Change the Story, Change the World: A day of training

I ran this day-long course last year twice, in Oxford and Berlin, and absolute­ly had a blast. It attract­ed a fine group of trou­ble­mak­ers from a  wide spec­trum of world-chang­ing organ­i­sa­tions: the Bible Soci­ety (“Every­one backs away when I say who I work for…”), Action­Aid, Four Paws, Cam­pact, the Transna­tion­al Insti­tute, Green­peace, the World Future Coun­cil, Com­pas­sion in World Farm­ing, Gyro Lon­don, HERA… world chang­ers of every stripe.

There was a mag­ic trick with a bit of rope.  There was some amaz­ing, pur­pose-filled sto­ry telling. There was joy. There were tears. And I had the most reward­ing expe­ri­ence when one of my stu­dents, a fundrais­ing copy­writer, wrote to thank me, say­ing she’d applied her learn­ing at work the next day with unprece­dent­ed results.

All of us could use some bet­ter sto­ries today. If we look around at the tales being told around our elec­tron­ic camp­fires today, it’s obvi­ous that the big over­ar­ch­ing nar­ra­tives that once explained the way the world works are break­ing down.  Facts are not win­ning. To reach hearts and minds and change behav­iours, all of us work­ing for a more beau­ti­ful world need to up our game. The sto­ries we tell need to be epic. Inspir­ing. Engag­ing. Com­pelling. They need to make peo­ple crave to be a part of them and act to pro­pel them for­ward.

On 20 March I’ll be pre­sent­ing a slight­ly abbre­vi­at­ed ver­sion of the train­ing at West­min­ster University’s Mas­ters in Media, Cam­paign­ing, and Social Change pro­gram­me  — a rare aca­d­e­mic pro­gram­me for young activists. That ses­sion is for stu­dents only, but the ses­sion on 21st of March is open to all. Reg­is­ter today — space is lim­it­ed, so quick as a fox, jump over that lazy dog.