Using Story to Explore Complex Situations and Movement Building

The Arcus Foundation sought to explore the experiences of their grantees who mobilized against an anti-homosexuality bill introduced in the Ugandan parliament. Thaler Pekar & Partners facilitated a layered storysharing session, in which twenty participants were prompted to recall, examine, and make sense of their experiences. Despite the multiplicity of individual stories, the exercise of developing a collective narrative helped to surface certain recurrent themes, challenges, characters, and positive and negative practices. The result was an inventory of the grantees’ collective knowledge and resources, mapped against a timeline of events during the crisis.

This program was part of a larger effort to assist grantees in understanding their overall strategies, goals, and assessments. The Arcus Foundation is “thrilled with the outcomes” and the program’s contribution to understanding movement building and the assessment of progress, especially in rapidly changing, complex situations.