Making new common sense
Future Narratives Lab is a non-profit research & development institute that equips campaigners and coalitions with narrative as a tool for building their collective power.
What we do
Expert non-profit or philanthropic partners commission us to support them, often across these four areas.
Research & Strategy
Mapping & analysing the narrative landscape to identify threats, opportunities, and ways to build power.
Creative Influence
Developing, testing & applying interventions to grow coalitions, attract resources and push issues up the agenda.
Narrative Infrastructure
Creating communities of practice and platforms to support, guide and inspire ongoing collaboration.
Learning & Training
One off workshops and extended learning journeys to develop key skills & build capacity for civil society groups.
Recent Partnerships
Our Philosophy: Building Collective Power with Narrative
Narrative is a key way that power is imposed, through setting the terms of debate: what is seen as possible or worthy of consideration. Too often, those tackling vested interests are trapped in fruitless binaries, or struggling even to be understood.
Overcoming this requires more than just better stories or messaging. Techniques borrowed from commercial marketing are designed to divide and extract, not build lasting collectivity.
We advocate instead for building the narrative capacity of civil society: the ability to understand and influence the assumptions that shape discourse & decision making, and use that to acquire the resources, insight, and alliances needed to confront power at scale.
Below are three examples of how we do this in practice.
Initial Spark Workshop
Kick-start the process of collective narrative power-building, with targeted research and a creative workshop.
For example, with Positive Money on the dominance of the US Dollar.
Creative Mobilisation Programme
Turn research insights into growing resources & influence, through events, publishing and targeted network-building.
For example, How to Disagree Better about Education with PSHE Association.
Establish a Narrative Power Lab
Work together as a coalition through structured sessions to develop and test counter-narrative experiments in practice.
For example, the Countering Deregulation Narrative Power Lab for NGOs in Europe.
Featured
Contact the Lab
We’re always happy to discuss our past projects and events, possible future collaborations, or anything else of interest. Get in touch via the form below.