Re-Storying Disaster
NewStories works alongside communities navigating disaster and disruption to help cultivate connection, shared learning, and regenerative pathways forward.
Re-Storying Disaster Is Community-Led Regeneration
Disasters are ugly, devastating, overwhelming. People suffer and die; the natural world is pummeled; structures are obliterated; lives and livelihoods are dismantled. Displacement and loss are staggering. There is no way to make the scarring losses of this kind of change acceptable.
We have also witnessed something remarkable: Within even the deepest loss, there are tiny seeds of new possibilities. Again and again disaster takes communities to a crossroads where they discover those seeds and tend them with extraordinary care. Communities begin to Re-Story Disaster by asking:
- What is becoming possible now?
- What wisdom already exists within this community?
- How do we rebuild relationships alongside infrastructure?
- What would regeneration—not simply recovery—look like here?
At NewStories, we believe communities are the authors of their own future. Our role is to accompany communities as they listen deeply, reconnect across difference, strengthen collective capacity, and cultivate new pathways forward together.
Explore our full framework for Re-Storying Disaster: https://rsdframework.sutra.co
How We Put This Into Practice
Re-Storying Disaster is a connected body of work. We bring practitioners together to learn, help neighbors prepare together, research what communities are discovering, and accompany people through the decisions they face. Each part strengthens the others—and all of it begins with the knowledge, relationships, and leadership already present in a community.
A learning network for people helping communities navigate disruption
Regenerative Responders brings together local leaders, organizers, facilitators, survivors, and practitioners who want to support communities with steadiness, care, and practical skill. Members connect through conversations, resource sharing, monthly calls, and opportunities to learn from one another’s experience.
Together, we are growing the capacity to listen, convene, work with grief and uncertainty, and help communities recognize and act on their own possibilities.
Explore Regenerative Responders:
https://regenerativeresponders.sutra.co
A map for meeting the crossroads
Our framework brings together what NewStories and its partners have learned from communities navigating disaster and long-term disruption. It describes the shift from treating people as recipients of recovery to supporting them as authors of their future.
It offers practices and “stepping stones” communities can adapt to their own histories and circumstances. The framework is a living body of work, informed by community experience and accompanied by research into what helps communities build trust, agency, and life-giving possibilities.
Explore the framework and related resources:
https://rsdframework.sutra.co
Building relationships and shared capacity before disruption arrives
We don’t need to wait for a disaster to come before we begin creating the conditions that help us to Re-Story Disaster. One of the most important things a community needs to make a turn at the crossroads disaster reveals is connection, relationships. We call this an infrastructure of trust.
NewStories, with support from the City of Renton, Washington’s Emergency Services Office has developed Ready Together, a handbook which guides neighbors and friends in getting prepared. It results in an action plan, and even more importantly, it strengthens connection.
You can download the Ready Together Handbook as well as other resources at http://readytogether.net
Learning from communities creating new paths
Our framework for Re-Storying Disaster comes from decades of working with communities across the Americas and around the world. The idea of making a turn at the crossroad which becomes visible after disaster is not new.
Communities everywhere have been making this choice for a long time. What they do, why they do it and how are often invisible. Our intention at NewStories is to begin to engage with more communities, everywhere, to lift up their stories and to continue to make visible the pathways communities walk when they Re-Story Disaster.
Explore the research:
https://rsdframework.sutra.co
Facilitation, accompaniment, and strategic support for communities and organizations
NewStories provides direct facilitation and consulting support tailord to the needs of specific communities, collaboratives, and organizations.
Our work may include:
- community sense-making processes
- facilitation and convening
- trauma-informed dialogue
- collaborative visioning
- systems mapping and strategy
- leadership accompaniment
- regenerative recovery design
We work as thinking partners alongside communities—not as outside experts arriving with predetermined answers.
What Makes This Work Different
Place-Based
Relational
Community-Led
Integrative
Rooted in Practice
Our work is grounded in decades of lived experience accompanying communities through disruption, recovery, and transformation.
Communities Learning Together
From wildfire-affected regions in Northern California to post-disaster recovery efforts in Japan and community resilience initiatives across the Americas, NewStories has worked alongside people asking:
How do we move forward in ways that strengthen both people and place?
Rather than replicating a single model, we help cultivate patterns of relationship, learning, and collective capacity that can emerge uniquely in different places.
We welcome connection with:
- communities navigating disruption
- grassroots leaders and organizers
- foundations and funding partners
- practitioners and facilitators
- regional collaboratives and networks
Whether you are responding to immediate disaster, strengthening long-term resilience, or exploring regenerative approaches to recovery, we would be glad to begin a conversation.
