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“What if we support community by exploring and nurturing connections to each other, place, local nature and mythology to grow the conditions for hope, collective joy and a less isolated and scary future together.” Isabelle Fraser, Understory Network Weaver
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This is a story about community and connection, best shared around a fire with spiced cider and soft cushions. Are you sitting comfortably? Let us tell you about an epic journey that we have begun and are inviting you to join.
Our story is a quest, to see if it is possible to come together as communities to weave connection and relationship into material strong enough to help us stay warm through all the scary, unknown futures we might face in the times ahead. This is a story about creating the conditions that support people in our home towns to act, to build, to create. The story underneath the action; the unseen space of relationship which makes it possible for change to fruit.
So far, we have gathered our crew, who will help us navigate our way. We have prepared some tools to start with, we have agreed our principles of how we work together, and now we are ready to share with you tales of how we will explore attachment, nurture it and find out whether our faith that it will help us mobilise as communities, to build the futures we want, holds true.
This piece of writing has been co-written by the four teams in our four places. Watchet, Minehead, Amber Valley and Dudley. Here we describe the work, the journey ahead.
Thank you to the National Lottery Community Fund for believing in this journey and making it possible.
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Understory is the story beneath a community; the network of unseen memories, connections, challenges and imaginings that form the context of a place.
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It’s the practice of making the invisible, visible, highlighting ways in which humans are in relationship with their surroundings. It is about our connection to each other, to place, and to our other-than-human kin, and it is about exploring those connections across time, from our deep past to the futures we dream of.
We are working together in four places. In Watchet and Minehead on the Somerset Coast, and Dudley and Amber Valley in the Midlands. We will be using this space to tell tales of the things that have happened and the way our thinking is headed. We intend to ‘work in the open’ together which means we will tell stories without too much polish. There will be different voices and different perspectives. It will be our Ursula Le Guin inspired Understory Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
The skeleton story, with no flesh or flowers, is this:
Understory supports community action using the tools of maps, games, craft and conversation. By gathering people together in conversations about relationship, time and place we can promote a way of being that centres around kindness, care and connection. We use these tools to chart paths out of the crises we find ourselves in, towards futures that are just and regenerative.
But skeletons are just good mineral fertiliser really, so don’t give that paragraph too much time. The story really begins from the compost of the last few years, where Onion Collective and Free Ice Cream spent the last six years designing a tool that maps community action in places with a digital network map. With it we were able to understand what purpose groups and organisations were working towards; we could see which groups were connected, we could use it to understand bonding, bridging and linking social capital - (though these capitalist inspired terms feel out of touch with the worlds we’re dreaming of now).
We mapped 30 places across the UK and in doing so, learnt the value of making relationships of community action visible and explored how these visualisations could be used as evidence for funders to support ambitions for future activity, to more effectively organise existing community action, and to mobilise different parts of the community to get involved. (Find out more in our learning document here.)