Engagement and Participation

This was the takeaway from our latest event, Can Stories Change Our World? , which brought together Cynnal Cymru members and other sustainably-minded businesses. We brought in three speakers to discuss how they use storytelling in their work and talk to us about the power and challenges of storytelling as change. This is clearly a topic on many people’s minds right now. It’s something we talked about in our September newsletter, and drew in a huge number of questions during this event. We discussed questions such as how you deal with apathy and depression in climate conversations, how to use comedy and positivity to tell poignant stories, and how to specifically reach Welsh audiences through storytelling style or platforms.  

Ant Green, founder of animation and illustration studio Motion Manor designed for positive change, discussed the importance of telling visual stories that imagine a fair and sustainable future.  

“In climate narratives, we’ve created a doom and gloom outlook because it’s the clearest outcome. We know what a bad outcome looks like, but we’re not so sure about the details of that good outcome.” 

Motion Manor, a Cynnal Cymru Member, have used their animations and illustrations to visualise this positive future for organisations such as the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations. While they use animation and illustration, Motion Manor ensures that their stories are rooted in reality – for Ant, that’s the key.  

“Show a snapshot of real people doing real things, even when using stories or illustration.” 

Camille Lovgreen, Cynnal Cymru’s Sustainability Advisor, echoed Ant’s sentiment of needing to situation any storytelling in real life examples, even when writing fiction. Alongside our Sustainability Strategist Karolina Rucinska, Camille wrote a series of fictional stories envisioning Wales in 2051. In their imagination, Wales had implemented all sustainability advice and was seeing a thriving environment and community. Through this set of stories, they were able to begin a conversation around what it looks like to successfully implement climate policy, as well as inspiring the hope that energises this movement.  

A similar set of stories was created by the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales (NICW), looking at Wales in 2100. The Chair of the NICW, David Clubb, was our third speaker. David stressed the importance of taking out time when thinking about long-term futures. David also discussed the need to evaluate not just how but where you’re telling your stories. NICW have recently made the decision to leave the big platforms, namely Meta and X, and move to open source versions that fit into their values. This decision comes at a time when many organisations and individuals are moving away from big name platforms in recognition of their censorship, unethical practices, and goals that don’t look out for regular people.

How do we tell our own stories? 

For Ffilm Cymru, the development agency for Welsh film and a Cynnal Cymru Member, visual storytelling is embedded into their work.  

Films such as this can be used to encourage behaviour change through emotive storytelling.

Ffilm Cymru’s work relies on the power of storytelling:  

“Stories have the power to provoke immense transformation in our society, as we’ve seen recently with ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office. They can also affect smaller personal shifts in perception and awareness that can snowball into positive change. It’s up to organisations like ours to help harness that power, and promote action on climate in creative, engaging and entertaining ways.” 

Just this month, Media Cymru and Ffilm Cymru Wales have launched a climate themed R&D content fund to support more climate stories and sustainability storytelling.

Is storytelling just for arts or cultural organisations?

Many of the attendees of our event came from organisations outside of the creative sector. The reality is that in every sector, telling your story in a way that reaches the right people is crucial.

Thrive Women’s Aid is a Cynnal Cymru Member organisation that supports women, children, and young people in Neath/Port Talbot who are affected by domestic abuse. They help survivors rebuild their lives and independence in safe communities, supporting entire families to break the cycle of abuse permanently and foster healthier, safer environments for all.

In this video, they tell the impact of their work through simple and effective storytelling.

As we look into the new year, it’s a great time to consider the stories you tell, and how and where you’re telling them.

Can Stories Change Our World? was part of Cynnal Cymru’s quarterly series of Cardiff-based events. Make sure you check out our next event coming soon, Growing the Sustainability Workforce, where we’ll hear from Future Generations Leadership Academy participant Abi Hoare and Finley Povey from Transport for Wales. The event is free for Cynnal Cymru Members, Sparc|Sbarc residents, and we have a limited number of free places for Cardiff University students. Don’t miss it!

