By Nathan Young
Thanks to everybody who responded to the last email and update about what we’ve got going on with the New Narrative. If you missed that, you can read it via the internal blog here.
This week I wanted to update folks on the plans I have going forward. I’d love to hear some of your thoughts, feedback, and interest level.
Fundamentally, my aim with The New Narrative is to bring people together for meaningful discussions, help us all build confidence in ourselves and our ideals, and hopefully build some community traction that will serve us all through the pandemic, and even more so when we can all get together in person again.
This is all part of a larger goal to create a community around a shared set of ideals based on redefining the predominant social narratives and creating new narratives for ourselves and others that are more equitable, fulfilling, and sustainable for all.
As I said in the last email, the last attempt at a collective was paradoxically moving too fast and too slow, too many directions and not enough direction. I feel like I should hold on to more direction for the project for the time being and slowly open things up with clearer parameters from there.
All that said, here is the plan I have for rolling things out in the short term:
1) I’m going to start working on what I’ll call “The New Narrative manifesto.” The idea behind it is for me to clearly detail the vision and the plan I have for this project moving forward and hopefully use it as a source document for all of us going forward. I want to find a systematic way to avoid having me be the perpetual arbiter of what is and isn’t part of the New Narrative mission.
2) I hope to start rolling out regular New Narrative events again very soon. These would all be virtual for now, consist of things like mini-workshops and discussion, and would all be distilled down and simplified to be easy to host via Zoom without a lot of extra planning. I’d keep everything short (60-90 minutes max) to minimize Zoom fatigue and everything would be free or donation based.
The content might be mini-workshops around our personal stories, discussions around social dilemmas (a la ReThink), more direct discussions about social justice issues, discussions around re-writing political and social narratives, or maybe just group check-ins.
I’m still bouncing around some ideas so if you have any input, I’d love to hear it. I might send another email out next week with more specifics.
3) In the interest of promoting everybody’s growth and building more cohesiveness into this group, I was also thinking of hosting a series of storytelling and personal development workshops that would be something we'd work on and talk thru collectively in the group. The idea is that we all have our own goals, dreams, and things that we want to achieve, and the biggest obstacle standing in the way is oftentimes ourselves and our own internalized narratives. This would help us deconstruct those narratives and create “new narratives” for ourselves.
If there's enough interest, I'll keep it to this group, but if not I might open it up to a larger audience via Facebook and the mailing list too. We’ll see. Either way, if you are interested in this, let me know so I can plan accordingly.
That’s it for now! Let me know what you think. I always appreciate hearing from people with their own thoughts on what does and doesn’t interest them, even if it sometimes takes me a bit to respond.
Either way, I really appreciate everybody’s interest in this group and this project, and if you’ve read this far, I appreciate you sticking with me through the ups and downs of it all too.
Hopefully, we can connect again soon!
Nathan
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