Introducing Inter-Narratives…

by Ella Saltmarshe & Paddy Loughman

We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Inter-Narratives community. This is the next iteration of what was formerly Reset Narratives. It is a place for people working across the environment, social justice and new economy spaces to come together and share intelligence about narrative change. We make sense of the latest narrative work, learn from each other, and sometimes members of the community do new things together. To join, sign-up here.

The new format

The new iteration sees six expert curators join us to curate bi-monthly 90 minute public sessions starting in July. They bring an extraordinary breadth and depth of practice.

On the alternate months we’ll host a lunchtime community session, which will be a space for members of the community to share their latest work and burning questions. Our fortnightly newsletter will summarise the latest narrative insight work.

We hope this new format will both expand all our story worlds, make the insight shared in the community available to more people AND keep the community-information-sharing that we know participants have found so valuable over the last few years.

Why narrative infrastructure matters

Why are we doing this? Story is the soil from which our politics, law, economics and culture grow. We are part of this growing understanding that the stories we tell determine our direction of travel.

In this context we see powerful, well-resourced actors, generating narratives that support the status quo and keep us stuck in the systems that are destroying our collective futures. Efforts to counter or provide alternatives can get stuck in the competitive paradigm they’re trying to combat resulting in fragmentation, reinvention of the wheel, and movements that are less than the sum of their parts. It is in this context that we feel it’s more important than ever for all of us working with narrative to be as generous and connected as possible.

The community is a form of narrative infrastructure. We like to think of infrastructure as the root system needed to support a flourishing farm/forest/ecosystem of stories.

Just like roots, infrastructure provides 3 things (i) resource (ii) intelligence (iii) support. Just like roots, sometimes infrastructure is visible and sometimes it’s not. And just like roots, narrative infrastructure can come in many different shapes and sizes from newsletters, to workshops, to slack groups, to online insight hubs, to communities.

And why Inter-Narratives? Because of the way that ‘inter’ works on many levels; whether referring to the inbetween space the community provides, to the stories that will help us navigate these in-between times, to the stories that need hospicing/ burying, interring. We also love that ‘inter’ can mean ‘among’, as the community is very much a place to be among stories.

If you’re not yet a member, sign-up here.

The work is housed within the Environment Funders Network. A big thank you to our funders The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation & The JJ Charitable Trust for supporting this work.