Re-Storying Disaster
Disasters do more than destroy homes, infrastructure, and landscapes. They disrupt relationships, fracture communities, and unsettle the stories people hold about their future. NewStories works alongside communities navigating disaster and disruption to help cultivate connection, shared learning, and regenerative pathways forward. Rather than simply rebuilding what was, we support communities in imagining and creating what could now become possible.
Disaster Changes More Than the Physical Landscape
Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, economic collapse, political instability, and ecological disruption all leave lasting impacts on the social fabric of community.
Recovery is not only logistical. It is relational, emotional, cultural, and systemic.
For more than two decades, NewStories has accompanied communities navigating disruption across North America, Japan, Zimbabwe, and beyond. Through facilitation, storytelling, collaborative learning, and systems thinking, we help create conditions where communities can process loss, reconnect with one another, and begin shaping regenerative futures grounded in local wisdom and lived experience.
We call this work Re-Storying Disaster.
Community itself—relationships, trust, and shared learning—is essential infrastructure for regeneration.
Re-Storying Is Community-Led Regeneration
When disaster strikes, communities face tremendous overwhelm, exhaustion, and fragmentation.
Re-Storying begins with different questions:
- 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.
Three Pathways of Work
A Living System of Practice
Re-Storying Disaster unfolds through two interconnected initiatives, supported by community coaching and consulting.
Place-based connection and shared learning
Collaboratories bring together community leaders across regions to build relationships, exchange knowledge, and strengthen collective capacity.
This includes:
- in-person gatherings and learning exchanges
- peer-to-peer connection across communities
- shared documentation and storytelling
- intergenerational dialogue and leadership development
Collaboratories are rooted in place, while connected across regions—allowing learning to move between communities navigating similar challenges.
A growing network of practitioners
The Regenerative Responders initiative brings together grassroots leaders, facilitators, organizers, practitioners, and community members working in the realities of disaster and transition.
Participants engage through:
- peer learning and exchange
- workshops and facilitated learning journeys
- systems and trauma-informed practices
- storytelling and reflection
- collaborative experimentation
Beyond heroic intervention, this is about cultivating the capacity to remain present, relational, and adaptive within complexity.
Facilitation, accompaniment, and strategic support for communities and organizations
NewStories provides direct facilitation and consulting support tailored 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
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.
