Lessons for a Story Commons: how storytelling can open the door to thriving futures

The People's Newsroom
2 days ago
5 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Organisers across the UK share how storytelling can help us transition to new economies on a liveable planet.

A watercolour and ink drawing showing lots of people engaged in different activities, such as reading, painting, and playing games. There is a large tree at the centre and a river running through the middle. — Illustration by Charlotte Bailey

This is the first piece in our ‘Lessons for a Story Commons’ series. These lessons emerged from a group of creatives who gathered to share examples and prompts for shifting the way we tell stories.

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.

This builds on calls for a ‘just transition’ – a move away from the current extractive, unsustainable economy towards economies that are regenerative for both people and planet.

This ‘just transition’ needs to happen in all industries and all areas of life, and this includes journalism, newsrooms, and media and information systems. We’ve already written an outline of how we see this transition for storytelling taking place.

Generative and life-giving stories will only come from generative and life-giving practices. That’s why we think this transformation needs to be much deeper than just having more diverse newsrooms, more funding for local journalism, or more fact-checking on TikTok.

Instead, we need processes for sharing stories that are highly collective, democratic and accountable, supporting communities to imagine and build towards transformed futures. Put together, we call these types of practices ‘a story commons’.

Want to connect with others around these ideas?

Join us Tuesday 17 February at 4:30pm BST for an online community discussion on this series. We invite each other to share reactions, perspectives and ideas on how storytelling can open the door to thriving futures – all are welcome!

A commons is a collective resource sustained by those who rely on it, which is cared for by a community according to a set of mutually agreed rules. You can read more about our thinking on the commons in this piece.

Crucially, this is a very different way of organising our information space than public or private ownership. Imagine if our most powerful stories weren’t shaped by corporations like the Daily Mail, Google or even the BBC, but instead were generated by and for communities, according to values and principles they had agreed together.

We knew there were already some amazing examples of this being done across the UK, and in 2024 we brought together a small group of these organisations to learn from each other. Over six months, we held sharing sessions for workers from AM, CIVIC SQUARE, Greater Govanhill, MAIA, National Theatre Wales and of course, Now Then.

We looked at infrastructures of care, generative storytelling, using ‘doughnut economics’ as a framework, shifting power and journalism, community investment and longevity, and using physical spaces such as newsrooms not only to plug information gaps but connection gaps too. We’ve written more about this process, and you can also see our values and principles for working together.

This ‘commoning’ approach is our collective response to a just transition. Together, we identified some key lessons to guide us as we seek to build a story commons, both in our individual work and in our work together.

We always knew we wanted to share these with others, so we’ve produced this ‘Lessons for a Story Commons’ series, which can be read in any order over on the Opus Blog:

In a story commons, we value the process
In a story commons, we explore what was, what is and what could be
In a story commons, we collaborate to regenerate
In a story commons, we envision new economies
In a story commons, we reimagine accountability and care
In a story commons, we inspire creativity

Producing these pieces has been a slow process. Partly it’s been slow because the concepts are difficult – it’s often hard to put them into words, or to separate them into individual ‘lessons’ as they are so interlinked.

We’ve also been wrestling with how to practise ‘commoning’ these stories across multiple organisations, when everyone has so many competing priorities and pressures (including National Theatre Wales being closed down entirely since we did our learning together).

While this has been a highly collective process throughout, at some point somebody’s had to write the words for each piece, and their voice will have shaped them in specific ways. To navigate this tension between individual and collective working, we’ve included expanded credits at the end of each one to acknowledge all the different ways people have contributed.

Each of the lessons is accompanied by an illustration from Charlotte Bailey of CIVIC SQUARE, who was part of our peer learning group. These illustrations weave together to make an overall ‘Story Commons’ image, showing how interconnected all of the lessons are. Creating this image was itself a very collective and iterative process, which helped us refine our ideas and engage more imaginatively.

This piece is part of a series, Lessons for a Story Commons. Aside from the introduction, How storytelling can open the door to thriving futures, the series can be read in any order:

How might storytelling open the door to thriving futures?

We're seeking a just transition for storytelling that moves...

from...	to...
Stories of what is (status quo)	Stories of what has been, what is, and what could come
Stories for information alone (fragments)	Stories for knowledge, sensemaking and connection (wholeness)
Stories that present, and drive, homogeneity	Stories that reflect, and cultivate, plurality and help us hold multiple and connected knowledges, realities, complexities and uncertainty
Stories that control, punish, shame and exclude	Stories that invite us into collective participation, governance and transformative justice
Stories that demonise, isolate and divide us	Stories that reflect us, connect us and equip us to act
Stories for generating, protecting and hoarding wealth	Stories as generators, and distributors, of shared resources and wealth for all people
To do so, we need to shift *how* we create. To move
from	to
Story-telling (products to be broadcast/consumed)	Story-sharing (a process, that invites us into co-creation)
Presenting stories as 'new' and the final word/record	Creating stories as ongoing drafts - that are additive, referential, relational and contextual to what has come before
Story creation that is extractive, immediate and overproduced	Story creation treated with care and intention for the betterment of our communities
Creators/journalists as gatekeepers and powerholders	Journalists/creators as facilitators and stewards that shift power so everyone can be part of the story
Creators/journalists as detached/dispassionate - creating stories detached from where they come from	Creators/journalists as part of the story, actively and intentionally recognising place and source
Limited access, via enclosure (paywalls, etc.)	Collective access, via commons