Who Owns the Story? Moving From Storytelling About Communities to Storytelling by Them
About the session
The social impact sector talks frequently about community voice. But there is a difference between including someone's voice in a story and giving them the power to shape the story itself.
Too often, communities become the raw material for narratives created elsewhere. Their experiences are interviewed, photographed, filmed and translated into campaigns designed around the priorities of nonprofits, funders or international audiences. Even when those stories are well intentioned, the decisions about what gets told, how it is framed and where it travels often remain far from the people whose lives are being represented.
What changes when communities become the storytellers rather than the subjects?
This session will explore ground-up and community-led storytelling as a question of power, ownership and justice. Drawing on experiments in proximate filmmaking, solutions storytelling and climate communications from the Global South, it will examine how communities can create narratives on their own terms and how institutions can support that work without taking control of it.
The conversation will also tackle the challenge of scale. How can locally created narratives reach larger audiences without losing their context or ownership? And what can climate and development organisations learn from communications models emerging in the Global South?
Discussion Group Leaders
Amber Lucero-Dwyer is Director of Marketing & Communications at World Connect, advancing locally led development through communications that elevate community-driven solutions and impact.
Manisha Gupta is Founder and CEO at Start Up!, accelerating social entrepreneurs and locally rooted solutions through leadership development and impact incubation.
Prachur Goel is CEO at Momentum Shifts, advancing climate action by building narratives that help climate solutions reach communities and mainstream culture.
Travis Randall is Director, USA at Ubuntu Pathways, advancing community-led approaches to health and education through strategic communications, fundraising, and partnerships.
Gabriel Diamond is Filmmaker at Skoll Foundation, advancing social impact storytelling that amplifies changemakers and explores connection, vulnerability, and social justice.
What to expect
A participatory conversation grounded in practical examples of community-led filmmaking, storytelling and narrative change. Participants will examine who makes editorial decisions, who owns the creative output, how resources and platforms are shared, and what genuine power-sharing looks like in practice.
The discussion will move from creating community-owned stories to the harder question of how those narratives can travel, influence public discourse and reach communities at scale.
Who this is for
This session is for community storytellers, filmmakers, communications practitioners, climate and development organisations, funders, journalists and movement leaders interested in shifting narrative power closer to the people whose experiences and ideas are being represented.
What You Will Get Out of It
Practical lessons from community-led and proximate storytelling models
A framework for thinking about ownership and power in the storytelling process
Approaches to supporting community creative expression without extracting or controlling it
Insights from climate and political communications emerging in the Global South
Ideas for scaling community-facing narratives while preserving local voice and context