Harnessing the power of story.

Bridging cultures and generations, stories have informed every stage of human history – distributing knowledge, making sense of complexity, helping us to learn and grow our understanding. Stories allow us to see through the eyes of others, creating connection and opening us to infinite possibility.

But insights drawn from bold new initiatives do not spread on their own. For stories to be understood and inspire behaviour change they need to be communicated in a compelling way to encourage and enable others to take on new approaches with confidence.

Crafting powerful stories that weave data with community voices are essential to the success of all our initiatives.

About StoryLab

Our StoryLab framework is building a robust global knowledge bank that catalogues a rich tapestry of stories from the field to share, educate and solve social and environmental challenges.

Not only will this framework amplify stories of hope and change, it also aims to:

• Support communities to collect, collaborate, manage and share their stories: Professional storytelling templates and collaborative tools support and encourage community members to capture authentic and trusted stories in multiple languages. Communities manage who can see and share information, giving all partners confidence to create, catalogue and share powerful communication products.
• Assist donors to monitor, evaluate and learn: Templates and tailored curation of story elements can support fulfil and evaluation objectives in an engaging way using participatory video and community voice. This approach is a pathway towards decolonising grant making by reducing the extractive nature of reporting. With the ability to group the themes and create an evidence base the vision is for StoryLab to surface cross-project themes and empower grant-makers to identify stories of collective impact. With permissions clearly tagged project-based stories can be shared thoughtfully and with respect, and provide valuable input into internal measurement, learning and evaluation (MEL) discussions.
• Amplify voice and collective impact: A public platform of tagged stories and evidence will enable journalists, policy makers and investors to access case studies and make connections.

During the pilot phase (2023-2024), we’re testing and learning with Ampliseed members and FolkTale as our technical partner.

From 2025 onwards we’ll be looking to new partners who share our values, are open to testing new pathways, and want to focus on outcomes that benefit community to scale our framework.