Welcome to the last edition of Listening to Change, a regular digest from the Centre for Public Impact, Dusseldorp Forum, and Hands Up Malleethat shares what we are hearing from government and philanthropy in our exploration of the role of storytelling in systems change.
Our listening sessions are complete and we are well into report writing but after speaking with over 30 people we’ve still got a few more interesting insights and resources to share. We’ve decided to share one more digest before the full report arrives in late October. Here are some final thoughts, collected over the past few months, about how stories are heard by government and philanthropy to understand change.
Collective stories have the power to move beyond the story of the individual and the programmatic response. Collective stories highlight where the system is failing and elicit community-led systemic solutions.
“Storytelling to government and philanthropy is often one person's experience. This service has helped this person. It's singular. It misses the collective nature, the wider collaborative community.”
An image or short video can have an instant impact in a way a report can’t. Sometimes we need to see with our own eyes to understand.
“To effect change, we need to make it easy to listen to and re-share stories.”
Listening to understand means better decision-making. To get there we need to build a movement for better storytelling and storylistening.
“If people’s mindsets are open to that, it enables them through their empathy genes rather than transactional genes to engage with what that might look like.”
We’re very excited about sharing our report in a few weeks. We will be holding a webinar to share our findings on the 28th of November. You can register your interest here with invites to follow. Until then here are some resources to get stuck into.
A youth-led project that gathered stories, expertise, and knowledge by and from Aboriginal young people with lived experience of the criminal justice system and the impact the criminal justice system has on them and their families.
The Centre for Public Impact is a global not-for-profit organisation founded by the Boston Consulting Group. We serve as a learning partner for governments, public servants and the diverse network of changemakers who are leading the charge to reimagine government. We work with them to hold space to collectively make sense of the complex challenges we face and drive meaningful change through learning and experimentation.
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