exiting what increasingly feels like an endlessly recurrent genocide loop.”
#deepnarrative #tactics #reactionary
Towards a New Philanthropy
Funders4Palestine; The Forge
“Grassroots movements are un-earthing and naming the ways in which militarism, capitalist extraction, and imperialist expansion wreak havoc on so many lives in so many places… Everywhere we look the institutions, frameworks, and ideologies we have built are being contrasted in real time with a live-streamed genocide against which the shallow promise of international human rights instruments and philanthropic funding are no match… Philanthropy has ultimately failed to truly grapple with underlying questions of power –– and ultimately the term of liberation… We have as a sector reduced the political to the technical, leading with the performance of accountability whilst displacing the politics of liberation to another conversation, for another day… Do we side with those who continue to hoard power to extract profit off of human lives, or do we choose the path of the people and all those rising up to demand an end to this horror? Do we choose to usher in a world of safety, dignity, and justice for all?”
#tactics
Events and Courses
Key: 🗓️ Event | 🎓 Course
Hope As a Radical Act
Paul Warrior, Jimmy Turrell
Oct 17th, 18th, 19th | The CampFire, Byker, Newcastle
“An exhibition that explores how art, protest, and creativity can inspire positive change. This event aims to reimagine protest culture, offering a fresh perspective on activism, creativity, and collective hope. Rather than focusing on opposition and destruction, this exhibition invites viewers to explore how protest can be an act of proposition, creativity, and positive change.”
🗓️ Details here
Can positive, funny, short-form storytelling flip the script on climate?
Rubber Republic; Association of Sustainability Practitioners, Content Rising
Oct 23rd | 16:00-17:30pm GMT+1 | Online
“Join us to explore an emergent project aiming to share stories of collective action that could change our world. Matt Golding and his network are engaged in a new project which aims to push the boundaries of storytelling with video. He and the team at content studio Rubber Republic are exploring how we might take the seeds of better futures that are already underway and make them more visible to more people. They’re developing social content that aims to help people see what more of this collective action could unlock - and to inspire others to a place of imagination and action. But telling positive stories in a world of divisive narratives and algorithms is hard… hence an experimental approach and an open ear for feedback!”
The Gateshead Community Bridgebuilders present… "How To Be A Bridgebuilder"
Boost
Nov 12th | 09:00-16:00 | The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle
“The Gateshead Community Bridgebuilders are working to build community power. They want local people to have the opportunities, skills, and confidence to engage in making decisions that are going to improve lives now and in the future. As they approach the 3-year mark of this initiative, they want to share with folks across the system how they actually do this. This will not be a prescriptive step-by-step guide, but a series of stories and insights to fire your imagination and, hopefully, get you excited about what might be possible for our communities. This event is aimed at people who care about community engagement, diversity and inclusion, place work, and/or transformational governance. We anticipate this event will attract people both from local services and from local communities.”
Quotes
(This selection of quotes is intended as a resource, in the hope that they may be useful for your own communications.)
“Funders can think of themselves as resource stewards, not agenda setters. The reality is that if you’re doing good narrative work, you are approaching it as a gardener.” – Mandy Van Deven
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” – Wendell Berry
"You can't talk about hope if you can't see reality, and reality's pretty bleak, but that's the starting point." – Chris Hedges
“Pain relief is not pain release." – Vanessa Andreotti
“The only way out is through.” – Robert Frost
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