In 2019, a group of representatives from registered housing associations across Wales sat down around a table with one aim: to find a way to work together to help alleviate the climate emergency.

They agreed that understanding their carbon impact, both as individuals and organisations, and being able to make informed decisions on reducing carbon emissions, had the potential to be transformative for the social housing sector and communities. Thus Carbon Literacy Cartrefi Cymru (CLCC) was born – a consortium that would provide a platform for knowledge sharing across the sector, collaborative problem solving, and peer to peer teaching to deliver Carbon Literacy training to staff across Wales.

One phrase in the meeting notes from the earliest days of the CLCC succinctly summarised what the approach would be:

“This consortium is about reaching you where you’re at and helping from there.” 

Fast forward five years, and the CLCC is now coming to a close, having achieved exactly what it set out to do. The consortium’s flagship project, a fully accredited Carbon Literacy training course tailored to the social housing sector, has been delivered to 598 people across Wales, thanks to the enthusiasm and dedication of the CLCC trainers who have passed on their knowledge to their peers and colleagues. The course has received two substantial updates and has been fully translated into Welsh. Its final iteration will continue to be used by members to certify their staff as Carbon Literate. Many of those housing associations are now certified Carbon Literate Organisations, and continue to champion carbon reduction in the workplace. As was inevitable with a large group of disparate organisations, not everyone’s time as members of the CLCC looks the same. Each had their own priorities, their own challenges to overcome. But the consortium’s ethos of looking at where each member was and guiding them to where they wanted to be played a huge role in the success of the project.

Bron Afon Community Housing was a part of the CLCC from the start, and remained as members throughout the lifetime of the consortium. Nadine Davies, Community Decarbonisation Officer at Bron Afon, said, “The CLCC has enabled us as an organisation to come together and learn about the importance of climate change and carbon emissions. It provided us with valuable skills, networks, and guidance for us to deliver the course to our colleagues successfully.”

Reflecting on her term as Chair of the CLCC since May 2023, Nadine added,

“The CLCC created a space for us to discuss and share in confidence what was going well and what our struggles were when delivering Carbon Literacy. I found the regular meetings and coming together with others delivering the course useful and it was good to listen and take on board points raised. I very much enjoyed my time as Chair of the CLCC and without it I don’t think we would have had as much success with the delivery of Carbon Literacy as we have. I look forward to continuing to deliver Carbon Literacy to the rest of our staff and the wider community to help tackle climate change.”

Fast forward another five years from now, and we hope that we will still be seeing the positive impact the CLCC has had. Consortium members are talking about rolling out Carbon Literacy to their tenants – and with more than 100,000 houses owned across the consortium, that’s a lot of people. We’ve created a Climate Essentials course to help trainers pass on key knowledge in a shorter, more accessible format, and encourage interest in the full training. For some member organisations, certified Carbon Literacy training is now mandatory for all new staff, and will continue to be delivered long into the future. For those housing associations who want customised training or advice, individually or collaboratively, Cynnal Cymru’s team can work with them to ensure that the success of the CLCC is just the first step on their carbon reduction journey.

In November 2020, when the world was coping with an unprecedented global pandemic, 29 members of the CLCC still found the time to meet, to talk about what they wanted the consortium’s future to be. Many of the initial targets had already been met, with 65 people already certified as Carbon Literate, and 83 people about to take the Carbon Literacy Train the Trainer course, at the time making it the biggest ever Carbon Literacy Train the Trainer cohort. But the world had changed since the CLCC’s inception, with training now having to be delivered remotely, collaborative working much harder than it had been in the past, and organisations rightly prioritising core business continuity and the wellbeing of their staff over less immediate concerns. It would have been very easy for Covid-19 to spell the end of the CLCC, but luckily its members were committed to keeping it very much alive. It’s thanks to them, the dedicated support of their colleagues, and the enormous enthusiasm of hundreds of people across Wales, that we can look back on the past five years and honestly say that the CLCC has made a difference – and its success will continue to inspire more and better changes to how we live.