We ate delicious food, watched Twilight and experimented with new learning styles, in a collective journey towards better UK-based narrative change infrastructure.
How can we build communities of learning, growth and care, focused on narrative change? This is the question we set out to ask at the start of Building Our Narrative Power (BONP) – our year-long narrative leadership programme. We’ve been led by 14 participants and a bunch of amazing facilitators, and we’re about to draw to a close. But before we share reflections on the whole programme, I’d love to tell you a bit about our second, and final, residential, that happened in November 2024.
So, let’s set the scene. We are in the beautiful countryside, the weather is as British as ever, fourteen change-makers from across the UK show up keen to reconnect and learn…
Styles of learning
We believe that narrative change work happens most effectively in community, and when people share knowledge across movements. That’s why our 14 participants come from a wide-range of experience, from racial justice movements to land access campaigning to community journalism. We wanted to create a space for folks to share their knowledge with each other, and we did this by moving away from conventional, top-down teaching styles, and towards a more participant-led approach.
The learning styles we used:
Direct education – drawing from US-based organisation Training for Change, we introduced theories and topics, and then held space for participants to knowledge-share about these. At times, we also offered PIRC’s and facilitators’ knowledge into the space. Most of the first half of the week went like this. After a year together, participants reflected on movement ecologies and their place within them, set their changemaking and narrative goals, and mapped out their narrative strategy going forward.
Peer-to-peer learning – The second half of the week participants offered up workshops, activities and spaces for each other. The topics were broad; from AI for social justice, to intergenerational communications to placard making. In some workshops there was debate and discussion, in others there was painting and crafts, in others there was solo reflective activity. As well as embracing a range of topics, we wanted to embrace the range of learning styles and knowledge-sharing styles in the room. We all have something to learn, and we all have something to teach. But we don’t necessarily have to have traditional teaching or facilitation skills to do this. By building comfort as a group over the year, we hoped participants felt ready to be a bit vulnerable with one another and do the work of knowledge-sharing.
My terrible handwriting! What is meant to say “narrative clinic” was jokingly named “narrative cunk” for the rest of the week
I personally really love both these methods of education. I see their benefits and their flaws. Bigger-scale peer-to-peer learning is newer to me, and I thank Huddlecraft for a lot of my learning. I also have a lot to learn with both these methods, and I made mistakes, we all did as facilitators. I am thankful to the group for being patient with us, for experimenting with new ways of doing narrative knowledge sharing, and for being brave and generous with their amazing wisdom and skills. I have learnt from every person on this programme, dreamt with every person, felt a real honour to be in community with every person. I am taking my mistakes seriously, and as learnings for next time. I hope we can continue to discover how we can do narrative change learning in a participant-led, bottom-up, peer-to-peer focused way.
Rest and play
Often, folks come onto residentials with an expectation they will learn lots of practical, theoretical content, and this is true! But what is often given less attention (by participants and facilitators) is the other thing we are learning when we come together in community: how to be together, and how to put our dreams into practice, sustainably and for the long term.
Soft toys, fidget toys, art materials – we wanted to build safety and comfort in the space, we believe it’s vital for learning as well as folks’ wellbeing.
At our residentials, we try to create a mini version of the futures we dream of. We’re big fans of Adrienne Maree Brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and we believe it’s important to emphasise the necessity of rest, play, joy, accountability, grief work, and just holding each other. We emphasise it not simply by talking about it, but by trying our damn hardest to do it, however challenging that might feel. So how did we do that this time around?
Rest is baked into the learning structure – our residentials contain half hour breaks and two hour lunches. We want to be responsive to the needs of the group – the majority of folks in this particular group were not morning people (including me!), so we had later start times to accommodate this. We had a quiet room and a creative/social room, as well as the main learning space. We also had “off” times for facilitators – whole afternoons where we were off duty. This wasn’t as well planned as last time, due to some last minute facilitator changes, and I’d like to rectify that for our next residential. In general, I think we’ve got participant rest more figured out than facilitator rest, and I want this to change, because I want us to be well-rested and grounded facilitators, for the group and for ourselves.
Creativity and connection are given space – One of our hopes with a longer lunch break is that participants can have time to eat, rest, take solo time and have time with other participants, if they wish. Many participants used the second hour of lunch to self-organise walks, creative times and other activities. The evenings were also given to board games, painting, films, grief work and other optional community activities. One evening, PIRC Community Lead Faith cooked us delicious jollof rice and stew!
Joy and silliness is key to learning! – we had dance breaks, laughed and joked together and – one of my favourite events of the week – we watched the trashy teen vampire film Twilight on our movie night. I wish I could have captured people’s facial expressions as memes.
Slowing down and reflecting – one of the more early-riser participants ran morning affirmation sessions. I held a grief space by the fire one evening and we cried and laughed together. Maymana from Misery joined us to take everyone on a nature connection afternoon. Encouraging slowness is great, but it’s even better if we can build time for it.
Baking learning into the learning
No residential is perfect (ours was far from it), and one of the most important things we can do as facilitators is learn. We know learning as a commitment is far more fruitful than learning as an afterthought, so we’ve been trying to do it consistently throughout the year, and the residential. This can be challenging, particularly when a lot of us have faced personal difficulties this year, and we are all in deep grief about genocide and the climate collapsing. How we care for ourselves and support each other is something we are still figuring out. We know that we have to keep showing up for change, and that supporting our participants is a part of that.
The week’s library. Books and zines could be borrowed and returned by the end of the residential. Participants were also invited to add their books to the collection.
We worked with external evaluators, Liverpool World Centre (LWC), to make sure we were meeting our aims for the week, and the participants were getting what they wanted. We evaluated as we went along, and worked emergently where we could, responding to group feedback. From the first residential, some of the BONP participants have been really curious about evaluation, so they worked closely with the evaluators to develop ways that they wanted to feedback, including peer-interviews and group reflection time. Feedback and listening to the group was key. We don’t always get it right, but I’d like to do my best – and I hope participants know my inbox and heart are open.
Another reflective tool we use is encouraging participants to think about next steps and how their learning is applicable outside the residential space. Effective narrative change theory has to be applicable to people’s lives. There should be no theory without practice – so we carved out space for participants to consider what this looks like, together and apart. And we hope to keep touching base with them long after the programme ends, to be around for support and solidarity.
That’s a wrap about the second, and final, BONP residential. We’ll be reflecting on the whole programme soon, including;
- How we’ve built rest and play into the programme as a whole
- The mistakes we made and how we’re working on them
- A deeper dive on our learning methodologies and how they were received by participants
- Reflections on how to better care for the facilitation team
- The things that went well
- And what next steps we are excited about
We want others to be able to run great narrative knowledge-sharing spaces, group programmes and residentials (whether they be narrative-focused or not!). If you’d like to reflect with us, we’ll be holding a movement sharing space on Wednesday 9th April at 12.30pm BST, and we’d love for you to join us. You can grab a ticket here.
