The labour of story-telling

Download the new research paper from Karolina Soliar, 2024 / 2025 #ShiftThePower Fellow, Re-shaping the Humanitarian System: How Local Organizations Can Use Narrative and Stories to Have Better Dialogue with Donors (also available in Ukrainian). 

Karolina Soliar, 2024 / 2025 #ShiftThePower Fellow

We are part of one of the first generations able to watch global crises unfold in real time. War, climate collapse, political extremism — we consume them through endless streams of headlines, statistics and live broadcasts. The result is a strange contradiction: we know more about suffering than ever before, yet often feel powerless in front of it.

People need an antidote. To me, community philanthropy is exactly that. A global, collective version of the “touch grass” exercise.

We still turn to community in times of greatest need. I recently stumbled across an article that captures this idea well: “In an apocalypse, the person who saves you is your neighbour.” For me, this conclusion resonates deeply. Ukraine has survived the prolonged attacks of Russia largely because of the people who stepped up in their communities — organizing shelters, helping neighbours evacuate shelling because they had available seats in their car, raising money for loved ones fighting on the frontlines, etc.

The only obstacle is that community philanthropy can only work its magic if people know that it exists. Like any meaningful initiative, local organizations need resources, visibility, and, inevitably, money. However, humanitarian systems have historically positioned donors and international organizations as narrators, while local communities became subjects of story-telling rather than participants. This often framed them as powerless, dependent and passive, pushing the main characters out of the very rooms where decisions about their lives were being made.

“Humanitarian systems have historically positioned donors and international organizations as narrators, while local communities became subjects of story-telling rather than participants.”

Through my own experience with localization efforts, I began noticing a recurring pattern: we keep trying to battle dominant narratives with data. There is an almost pathological need to produce more reports and quantify progress — celebrating how the percentage of funding directed to local organizations increased from 1% to 1.01% as “a small but meaningful step.” Reports and studies are still important. But perhaps we should rethink what they are ultimately for. Too often, research becomes a tool for proving the worth of local organizations to donors rather than providing local organizations with tools that they can actually use themselves.

Actually, I can deeply relate to the love of gathering statistics. Since university, working in communications, I have been trained to believe that everything meaningful has to be measurable. My former job, working with Ukrainian community philanthropy organizations, as well as my time spent as a #ShiftThePower Fellow, has helped to challenge this way of thinking, and to seriously consider why people make the decisions that they do.

In my previous role, I was responsible for organizing networking events called Meetings for Change, designed to connect local organizations with international NGOs and donors. I kept returning to one idea: if representatives of international organizations could form a genuine personal connection with even one person advocating for a local community, then perhaps, the next time they were discussing the budget for a humanitarian programme in the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine, they would pause and think: “Wait, I remember that passionate project manager from the local NGO. They told me how difficult it is to cover administrative costs and pay their core team. Maybe we should allocate more funding there.”

To try to foster these genuine connections, we came up with the Local Talks format. At the beginning of each networking event, we selected a few local speakers who could share stories connected to the specific realities of their region and field of work. We would work with them in the lead-up to the event, helping them to craft a powerful narrative. When I started writing my #ShiftThePower Fellowship paper, I initially, and very painfully, tried to come up with a miraculous formula that could measure the success or failure of Local Talks.

Is there a perfect story that performs better than others? Was the number of trainings we provided enough to help speakers deliver their message effectively? Did the speaker’s position or professional background matter to the audience? While none of these questions is entirely pointless, my breakthrough came when I realized that numbers do not always work well when it comes to understanding the “success” of stories.

“Before people change policies or reform institutions, they first need repeated exposure to new stories, perspectives and ways of understanding a problem.”

But one idea started to become crystal clear to me. And that is that one encounter is simply not enough. Humanitarian systems consist of living, breathing people, and their beliefs are shaped through constant repetition. I started thinking about communications as a form of social-reproductive labour. It’s the often invisible work that helps sustain larger systems and makes broader change possible.

In many ways, communication plays that role in social change. Before people change policies or reform institutions, they first need repeated exposure to new stories, perspectives and ways of understanding a problem. In grassroots movements, local actors are now carrying much of that labour themselves. Though while their stories may be valued as emotional and inspiring, very few resources go into the practical support needed to share them consistently — funding venues, filming events or hiring communications staff to help shape and distribute those narratives. In my paper, I suggest that Local Talks is an effective tool for helping local organizations share their stories. The format is short, flexible and relatively low-stakes in terms of production.

When the paper was nearly finished, I sent the first draft to a few trusted people in the sector for feedback. One of these individuals asked, “How is that a new idea?” For a day or two, I felt almost upset by it. Then, rightfully humbled, I realized that I’m no longer interested in fighting for originality. My goal is to make the work of lifting up powerful local stories reproducible.

We simply found a story-telling format that worked for us, and claimed it as an approachable tool for amplifying the voices of local organizations in Ukraine. Now I want to share these reflections so that other communications specialists, project managers, or whatever title your team assigned you this week, can take the idea as clay and shape it into a new vessel for carrying local stories into the wider humanitarian system, reshaping the narrative in the process.

By: Karolina Soliar, 2024 / 2025 #ShiftThePower Fellow