For the past two years here at the People’s Newsroom, we’ve been exploring how changing the way we tell stories can be key to changing the future itself. This work is centred on the belief that collective storytelling, and the connection it facilitates, is essential to the transformational changes our societies need.

The work of the People’s Newsroom centres on the hope that we can imagine, develop and steward a Story Commons which will help us tell deeper, more systemic and ultimately more valuable stories. These stories would reflect and enable our essential interconnectedness and our innate need for connection, solidarity and collective action.

What could a different relationship between storytelling and economics look like?

Accountability is a discipline. It is not a fixed destination. 

The stories we tell about the world are not separate from culture – they both shape and are our culture.

This may seem self-evident but this truth is not systematically acknowledged within some of our most influential storytelling spaces: newsrooms. 

The People’s Newsroom has been exploring how storytelling can support transitions away from extractive economies and towards regenerative and life-giving ones. A theme that came up in our learning together was the importance of stories about emerging futures being located in specific places, histories and communities.

As individuals, communities or organisations, we are constantly assigning – or perhaps more often, assigned – value. We are weighed and measured every second, every hour, every day, in almost all our interactions.