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NewStories

Re-Storying for Regenerative Futures
-- Change your story, change what's possible. Stories shape us. Or simply aren’t true?

They shape our thoughts, our perceptions, and our responses to the world. They hold our history and guide our actions in difficult times. They define us to ourselves and each other and provide our place in the order of things. What happens when the Old Stories, the ones we were taught to believe, no longer serve or match our experience? What are the New Stories, the ones that tell us the truth for

these times and help us understand where we are going? What is the Larger Story of who and what we are that gives new meaning to our lives, strength to speak truth to power, and courage to ride the waves of change with style and grace, love and humility, gratitude and praise?

06/11/2026

"I can say anything I want now at this age — which is a great liberation and a big responsibility." — Meg Wheatley

Meg Wheatley has spent five decades teaching leadership, community, and what it means to be human. At nearly 82, she has arrived at ideas that don't fit neatly into any of it.

She teaches three kinds of compassion—and the one most of us are missing is the fiercest. Idiot compassion is the cape-rushing impulse that ends in burnout. Loving kindness is genuine partnership that strengthens rather than depletes. Fierce compassion is compassion without aggression—the kind that carries a sword. Not for aggression. For clarity. For the courage to speak when something needs to be said.

Our profile on Meg—drawn from a conversation with Great Transition Stories editor-in-chief Stephanie Regalado last week—is live now on Great Transition Stories, where she is also a featured storyteller. And Friday, June 20, Meg is offering a three-hour live exploration: Fierce Compassion: The Power of the Sacred Feminine.

Read our newsletter, including links to Meg’s profile and event, via the link in comments.

06/04/2026

Seven-plus years after the Camp Fire, the people of Paradise are still at work—rebuilding, carrying what cannot be put down, and finding the endurance to keep going within their community.

Last month, we enjoyed the honor of witnessing that work firsthand.

The first Re-Storying Disaster Learning Exchange brought community practitioners from across Northern California to Paradise for twenty-four hours of embodied learning—hand-crafted dinners, Ridge tours, housing development visits, conversations with Town Staff, and a gathering at Hope Plaza, the moving community-led memorial honoring the lives lost in the Camp Fire.

What made it different from a conference or a workshop? The place itself was the teacher. By attaching conversations to specific locations in Paradise, something opened up that boardrooms rarely allow. Impromptu exchanges bubbled up throughout the day. Stories emerged in the spaces held open.

"Communities are the authors of their own futures. Learning Exchanges are a way for communities facing similar challenges to see how others are making their way forward—exchanging ideas and experiences while building solidarity and connection across distance and difference."

The Paradise Learning Exchange is the first in a series. Future exchanges will feature communities including Nevada City and Cobb Mountain.

Read our reflection and stay tuned for what's coming next at the link in comments.

05/28/2026

Over decades of accompanying communities through disruption and transformation, we have come to believe something deeply: trust is the infrastructure for regenerative futures to emerge. Durable relationships create the conditions that make lasting transformation possible—and investment in those relationships is core to everything we have seen succeed.

That conviction brought us to this resource, and we think it will resonate with many of you.

Community As Strategy: 10 Ways to Create Belonging and Power Where You Live is a beautifully crafted, freely shareable zine by Sarah van Gelder—lifelong activist, writer, and founding editor of YES! Magazine, and a longtime friend and colleague of NewStories and Great Transition Stories founders Bob Stilger and Lynnaea Lumbard.

Sarah's ten practices are rooted in lived experience, cross-cultural wisdom, and decades of on-the-ground learning. They are for anyone who gathers people: neighborhood organizers, facilitators, educators, community builders, team leaders, and anyone trying to make the groups they're part of work smoother.

"It was community that kept our ancestors alive. And it will be in community that we can support each other through today's crises." — Sarah van Gelder

The zine is free—in the Creative Commons—to download, print, copy, and share widely. Thirty pages of practical wisdom you can hold in your hands, pass across a table, or drop into a group chat.

Read our overview and link to download via the link in comments.

05/19/2026

Today, Great Transition Stories is live—and we are so glad you're here.

Fifteen years ago, Duane Elgin, Jeff Vander Clute, and Lynnaea Lumbard began gathering the archetypal stories of transformation that could serve as maps for navigating change. Today that vision has found its fullest expression yet: a living commons with more than 200 pages of content, 450+ curated resources, and a growing body of work that translates paradigm-shifting research into accessible stories for anyone seeking deeper understanding of this moment we are all living through.

Today, nine members of our team share their own personal entry points into the site—ten different doors into the same living house. Find the voice that resonates and step inside at the link in comments.

This commons grows richer with every voice that joins it. If you know of a story worth telling, a voice worth amplifying, or a resource worth sharing—we want to hear from you at the email, also in comments.

Cheers!

05/14/2026

Today, members of our Re-Storying Disaster team are on the ground in Paradise, California, for the NorCal Fire-Affected Communities Collaboratory Learning Exchange—gathering with community practitioners who have spent seven years building something worthy of what was lost.

NewStories Founder and Board Chair Bob Stilger has spent 50 years asking the most important questions about community—what holds it together, what tears it apart, and what becomes possible when people choose to build something new in the ashes of the old. From Spokane to Zimbabwe to Japan to Northern California, he has been present for that work again and again.

Today he weaves those threads together—and extends an invitation to conspire.
"I am not the disaster guy. I am the possibilities guy," he shares (and everyone who has worked with him agrees).

