Stewardship

This guide is offered as a shared resource.

It’s stewarded by people working inside complex systems who care deeply about how ideas are held, shared, and put to use. Stewardship here means tending the work with intention—while leaving room for others to adapt it, question it, and carry it into their own contexts. The guide is meant to grow through use, gaining strength as it travels and takes new shape.

  • Using storytelling at the university to address food security by collecting authentic narratives directly from students experiencing hunger. The goal is to build empathy and awareness among different decision-makers across the local and national food system, transform awareness into action, and ultimately contribute to shifting the dominant aid-worker food narrative in Benin to one shaped by local voices. Learn more

  • Using Indigenous storytelling as both a Traditional healing practice and systems intervention to address the opioid crisis. The initiative positions community members as wisdom holders, gathering and sharing stories that reveal root causes while restoring cultural continuity and creating pathways for Indigenous approaches to influence broader healthcare, governance, and social systems. Learn More

  • Dunna, a Colombian nonprofit, integrates mind-body healing practices with restorative justice and ecological reconciliation to build peace in post-conflict communities. Through six-month journey that combines storytelling circles, somatic processing, and land-based healing projects, they help communities transform trauma and rebuild relationships severed by violence—between individuals, communities, and the land itself. Learn More

  • A documentary film following a theatrical production that brings together Indigenous Kogui leaders and a theater company to reveal how competing narratives about land actually control systemic decisions about land ownership, use, and governance. The film captures both the story being told on stage and the meta-narrative of how storytelling processes themselves perpetuate or challenge power structures. Learn More

  • The Living Atlas initiative combines high-tech digital mapping with place-based wisdom to create dynamic, interactive visualizations of bioregions. By collecting stories from diverse inhabitants—Indigenous elders, farmers, artists, residents—who share the same watershed or ecosystem, it builds collective narratives that respect natural rather than political boundaries, revealing connections between landscapes, communities, and economies. Learn More

  • The Skillman Foundation is developing a distinctive approach to systems storytelling in Detroit's education landscape, working through the Detroit Education Narrative Collective—a group of storytellers using their diverse art forms to illuminate education system dynamics. The approach prioritizes building common ground, supporting artists to channel their creative practices toward revealing systemic patterns while catalyzing dialogue at local, state, and national levels. Learn More