Our Approach
If you are longing to rewrite your organization’s future, NewStories can help.
Let us support you in “Re-Storying!”
We work in places where climate, economic, social, and political disasters are undeniable. We help you find and engage in transformative change that makes enough of a difference to make a difference.
Hiring NewStories gives you access to our decades of experience as activists, scholars, and practitioners, and supports us in growing this field of new stories.
We use a variety of methodologies and skills within our work, including Re-Storying—a reflective, step-by-step process to clarify past, present, and future stories, Principles-Focused Developmental Evaluation, facilitation, consulting, coaching, and self-organization models.
Why Stories?
We don’t live in the world- we live in our stories about the world.
Like the air we breathe, there is an invisible field of stories all around us and through us, whether or not we are conscious of it. Story is the way we pass on our history, our beliefs, our points of view. It is the way we teach our children and show them their place in the universe. Story is the way we tell our friends what is going on in our lives and how we perceive our reality.
This StoryField is what makes meaning for our lives. It contains the totality of our cultural and collective myths, beliefs, ideas, patterns, history, and capacities specific to being embodied human beings. It shapes what we think and how we act., and we shape it through our thoughts and actions through time.
Why is this important? Story, at this meta-level of pattern, is the core seed from which thought and behavior emanate. If we are truly to consider new stories, new possibilities for our lives and for the future of our planet, we need to know the stories we are already in that are shaping us and begin to learn how we might change the story towards a more joyful and life-affirming .
At an individual level, we are all enacting a story whether or not we know what it is. Some stories are transformational and can serve as guides for our journeys, and some are not and lead us to dead ends. Similarly, at a collective level, we are engaged in many different stories, some of which we already know from past experience lead to painful and destructive ends. Others, patterned on what we already know, create joy, health and wellbeing, offer hope for a more thriving future.
Why Re-Storying?
NewStories believes we are in a time of systems collapse and rebirth. Collective experiences of floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, sea rise, nuclear meltdowns, healthcare failure, mass shootings, opioid addictions and much more tell us that things just are not okay. These experiences are a slap in the face, a wakeup call, asking us to consider what larger stories we want to be living in. These crises and catastrophes break open and lay bare our current stories. While there is an almost irresistible pressure to return to the old story, there is also an invitation to create a new one.
We work at that crack to help the light get in where it becomes possible for a new opportunity to emerge. We start with the assumption that the community has the answer, that you increase the health of a system by connecting it to more of itself. We’ve been privileged to provide services in many places where the story has been broken in places like Zimbabwe, Japan, Northern California, Alaska and Cherokee Nation. Our work is with local partners to connect and convene communities in new ways that have both space to grieve what is gone and to create what might be.
People connect with their own existing stories and each other, to envision new possibilities, to act in alignment with their values, to take action, to see what actually happens, to illuminate what happens to inform, inspire and invite change at larger and larger scales.
Our Principles
NewStories embraces a process called Principles-Focused Developmental Evaluation (PFDE) in our work. This is a system by which we define a set of Principles—defined as Values Made Actionable—and then use those principles first to guide innovation, planning and decision making, and then again as the basis for evaluation.
Before we could bring this process into our work with communities we knew we needed to create our own set of principles according to this system in order to guide our processes and then to evaluate if we, ourselves, are achieving results in alignment with our values.
While these are constantly a work on progress here are the principles that guide our work (and as a bonus, the entire core team has been finding these incredibly valuable in our personal lives as well).
Be Aware of the Water We Are Swimming In
Connect & Share:
Be An Ecosystem
Trust The Moment & Be Curious
Sense & Respond to Context
Link Inner &
Outer Work
Love With Intention & Action
Discern Value & Illuminate
Feel & Notice
Take A Next Step
Try & See What We Learn
See New Possibility Emerge
Repattern & Restructure