To Nicole, Michelle, and Bob and everyone gathering in Paradise today and tomorrow: we are with you in spirit—and so proud of this work. 🌲

You can read Bob's full reflection at the link in our comments.

05/07/2026

Restoring fire-affected landscapes takes more than good intentions. It takes data, trust, flexible funding—and sometimes, 30+ partners willing to work together across jurisdictions over generations.

Last week, the Regenerative Responders community gathered to learn from Taylor Nilsson, Executive Director of the Butte County Fire Safe Council, about the collaborative model powering landscape-scale restoration in Butte County, California.

A few things that stayed with us:
🌿 Look for "stacked benefits"—the ways a single project can serve multiple partners at once. When shared value becomes visible, trust and momentum follow.

📊 Accurate shared data is foundational. Without it, project planning and grant development stall before they begin.

🤝 Trust takes time. The atmosphere of collaboration within the Butte County Collaborative Group has been built over years of steady relationship-tending — and it's what makes everything else possible.

💰 And the biggest challenge? Funding. Landscape-scale restoration requires 100-year thinking. Our funding models haven't caught up yet.
The full recap and recording are available now—with lessons that translate to communities navigating recovery and regeneration anywhere in the world.

Read the full reflection and watch the recording via the link in comments.

04/22/2026

"Life is Earth animated." — Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth

Pause for just a moment today. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Breathe in slowly and let your body remember what it has always known — that we belong to this Earth as much as it belongs to us. We are not separate from this living world. We are an expression of it.

To every community builder, land steward, storyteller, healer, regenerative thinker, and living systems worker quietly weaving a new relationship between humanity and this planet:

Your work is Earth's work. Thank you. Keep going.

🌍 Happy .

04/17/2026

Seven years ago, the people of Paradise, California, faced the unimaginable. What they have built since is something the world needs to see, and is best told by the people who lived it—who stayed, returned, and chose to build something worthy of what was lost.

NewStories has been accompanying the Paradise community since early 2019. And now, we're inviting communities from everywhere to learn alongside them through two upcoming events—open to anyone, anywhere doing this work:

🌱 April 30 — Regenerative Responders Community Call (online—join from anywhere) Collaborative Funding Strategies in Paradise, Butte County & Beyond
Community leaders from Butte County share tested strategies for coordinating resources across 30+ partners—hard-won lessons that translate to communities navigating recovery and regeneration anywhere in the world.

🏔️ May 14–15 — NorCal Fire-Affected Communities Collaboratory Learning Exchange (in Paradise, CA)
An on-the-ground gathering open to communities everywhere—a rare opportunity to learn directly from the practitioners living this work, in the place where it is happening.

These are invitations into what becomes possible on the other side of loss—and the people of Paradise are living proof. The learning they are willing to share belongs to all of us.

Link to read more in our newsletter (and to register) in the comments.

04/06/2026

What do we do when the structures and stories we've lived inside all our lives are changing?

NewStories Founder and Board Chair Bob Stilger has spent 50 years helping communities come together, dream together, and grieve together—and he has a clear answer: we find the next elegant minimum step toward a horizon that calls us. We keep walking. We keep picking ourselves up.

This Tuesday, April 7, Bob joins a remarkable cohort of practitioners for At Work in the Ruins—a five-week online journey hosted by Beehive Productions and the Rotterdam Change Days, drawing on Dougald Hine's four essential tasks for navigating a time of endings and emergence:

🌿 Salvaging — gathering the goodness worth carrying forward
🕯️ Mourning — honoring what must be released, and finding the seeds within the grief
🔍 Discerning — seeing clearly what never truly served us
🧵 Weaving — picking up dropped threads of older wisdom ready to matter again

These are not tasks of resignation. They are tasks of orientation—for people who refuse to look away, and who trust that something new can take root in well-tended ground.

Joining Bob are Dougald Hine, Vanessa Reid, Carlotta Cataldi, and a cohort of changemakers navigating this same threshold—hosted with care by Amy Lenzo, Rowan Simonsen, and Mary Alice Arthur.

Five sessions. Tuesdays April 7–28 and Wednesday May 6. Begins at $175. Scholarship opportunities available.

"And our question becomes — how do we participate in co-creating what comes next?" — Bob Stilger

For more information + registration options, visit the link in comments.

04/02/2026

"It was a gathering at the sacred well," and "An island of sanity in a world of chaos."

That's how our co-founder Lynnaea Lumbard described Bioneers 2026—and we couldn't say it better.

Eight of us from NewStories and Great Transition Stories spent three days in Berkeley alongside nearly 3,000 people doing the good work of living systems, community resilience, and regenerative possibility.

The 37th Annual Bioneers gathering—the largest since before COVID—brought together Indigenous leaders, youth voices, scientists, artists, farmers, and long-standing practitioners from around the world.

A few things we heard that we won't forget:
"We don't have to go back to nature. We ARE nature. Our responsibility is to remember." — Corrina Gould, Lisjan Nation

"Finding beauty in a broken world is an act of bringing beauty alive." — Terry Tempest Williams

"Nature is a language your body knows." — Dr. Jeannette Armstrong

"I am, because we are." — Leah Penniman, Soul Fire Farm

Our latest newsletter shares what we heard, what moved us, and what we're carrying forward.

Read the full recap: https://mailchi.mp/newstories/gifts-to-share-from-bioneers-2026

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Spokane, WA

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Tuesday	9am - 5pm
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http://www.NewStories.org/, http://www.GreatTransitionStories.org/, http://www.AfterNow.Today/

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