I hope this finds you and your families and communities well.
Thanks to those who joined our first Narratives Working Group call. We enjoyed the chance to go deep together, as the first kick-off to this working group.
This is a follow up and also an invitation to our next call, happening next Thursday 7th May at 10:00-11:30am BST.
Register for our next call here- and after registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. More below.
Follow up to last week’s call
As promised, here are the slides from the SG3 call that happened last week.
The exercise we went through is one from the Moral Imaginations playbook. This creative approach towards imagining different futures is currently being prototyped with groups around the world. The website is under construction, but if you’d like to find out more about that work, please get in touch.
Next week’s call
For our next call, we will focus on the metaphors, narratives and images that are being used to describe COVID-19 and frame the response to it. We will be hearing from different group members who will share:
Narratives, metaphors and imagery they are using in their work, and why they think they are important/strategic to pave the way to a more just, healthy world
Narratives, metaphors and imagery amplified in the media that would be good to build on
Discussion on which metaphors and imagery to avoid, and why
Speaking with some group members, there is an appetite to identify the similarities and differences between the metaphors, images and narratives we are all using - and see how we might be able to converge.
If you’d like to prepare something to share on the above, please get in touch on this email.
Sharing the invite with others
You are welcome to share the registration link to next week’s call with others, but if you do so, please also ask them to fill out this Google form so we can follow up with them about how they might best want to be involved.
Digest from group members
Inspiration:
Great article “A pandemic is not a war” enjoyed this as thinking deeply about metaphors and memes
The iconic TV2 advert from Denmark “All That We Share” that went viral globally
A really nice piece listing inspirational feminist writing: We got this: Finding hope in the time of COVID-19
Some people enjoyed: “Making Meaning in a Global Pandemic" from the Narrative Initiative
This piece on four possible economic futures: What will the world be like after coronavirus?
Also enjoyed Nesta's futures blog, with more to come: There will be no back to normal
From group members:
8 Tips for framing Covid-19 from Ella Saltmarshe
Collective Psychology Project report out this morning: This Too Shall Pass by Alex Evans, Casper ter Kuile and Ivor Williams
This article from Jon Alexander: Subject, Consumer, or Citizen: Three Post-Covid Futures and accompanying: funding bid
From Sydney Policy lab: Moving beyond lockdown: how might citizen action help tackle the public health crisis?
Sharing this Tweet of a favourite quote by Arundhati Roy on being inbetween worlds - stories matter in this time
This Tweet from Cassie Robinson about the convening The National Lottery Community Fund is doing with the RSA, and the quote by Milton Friedman used in the convening, also shared by Jon Alexander:
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” ― Milton Friedman
Please send any articles or sources of inspiration to Gwyneth at gwynethj.uk@gmail.com to be included in the next digest.
The Narwhal
After our call last week, one of our group members was visited in a dream by a strange sea creature called a Narwhal with a message for the group. We are deciphering this message and will have more information shortly.
Look forward to seeing many of you on the call next Thursday.
NARWHAL