What We Do

“What makes this approach different? It helped me to be involved, not sit back and wait for something to happen, for someone else to make things better. During the program we talked a lot about fear, about the cocoon of fear. I am no longer in that cocoon.”
–Zola Matutu, workshop participant and community leader in South Africa’s Limpopo Province

We partner with local champions in these areas:

• Leadership
• Community engagement and capacity building
• Gender equity
• Post-conflict transformation

Positive, sustained change begins when we understand the stories that shape our lives. As people acknowledge and retell these stories, they identify beliefs and practices that continue to fail them and their communities. In this retelling, they also identify their own overlooked skills, knowledge, expertise, and strengths. They can then co-create new, more positive stories that inspire personal transformation and collaboration, enabling communities to co-construct and reach their desired goals and greater well-being. These new, more positive stories can move mountains.

This narrative and relational approach to leadership, gender equity, and community building invites people to reclaim and co-create their own stories of strength and hope. It helps bridge divides, heal relationships and leverage a group’s diversity as people coalesce around common goals and col­lective action.

These narrative and relational practices also enable change to happen faster and to take root more deeply, because it is built on a new, shared story, co-created by the community and based on its own experience.

Our work is initiated and co-designed by local partners who share our philosophy of com­munity engagement to achieve lasting, systemic change.

    Re-remembering
    Re-claiming
    Re-visioning
+ Co-creating
    ———————
= Sustainable Action

SEE WHAT MAKES STORIES MOVE MOUNTAINS DIFFERENT