What can we each offer on this beautiful and amazing planet in these chaotic and uncertain times?
Our work at NewStories has always been to help people change the story so we can change what is possible. We recognize that this pandemic is part of the web of other disasters – climate, social, economic – demanding that we change the way we live on our small planet.
You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear Not the strangeness you feel.
The Future must enter you long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth, for the hour of new clarity.
- Rainer Maria Rilke -
Our purpose
We help change-makers and leaders, communities, organizations and systems flourish in these chaotic times of collapse and transformation. Our purpose is to help navigate the tides of change towards well-being, compassion and deep collaboration to create the lives, communities, and organizations we want for future generations, now.
About Us
We are a charitable non-profit intergenerational collective of diverse master practitioners – facilitators, social process designers, community organizers, artists, mindfulness guides, coaches and storytellers – from all over the world. We have, for decades, been designing and facilitating spaces and programs that move from conversation to action.
SERVICES
We’ve always been here to help you change your story and change what’s possible. We’re facilitators, consultants, thought partners and teachers.
For almost 20 years now we have co-created the spaces where people gather to make sense in complexity and have conversations that matter. Right now, in these pandemic times, we must be having even more of these conversations – and having them virtually. Such conversations will lead us to wise action changing lives, communities and organizations.
NewStories uses participatory change processes and a community development approach, and offers facilitation and consulting services and partnerships to help create the lives and communities we want for the future, now
Contact us to share your needs, questions, and challenges and to explore how we might work together.
STORIES
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. This StoryField is what makes meaning for our lives. It shapes what we think and how we act. And we shape it through our thoughts and actions through time.
At NewStories we address the larger, archetypal, hidden stories that sweep huge swaths of the human population into a particular configuration of beliefs of what has meaning and how the world works. Some of these stories are in religions, cultural traditions, and different eras of scientific understanding that have changed through time. Some come out of myths and fairytales and some come out of different movements of intellectual or political thought.
OUR PROJECTS
At NewStories we do whatever we can to support work bringing communities back to life. We both undertake initiatives of our own and we are a virtual HUB for organizations in the US and around the world whose efforts are resonate with our values, principles and beliefs. Check them out. They range from the Humane Prison Hospice project at San Quentin to the Kufunda Learning Village in Zimbabwe, as our own key initiative: Preparing for the Possible
Curated resources
An essential part of our work is to curate and offer resources that help all of us navigate in these times of change.
We have opened a Pandemic Resources section on our website to specifically bring forward resources we come across which are helpful to both understand the pandemic and to discern paths of right action. This is very much an emerging section. Please email us with suggestions at pandemic@newstories.org
NewStories President Bob Stilger wrote his book AfterNow: When We Cannot See the Future, Where Do We Begin? after feeling called to help people in Japan rebuild from the “Triple Disasters” of 2011. It is his story and the story of thousands in Japan discovering what is after now?
Great Transition Stories is a virtual hub for illuminating the larger, often invisible, archetypal stories of our world, which can help us make sense of these times. Lynnaea Lumbard, NewStories Board Chair has stewarded the creation of this collection over many years. The website makes the deeper patterns we’re in visible so we can see where they lead.
Working with groups around the world in many ways for decades now, NewStories comes across some amazing resources which we believe will increase your capacity to meet the challenges and opportunities you encounter in our changing world, including great articles, handouts for various methodologies, informative videos, websites that are related to our work. We call this collection Essential Knowledge.
Featured Blog Posts
This is real
The headlines are relentless. The image just overwhelming. In the last weeks when I have looked outside my windows in Spokane, Washington into the yellow soup of very hazardous air, I’ve felt overwhelm claustrophobic. Destruction of the small town of Malden, to the south of us is tragic. Hell, there’s so much tragedy around these days that it is hard to know where to start.
The following account comes from a cattleman, David Daley, in Northern California. It is his deeply personal story of the desecration of lands his family has walked for generations. It is more than hard to read. I urge you to take in as much as you can. We are in liminal space now. The space between what was and what will be. It is a time of collapse and regeneration. We have choices here. Personally, I am finding it hard to understand exactly what they are and to step towards them..
David’s Story
Collapse and Regeneration
We are rapidly becoming aware that none of us are going to be left out of the collapse of multiple systems in which we live. Wars may be happening elsewhere, but fires, floods, hurricanes, bomb cyclones, tsunamis, crop failures, earthquakes and now pandemics are all around us. There is no way out of the experience of the collapse. We are already in it. No matter what your privilege, we are still all interconnected and when the food supply runs out, the grid goes down, communications stop, water runs out, and millions have a virus, we will all feel it. It’s essential that we learn how to hospice the passing of the old so it spews as little destruction and death as possible while we also midwife newly emerging patterns of compassionate caring and interconnectedness.
Facing Reality, Not Fixing Problems
We cannot “fix” the coronavirus. It is here. To be sure, there are many things we can do to mitigate the speed with which the virus spreads. I’m deeply appreciative of the many announcements helping us learn what we can do. This is a zoonotic virus, meaning it is one spread from animals to humans. This virus is anything but random. It is a direct consequence of the choices those of us with money have been making to consume, consume and then consume some more. The idea that happiness is a commodity that can be purchased by having and spending lots of money is an idea disproven time and time again.
