Hi everyone,
We hope you’re holding on and holding together out there 🫶
This week we have insight and reflections on what it takes to mount a coordinated response to the fast-moving forces of division and separation.
Shared in solidarity
Spotlight
BLIS Collective
A US-based “cross-movement Solidarity & Action Hub” working to “turn fragmented support into collective power – and solidarity into structural change.” BLIS stands for ‘Black Liberation-Indigenous Sovereignty’, with a dual emphasis on “braiding narratives” and “growing movements” to both “win policy” and “shift culture”. They are calling for a ‘New New Deal’ that includes “comprehensive reparations and reparative policies for Black and Indigenous communities as well as economic and social policies designed to uplift all people, particularly working-class people of colour,” in an approach that “recognises the power of narrative and cultural strategies in shaping policies and fostering solidarity across historically oppressed groups.” They hold that “by harnessing the collective power of diverse social movements, we will create a culture where justice, equity, liberation, and sovereignty are not only embraced but actively pursued.”
🔆 See here
Shares
📋 Report | ✏️ Article
See our full searchable library of every share from these newsletters
Links
📋 Emerging Opportunities to Shift Culture On Health, Wealth and Government – Jennifer John, Tamsyn Hyatt
✏️ What Does It Mean to Be English? – Ruth Taylor
✏️ Who Is Organising Poor White Folks Towards Liberation? – Amahra Spence
✏️ A Belonging Story – John A. Powell
✏️ Against the Obsession With Narratives – Judith Mll
✏️ Building for the Right War Before its Too Late – Andre Banks
Summaries
Emerging Opportunities to Shift Culture On Health, Wealth and Government
Jennifer John, Tamsyn Hyatt; Frameworks UK: Moving Mindsets
New research, which included a “first-of-its-kind survey”, reveals six “key findings about the state of British culture – and what this could mean for those of us working to change culture nationwide.” The findings in brief are: “1. Individualism is our default – but not when we get issue-specific; 2. Precarity is seen as our new normal – and people support bold action on extreme wealth; 3. More of us believe the economy is rigged; 4. We see health as a national resource; 5. Politicians are seen as ‘not like us’; 6. Some mindsets cluster together, with major implications for social change work.” The final finding suggests that coordinated effort by actors working on different issues to move one “lynchpin mindset” can maximise collective impact with a “positive spillover effect.”
#framing #narrativestrategy #insight
What Does It Mean to Be English?
Ruth Taylor; Culture Soup
As the rapid rise of Reform prompts urgency and alarm, Taylor feels “something deeper and more uncomfortable is also being asked of us: to invest in the quieter work that surfaces both our nation’s ghosts and our neglected traditions of care, so as to tend to the soil that keeps growing Farages.” Over four articles, she reflects on the fragility of the English identity: “not bedrock but wet clay”, a “quagmire of histories and deep narratives” that is “shaped and reshaped by the stories we allow ourselves to tell.” We are encouraged to imagine and pursue projects, processes, places and practices – an effective “accumulation of small, messy, unglamorous acts” – that face into three paradoxes: “seeding liberatory futures, while refusing to ignore the rot…addressing today’s hardships, while facing modernity’s lies… and tending belonging, while unapologetically naming harm.” She hopes for an Englishness “truer, humbler and more entangled with the land and the people who call this place home.”
#narrativestrategy #deepnarrative #tactics
✏️ Read part 1, 2, 3, 4
Who Is Organising Poor White Folks Towards Liberation?
Amahra Spence
“Make no missteps with the title of this piece — we need more than ‘talking to white people’ or a redirecting of programmes to focus on the ‘left behind white communities.’ Through these niceties and arbitrary binaries, we risk maintaining a perpetual reversal; a sustained paradigm of haves and have-nots; a de-equilibrium that temporarily benefits a few but continually favours extractive power. To really contend with radical grievance is to orient with a politicised analysis of liberation. We are talking a rigorous, astute, multifaceted, systemic, (infra)structural, intersectional framing of liberation that grasps at the root of dispossession and class… This is not about saving poor white people. It is about refusing to let fascism monopolise their grief. It is about refusing to cede the terrain of belonging, ritual and story to the far right… To insist that the longing for belonging, the ache of loss, can be transformed into radical grievance.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
A Belonging Story
John A. Powell; Othering & Belonging Institute
Having previously reflected on “the core norms” that people share: “a belief in democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, and the fundamental right of all people to belong,” and what we need to share more of: “being open to working in new coalitions, sharing risk and learning, and embracing courage and complexity,” Powell outlines the fight for a collective story about “who we believe we are and who we want to become.” Recognising that “what we believe is what we create” (seeing isn’t believing), he calls for a “We The People” story that “rejects inevitability-thinking, and acknowledges the possibility of change,” and that makes room for fear, “while also employing collective courage as a practice and strategy.” This is a public, out-loud endeavour: “collective meaning-making, deeper collaboration, and gathering together are all vital antidotes in a time of crisis and division.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
✏️ Read here
Against the Obsession With Narratives
Judith Mll
“Dominant stories do not triumph because they are more persuasive or imaginative, but because they have the infrastructures that allow them to be diffused, repeated, and naturalised… The key question is not only what we say, but who can say it, where, and with what resources… The great emancipatory narratives (feminisms, trade unionism, anti-fascism, anti-colonialism) were not born as communication strategies but as material practices of solidarity, organisation, and conflict… Language can be a tool of liberation, but only when it is backed by material power: by institutions, by resources, by spaces and media that are not dependent on capital… Perhaps the task is not to ‘change the narrative,’ but to reorganise the collective power capable of changing reality itself.” There is no ‘narrative game’ without ‘the ground game’.
