Over 60 councils and individuals have contributed to a unique new book. Plus, a new narrative creating resource coincides with its launch. Want to get your hands on both?
by Dawn Reeves
As well as the positive excitement of going live with our new narrative for local government, One Story - Councils, covid and better futures, my neck is crunching, my shoulders are coat hangers and I keep feeling that launching a book without a glass in hand is just wrong. I remind myself, it’s a fantastic piece of work, it feels important, beautiful, and hopeful. It’s that just the moment of pressing send writ large, our vision is going out into the world.
The book has 60 compelling stories celebrating the true grit of people in councils and communities that’s been shown in spades during the pandemic. It’s about what holds us together, what absolutely matters and what people need to do together to face an uncertain future. And it has one story, the essence of a new narrative for local government.
There’s also a new toolkit for comms colleagues, to support you to build your own narrative. Many thanks to the Local Government Association for supporting and shortly hosting this. Big thanks too to our sponsors, CCLA, who have enabled us to produce hard copies of the book.
How will it go?
The volume of comms messages now mean it’s hard to see exactly how the new narrative will land, or to nail down specific outcomes. That’s the nature of narratives, they can be mercurial, fluid, breaking off in unexpected channels. At their best they change, grow, and get adapted to local circumstances, they live!
We’ve given the narrative the best shot we can, using an approach that benefits from the power of many voices speaking the same core change – a poly-vocal narrative no less. It’s a network of many creative hard-working people, who don’t like the dominant narratives about local government and stepped into the space, using their voices to change the big picture story. Right from the start, we saw this as a sort of guerrilla operation, bottom-up but linked to many organisations in the sector.
We think the work is hopeful because, despite fatigue and over-whelm, it looks back at what’s been done and forward to what we can do with the confidence of a critical mass.
Across the network of lovely people, we’ve mobilised all sorts of stories and masses of support, with the toolkit, the comms strategy, with illustrations, photography, actors, video, and podcasts. There are so many people to thank.
We hope you’ll download the book and toolkit.
And join us for the launch of the book, it’ll be an uplifting hour.
It takes place on 17 February, 4-5pm, via Zoom.
You can register HERE.
We look forward seeing you there.
Dawn Reeves, Fran Collingham, Paul Masterman and Darren Caveney
Team One Story
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