Are you a changemaker, a storyteller, or someone who’s looking to shift the way people think, feel, and act? Then we’d love to learn, grow, and build collective narrative power with you.
APPLICATIONS ARE NOW CLOSED.
Thanks to everyone who has applied, we’ll be in touch soon.
If you’re interested in supporting the programme as a mentor, trainer, or content partner, email our Workshops Lead, , with a bit of info about you, how you’d like to be involved and any useful links 🙂
We’re PIRC, and we’ve spent the last 15+ years helping people make change through the stories that we tell. It’s the work of narrative change: changing the current of how people think, to create waves of action and lasting progress.
We’re excited to launch the ‘Building Our Narrative Power’ course. We’ll bring together 16 people who are all interested in changing the narrative across social, climate, and economic justice, and are impacted by oppression. For example: white supremacy, transphobia, anti-immigration policies, poverty, police violence, ableism, or living on the frontline of climate breakdown.
This course is free and expenses will be covered. We also have a limited number of full and partial bursaries available, to pay folks for the time they devote to the course.
Read on for full details!
What’s it all about?
‘Building Our Narrative Power’ is a year-long course about using narratives for justice and social change. It will include in-person residentials, online workshops, discussion groups, practical exercises, and mentoring, followed by tailored post-course support. And if you join us, it will be co-designed by you.
We know that the professional narrative-change sector in the UK has been dominated by a narrow range of people: mostly white, straight, middle and upper class, non-disabled, and strongly favouring western academia. This programme aims to challenge that, taking what’s worked and shifting what’s not. All participants will have lived experience of what they’re working to change.
We will support you to develop the skills, knowledge, community, and infrastructure to go deeper with your narrative-change work, and train others to do the same. We will also hold space for co-learning, resource redistribution, sharing, growth, and rest.
We’re dreaming of a strengthened and resourced community of narrative changemakers, collectively helping to birth new narratives that bring new worlds into being. If you’d like to be part of this, we’re keen to hear from you!
Who is the programme for?
We are inviting 16 people with lived experience of the issues they are working on to join us. Folks will be focusing on a range of different justice-related issues, from different backgrounds and experiences, thinking intersectionally about their work. You might be paid for this work, or doing it unpaid alongside your community.
We are looking for community leaders, or those who’d like to step into deeper leadership. We see leaders as the people who uplift others, can be held accountable by their communities when they get things wrong, who work to do better, and encourage others to be leaders too. If you are the person in your community who enjoys supporting others and sharing learnings with peers then this is for you.
You are invited to join in pairs, because we know how much easier it is to develop new ideas when you’ve got a collaborator from the start. You can either apply together or be matched through the application process.
You will bring a project or focus to apply your learning to during the programme. Some examples of focuses might be:
- “We’re a transgender mutual aid group with a few journalist contacts. We want the media to tell fairer and kinder stories about trans people, and we want to learn from other movements about their experiences of media visibility.”
- “We’re part of a network of residents who want our neighbours to put pressure on our local councils for more affordable housing, and we want to have a joint message to do that.”
- “I work in campaign communications in a national disability charity. I want us to advocate for an intersectional approach in our sector, but I don’t know where to start.”
- “My friends and I have experience of navigating the anti-immigration environment in the UK. We want to organise with others to tackle some of the deep beliefs in the UK that made anti-immigration policies possible—beliefs like ‘fear of the unknown’.”
- “We have lived under the flight paths of London City Airport and want to join-up with other people with similar experiences, to create a narrative-change guide on ‘sacrifice zones’.”
You will be supported to build narrative power by creating narrative strategies for your groups, developing communication guides, creating cultural content, intervening in public debate, training others, and seeking opportunities for cross-movement narrative alignment.
Programme structure and vibe
The programme is made up of seven peer-learning sessions, including two in-person residentials and five online sessions, throughout 2024. This will be followed by tailored post-programme support for up to a year..
We want to challenge traditional learning methods, so we will co-design the programme with you, taking your guidance on what you need, while providing offerings, ingredients, and support.
