A brief overview of the work that’s gone into the creation of this site and everything it contains, including the steps taken and the people involved. Read on for details of the questions we were holding, who was in the room, and some of the learnings along the way.
Context
Climate breakdown, genocide, rising fascism, inequality, ecosystem collapse… The stakes are high. Frightening futures are becoming increasingly probable — the success of the work of change-makers, both individually and collectively, has never been so vital.
Holding this, we have been attempting to work out what it might take to foster a degree of mutually-beneficial cross-issue strategic cohesion, to present a suitable and viable response to the powers and challenges of this moment.
Central to this has been the recognition that the almighty challenges we’re facing are symptoms of the systems we live in, and that these systems are shaped by, and in turn shape, deep dispositions — an undercurrent of tacit assumption about who we are in the world.
The dominant deep dispositions our societies are based on are giving permission and encouragement to systems that are destroying life. Our hypothesis is that if humanity wants a fair, liveable future on the planet, we need to reorient those dominant deep dispositions, towards ones that serve life. Doing so will take all we’ve got, and will push us beyond much of our traditional change-making practices, at least those familiar to the Global North/West.
Steps
Step 1 · Deep Narrative Dive
One-day workshop, funded by European Climate Foundation, Summer 2024
Questions
- Is there appetite in the field for this work?
- What does the field already know about doing this work?
Learnings
- Clear demand for deeper narrative work that can work across movements and issues.
- Not starting from scratch; plenty to learn from and work with, both in terms of precedents and narrative insight.
- Span movements, funders and sectors.
- Keep asking “who’s not in the room?”, and center diverse lived experience in our work.
- ‘Routes to audience’ are fundamental and need to be valued as such, both in terms of resource and strategy.
- Coordination and collaboration with the ground-level is key.
- Work for both the immediate and long-term simultaneously.
Hosts — The Culture Initiative
Attendees — practitioners from: HEARD, NEON, Telltale Research, Climate Outreach, Frameworks UK, Common Cause Foundation, Healing Justice LDN, AKO Impact Storytelling, Global Optimism, Act Climate Labs, Count Us In, Creatives 4 Climate, Climate Coalition, Reframing Race, Global Dialogue.
Attendees — funders from: ECF, Civic Power Fund, The JJ Charitable Trust / Climate Change Collaboration, JRF, Lankelly Chase, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK branch.
Step 2 · Deep Narrative Development
Ongoing development, ECF funded, 2024–2025
Question — What could a blueprint for this work look like?
Horizon 2+ strategy suggestions
Programme Blueprint
Leads
- Ella Saltmarshe, The Culture Initiative
- Paddy Loughman, The Culture Initiative
Advisors
- Ruth Taylor, Common Cause
- Suzanne Dhaliwal, GSCC
- Sarah Joynt Bowe, Healing Justice London
- Mandy Van Deven, Elemental
- James Logan, formerly Narrative Network Initiative
- Dora Meade, NEON
- Ed McGovern, Calouste-Gulbenkian
- Carrina Gaffney, Lankelly Chase
- Husna Mortuza, JRF
Step 3 · Deep Narrative Studios
Stewarded Research & Design Studios 2025, Joseph Rowntree Foundation funded
Questions
- What do we know about deep narrative work?
- Where are the barriers / gaps / opportunities?
- What could a programme of work look like?
Approach
Collaborators
The group of people who worked together across three ‘studio’ sessions to provide the insight and perspective that the Stewards worked from (listed alphabetically).
Interviewees
The people the Stewards spoke to for further expert insight, in particular from locations further afield than the UK (listed alphabetically).
Stewards
The team who oversaw the design, development, convening and processing of the work (listed alphabetically).
Paddy Loughman (steward, project lead) — an independent strategist and Inter-Narratives co-director. A Facing Human Wrongs alum, he previously worked with UNFCCC Climate Champions, XR, Wolff Olins, and co-authored Stories for Life.
Ella Saltmarshe (steward) — interested in creating culture that supports all life to have safe futures. Director of The Culture Initiative, which houses projects like The Long Time Project, The Long Time Academy and Inter-Narratives.
Jo Ram (steward) — has journeyed from climate activism to narratives and culture change. Currently studying the colonial past to unpick the colonial present, focussing on how environmental pollution exposes the ‘humans are separate from nature’ myth. Previously PIRC, Lankelly Chase, Platform London, and one of the Stansted 15.
Ruth Taylor (steward) — an exhausted campaigner turned independent strategist, focused on seeding new cultural ‘logics’ and narratives and strengthening latent values. Currently with Emerging Futures; previously Common Cause Foundation.
Ruth Newton (project manager)
Funding, and a conflict worth naming
This work has been supported by the European Climate Foundation (Steps 1 and 2), the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Step 3) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK branch. [TO CONFIRM: which phase or costs Gulbenkian supported — it is credited in the site footer but not yet attributed to a step above, and one of the two needs correcting.]
Some of the people advising this work are employed by the foundations funding it. Ed McGovern is at Calouste-Gulbenkian, Husna Mortuza is at JRF, Carrina Gaffney is at Lankelly Chase, and steward Ruth Taylor is currently with JRF’s Emerging Futures programme, JRF having funded Step 3. Lankelly Chase, JJ Charitable Trust and Civic Power Fund attended the opening workshop without going on to fund the work.
We are naming this rather than leaving it to be found. This overlap is normal in a field this size — the people who understand the work best are often the people resourcing it — but it means our advisory input and our funding relationships are not independent of each other, and readers should weigh what follows accordingly. [TO CONFIRM: whether any advisor recused from funding decisions, and how the two were separated in practice.]
An inquiry into moving beyond extraction and ownership as deep dispositions ought to be able to account for where its own money comes from. That includes the Gulbenkian endowment’s origins in an oil concession, which we think is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as something a critic discovers.