Zoom In, Zoom Out on an Impactful Story

​Durable change doesn't come from optimizing a pitch; it comes from moving a narrative.

​🗓 25 August 2026
🌍 A Egregor Community Event

​Most impact-driven founders and changemakers hear the same advice: "tell a better story." So they refine their pitch deck and rehearse their founding myth. That's storytelling, a real skill, but also the most zoomed-in, most surface-level piece of the picture.

​This session introduces a sharper model by drawing a clear distinction between storytelling, story, narrative, and the intelligence that allows you to work deliberately across all three levels.

​A narrative is the larger, shared pattern of meaning that a community or society already carries, the deep current running beneath public discourse. A story is one particular expression of that pattern, one of many tales feeding the same current. Storytelling is the craft of sharing that story in a specific situation, on a specific day, to a specific audience. And narrative intelligence is knowing which larger narrative your venture plugs into, identifying the stories competing with yours, and choosing, consciously, which patterns to reinforce, counter, or work to shift.

​That last level is where the real leverage lives, especially for impact-driven projects. And for organizations that seek to transform mindsets as much as practices, this capacity is not a communication skill, it is a strategic one.

​This session will help you:

• ​See the difference between narrative, story, and storytelling

• ​Read the larger narrative your venture is feeding or fighting

• ​Choose your relationship to it with intention: reinforcing, opposing, or working to shift it

​Speakers

​Alexis Niki

​Alexis is a storyteller and narrative leadership coach. With a background in screenwriting, she worked as a story consultant in independent film production before bringing her story skills to the nonprofit and business worlds. Through her consultancy StoryNova, she helps leaders define their most powerful stories and activate futures of hope over fear. A New Yorker by birth, she has lived more than half her life in Europe. Each encounter with a new culture required her to adapt and to integrate new information into her personal narrative, and she takes her clients on a similar journey

​Ciku Kimeria

​Ciku is an author, journalist, communications and strategy specialist, and adventurer whose work explores the complexity and richness of African stories. She is an Opinion Columnist at Bloomberg, a TEDx speaker, and a recent Bellagio Center Resident with The Rockefeller Foundation. The author of two mystery novels, she has also written for Quartz Africa, African Arguments, OkayAfrica, and The Africa Report. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from MIT and has advised leading global organizations on communications and strategy.

​Moderated by Arushi Gupta, co-founder of Egregor.

​​Format

​🕒 Networking & introduction
🕒 Speakers conversation
🕒 Community Q&A
🕒 Closing reflections & operational takeaways

​​About Egregor

​Egregor is a French endowment fund supporting social and environmental innovators through catalytic funding, strategic support and ecosystem-building approaches across Europe and Africa.