#narrativestrategy #tactics
✏️ Read here
Building For the Right War Before its Too Late
Andre Banks; NewWorld Report
In response to the realisation that bad actors are well ahead in the new media game, “we’re standing up a next generation narrative campaign: a distributed creative force that turns big moments into viral content within hours, not days. We’re investing in pods of internet-native creators and connecting them with strategists, designers, and distribution infrastructure. Our goal: coordinated infrastructure to make fast decisions and flood the zone so our worldview can compete when and where people are deciding how to make sense of this moment… multiple pods with different focuses on audiences, content types, and stories to disrupt or amplify… the true ‘alt-left pipeline’: creative, bold, loud opposition to having our rights stripped away.” Also see
#tactics
✏️ Read here
Noticeboard
🎓 Course | 💼 Role | 🗓️ Event
A Meta-Relational Approach to AI
University of Victoria, Depth Education Series
Deadline: TODAY, 17th Oct | Online
“This six-week course explores the transformative potential of relational intelligence and accountability in the evolving landscape of human–AI interactions. Drawing from Burnout From Humans and the subsequent Standing in the Fire report, the course is designed for participants who are engaging – or seeking to engage – with generative AI in ways that challenge modernity’s extractive programming patterns in both humans and machines.”
🎓 Apply here (last day!)
Membership Insights & Collaboration Strategist
BLIS Collective
Deadline: 20th Oct | Full-time, Remote | USA
“At BLIS, we believe that data is a powerful tool for solidarity building, measuring impact, and deepening alignment across movements. The Membership Insights and Collaboration Strategist will play a central role in leveraging data as a tool for power-building, internal coordination, storytelling, and resource distribution…This is a multi-hyphenate role that lives at the intersection of network analysis, impact measurement, relationship building, and participatory grantmaking. You’ll help make the power of our members and the story of BLIS more visible, measurable, and actionable.”
Dystopia is Not the Future
Barbican; Andreas Malm in Conversation with Adrienne Buller
Nov 2nd | Barbican, London
“Best-selling author and activist Andreas Malm leads a vital discussion on the climate crisis, exploring how we can act and come together with hope for change. Scientists, tech giants and politicians are looking to technology for solutions to the impending collapse, including turning the heat down at a later date and technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. This talk examines these promises of magical future redemption.”
From Page to Screen: Keeping it Green
Green Rider, Climate Spring
Nov 13th | The Conduit, London
“Join us for a screening of There Will Come Soft Rains, followed by a discussion between the filmmaker, cast, Climate Spring and Green Rider. Performers include: Lucy Stone, Elham Ehsas, Olivia D’Lima, Danusia Samal.”
Rogue Hope
Thomas Coombes; Rogue Union
“This community is for people who want to figure out how to hope, train their hope muscle and spread hope to others. People who are curious about what activism would look like if it embraced new insights from neuroscience, psychology, marketing, sports science and even meditation. People who are determined to grow hope into action, so that we are able to spread care and connection just as effectively as populists spread fear, hate and division.”
Quotes
(This selection of quotes is intended as a resource, in the hope that they may be useful for your own communications. See a full list of all the previous quotes.)
“To truly hold the light, we must also know how to hold the darkness – because when we focus only on the light, our shadows grow larger.” – Vanessa Andreotti
“The demands of the market are not compatible with the obligations we have towards life.” – Kara Huntermoon
“You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.” – James Clear
“What we are willing to see, we admit into being and make real.” – Charles Eisenstein
“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science.” – Albert Einstein
Thanks for joining us, see you here again soon.
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