The course
We’ll co-design a course to build narrative power across the communities we are from. There will be space, time, and support to develop your own projects. You’ll share your experience and skills with one another too. We’ll invite you to share your learning hopes for the course, and also consider what you might like to offer/ teach/ share with one another. Don’t worry if you’re not sure yet—our coaches and mentors can work with you to figure it out.
At PIRC, we’ve got lots of ingredients we can offer to the course, including workshop activities, toolkits for building narrative strategies, and communications research findings. And we’ve got a community of staff, associates, and trainers excited to run sessions with you.
Our first session will be a five-day residential where we’ll offer some introductory workshops to build a shared understanding of the role that narrative work can play in social change, explore the history of storytelling, and the deep roots of why we think the way we do. We’ll reflect on our relationships to ‘leadership’, and set intentions and dreams for the course.
- Developing a decolonial approach to narrative change
- Analysing the narrative landscape: understanding how society thinks about our issues
- Finding the points of intersection across our issues, building shared and complementary narrative strategies
- Identifying moments and opportunities for narrative shift
- Firing-up our radical imaginations, and developing narrative and framing ideas collaboratively
- Testing narrative and framing ideas
We’re also part of a wide ecosystem of narrative change and strategic communications practitioners who offer support in many of the areas listed above, plus:
- Campaign strategy
- Creative communication skills-building (e.g. video-making, graphic design, media stunts)
- Influencing pop culture (e.g. film, TV, books, music)
- Navigating traditional and alternative media (e.g. broadcast and print journalism, social media)
Follow-up support
After the 2024 course, up to a year of tailored support is available in 2025, helping you run with your learnings from the course. This could look like: further sessions with your mentor, one-to-one coaching from the PIRC team, book clubs, action learning sets, signposts to training opportunities, link-ups with other narrative change practitioners or potential funders, platforms for sharing your work across our movements, and more.
Practicalities
Dates
Once you join the programme, we’ll explore your hopes and dreams for the course in Autumn this year, before the main sessions start in 2024.
We’ve set the date for the first residential session in January 2024, and the rest is open for us to work out together with you. For now, here’s an idea of what we’re imagining:
- Session One: 29 January – 2 February 2024, 5-day in-person residential
- Session Two: TBC: March 2024, 1-day online workshop
- Session Three: TBC: May 2024, 1-day online workshop
- Session Four: TBC: July 2024, 2 x half-day online workshops
- Session Five: TBC: September 2024, 1-day online workshop
- Session Six: TBC: November 2024, multi-day in-person residential
- Session Seven: TBC: December 2024, 1-day online workshop
Location & Venues
We are currently working on the logistics for the programme. Our first session will take place in person, in Wales, at the Centre for Alternative Technology. You can view venue access information here. Any further in-person sessions will take place in wheelchair-accessible venues, and we will fully consider everyone’s access needs while booking and publish full access information for the venues ahead of time.
Supporting your participation
Places on the programme are free, with all course costs covered, and travel and food expenses too. But if your organisation is able to cover your travel expenses and/or make a donation to the course costs, that would help us make more bursary funding available – increasing access for others
There are a limited number of bursaries and part-bursaries to pay for time spent on the course. We are offering this to combat the inequality in our society that undervalues the unpaid work of grassroots organisers, and leaves opportunities like this most accessible to those from more privileged backgrounds. We want to ensure this project is accessible to everyone, and particularly to facilitate people who are affected by economic injustice to attend and share their expertise.
We’ll be looking at various ways to support people to participate: such as covering childcare, and ensuring venues and facilitation are accessible. Please let us know if there may be barriers to your participation so we can work to address them.
We want to support participant wellbeing throughout the programme. There will be a quiet space, crafting materials, nature connection activities, energisers, and long breaks. We want to prioritise rest and gentleness. We are also currently fundraising for individual wellbeing budgets
Get in touch
Want to get involved or find out more? Please let us know if you have questions about any of this! Email Faith, Kaan and Hannah at for more. You might also find an answer in our FAQs below.
