Where Re-Storying Works
As NewStories reflects on the past 25 years, it becomes clear that 'Re-Storying' is the core pattern woven throughout the work.
People often ask, ‘What does NewStories do?’ At the heart of its offerings is simply this: supporting individuals, communities, and organizations in Re-Storying themselves. While the specific areas where NewStories has been invited to collaborate have clustered into four key domains, the approach is not limited to them. These areas offer a glimpse into how Re-Storying comes to life across different contexts, but they are by no means exhaustive.
Read about these four categories to get a sense of the different ways Re-Storying may unfold…
Emerging Program
Development & Evaluation
Regenerating Community
After Disruption & Disaster
Enhancing Leadership
& Evolutionary Capacity
Convening and Facilitating
Conversations That Matter
Emerging Program Development & Evaluation
Growing new learning programs to enhance community capacity comes with innumerable challenges. NewStories offers responsive, emergent methods for program development and evaluation (including “Principles-Guided Co-Creation” and systems change through action-learning) to support organizations in Re-Storying.
NewStories helps you to develop insights and leadership capacities needed for these times by building programs for particular communities or contexts. Sometimes NewStories sees themes and needs that are similar in many systems, and creates learning programs to address these through webinars, seminars and workshops, learning journeys and other forms, both face-to-face and virtual. To stay informed and up to date on our most recent projects, sign up for our newsletter here.
Regenerating Community After Disruption & Disaster
Across our small planet, more and more people witness their lives changed in an instant when disaster strikes. What was is gone. What might be is invisible. In the days and weeks after destruction, while the grief is still overwhelming, some people are able to ask “What do I want now, for my life and the future of my community?” In this excruciating time, there is an opening to leap beyond old constraints: an opportunity to Re-Story. NewStories supports you in finding your way in this uncharted territory. NewStories helps you clarify the principles most important to your work and then use those principles to guide you through cycles of considering current work, developing new plans and actions, and then reflecting further on what just happened. This is Re-Storying in action.
Enhancing Leadership & Evolutionary Capacity
We must come to terms with the fact that “teaching” information independent from place, people and purpose is ineffective. Now is the time for cultivating wisdom in action.
There is no “expert” or “gold-standard research-based best practice” that can be identically applied to the complex contexts of every community. NewStories has decades of history offering learning experiences that initiate leaders in the embodied practice of principled, transformative action.
NewStories supports leaders in holding space for evolutionary learning at the community level. This looks like deepening skills at negotiating tension, divergence and outright conflict, as well as building adaptive expertise. NewStories invitse emerging and transitioning leaders into processes that help them learn from their own experiences, and from those of their community, along with others who are outside the day-to-day contexts yet who bringing aligned insights and adaptive inspiration.
Convening and Facilitating Conversations That Matter
NewStories convenes and facilitates “Conversations That Matter” in order to move community-based initiatives forward. A range of approaches are used to facilitate deep dialogue, both in person and virtually. NewStories brings people in any system together, helps you to generate enough trust for truth speaking and deep listening, and then explore questions that matter. While convening and facilitating conversations that matter is an essential part of NewStories’ work after disasters, it is also a core power NewStories’ brings to every engagement.
NewStories nurtures the ability to work with tension and dissent when addressing the reality of challenging situations. By Re-Storying, NewStories can go beyond polarization to see the deeper values that we share, and pursue those values in the systems we’re all a part of.