About the Project

In the beginning was the word

And soon after, there came many words and many different stories. For as long as human beings have walked the earth, they have sought to chronicle their lives in ways that transcend time, space, and even language. They became the stories they told, and those tales charted a roadmap to understanding who they and their descendants were as a people. Stories became the most powerful way to immortalise life: if it happened, it was history and would be written; if it didn’t, it would be imagined and be told.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful devices we have because stories build worlds — worlds we have, worlds we want, and worlds worth fighting for. But what happens when stories are weaponised by those seeking to destroy those very worlds? Stories can also betray and amplify the structures of power and blindspots in our everyday life, which perpetuate the status quo.

In an attempt to combat those structures, we have arrived at Narrative Change, a collective practice that aims to explore some of the most critical questions around stories and storytelling:

Is it enough to think of what stories we tell?
What happens once a story is told?
How do stories spread?
How do stories not just reflect the world but change it?
How do stories orient us towards hope?
Can stories lead to collective action?

Welcome to Once Upon a Tomorrow: a project that has emerged from some difficult observations about the challenges of diversity, inclusion, equality, engagement, and belonging in the complex and contested worlds we live in. Once Upon a Tomorrow (OUaT) is a co-created, critical, collaborative, and distributed deep-dive that brings together narrative experts to think, explore, prototype — and imagine new modes of narrative change that lead to collective action of hope. Over the course of the next three months, we will come together through Action Labs, Knowledge Studios, and Narration Hubs, to create a resource set that shows the possibilities and hope of how narrative change can be generated through collective action for hopeful futures.

Over this period, we will work distributed but together, remotely but intensely, in synchronous and asynchronous sessions that are co-created with this group of narrative experts. We will draw upon our individual expertise and collective experiences to create baselines, curate galleries, and produce toolkits that help understand and show how narrative change practice can be implemented.

And so we asked our narrative experts our first question: “Through your presence in this world, what do you hope for?”