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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?

10/15/2026

What does it mean to show up for one another before disaster strikes?

In our latest NewStories newsletter, we meet two remarkable emergency management professionals, Deb Needham and Dan Seguin, whose experiences offer deeply human perspectives on preparedness, resilience, and the power of community.

We also share Nicole's reflections from our recent Regenerative Responders Community Call, where participants explored the Ready Together guide, along with an invitation to help shape what's next for Regenerative Responders in 2027.
From homemade cookies to neighbors arriving with chainsaws, their stories reveal the many ways we can contribute to one another's well-being—and how the relationships we build in everyday life can make all the difference when challenges arise.

Read the newsletter with links via the link in comments.

10/01/2026

Resilience starts at home. And it grows when we prepare together.

As October begins, we’re thinking about what helps us feel ready for what comes—and the people and relationships that help us meet it together.

On Wednesday, October 7, from 2:30–4:00 PM PDT, our Regenerative Responders community will gather to explore how to bring people together around Ready Together, our newly revised guide for community-centered preparedness. We’ll talk about who to invite, how to gather, and how to begin building the relationships and trust that matter when disruption comes.

Our October newsletter also shares a simple Ready Together practice, Bob Stilger’s reflections on the crossroads disaster can create, and an invitation to join RegenWorld in the redwoods later this month.

Join the community call + read the October newsletter via the links in comments.

09/10/2026

What does it mean to practice peace now?

The team at Great Transition Stories began asking that question as they prepared to join the extraordinary convergence of peacebuilding activity unfolding around the world this September.

Over the past several weeks, they've been listening to people who have spent years—and in some cases decades—working in peacebuilding, healing, systems change, and collective transformation. Again and again, peace is being described not simply as an outcome we hope someone, somewhere, will eventually achieve, but as something we participate in.

It begins within us. And it doesn't remain there.

Three voices in our latest newsletter:
Jon Ramer offers a provocative distinction between believing in peace and being peace: "Being peace is right where I am, right here, right now."

Deborah Moldow, interfaith minister and longtime UN peacebuilder, is still asking: "What's mine to do here? How can I be a force for healing and peace?"

Markabadi brings world peace closer to home, exploring inner stillness as practice—and how what we cultivate within ripples outward.

Plus ways to participate this month:
🕊️ September 11–21 — 11 Days of Global Unity, with GTS opening the series
🕊️ September 13 — Invest in Peace: Humanity's Highest ROI
🕊️ September 15 — Meeting This Moment, our live gathering in the Peace Intelligence Room
🕊️ September 19 — PEACE AID: a digital Torch of Peace carried around the world through music

We'll return September 17 with more peacebuilders, reflections from our live gathering, and stories of hope from four of the world's major conflict zones.
Read the full newsletter with all of the links via the link in comments.

09/08/2026

Twenty-five years in the making.

The Re-Storying Disaster Framework made its debut last week at the September Regenerative Responders Community Call—the culmination of a quarter century walking alongside communities facing disaster, and six months of reflection and writing by the Re-Storying Disaster team at NewStories.

Nine stepping stones, grouped in three movements:
Coming back to life — honor grief, tend an infrastructure of trust, cultivate kinship across difference. The relational and emotional ground everything else grows from.

Meaning and direction — practice leadership that lowers anxiety, surface shared principles, re-story for new possibilities.

Insight into practice — take action while reflecting, connect translocally, tend the long, slow work.

One of the most important insights from the call: these stepping stones are not for the immediate days and weeks after disaster, when communities are still too raw to receive a call toward new possibilities. They may even be harmful in those moments.

Instead, they are a toolkit practitioners metabolize beforehand—carried in the background when crisis hits, informing how they listen, lead, and respond without asking people living through disaster to engage the Framework itself.

"The stepping stones are for people who are able and willing to lead change in their own lives and communities and organizations—change that points toward equity, justice, kindness, and love." — Bob Stilger

Read the full recap and access the framework via the link in comments.

08/25/2026

Disaster reveals things about a community that were always true but rarely spoken—who is trusted, who has been carrying too much alone, who knows how to fix things, whose voices need to be part of the plan.

This fall, the Regenerative Responders community gathers three times to sit with what disaster reveals and what becomes possible in its wake.

September 2 | The Practice of Re-Storying Disaster
An introduction to Re-Storying Disaster as a practice—the work of re-enlivening, re-patterning, and re-structuring toward a life-giving future. What are the conditions that make this practice possible?

October 7 | Getting Started with Ready Together
A guided tour of the Ready Together Toolkit and open discussion about starting a group in your own neighborhood. Communities that do this work beforehand walk into an emergency already knowing each other.

December 2 | Hopes & Possibilities for 2027
A chance to shape what comes next—including the possibility of a cohort-based certificate program. What would best serve community practitioners in the year ahead?

All three calls run 2:30–4:00 pm PT, hosted by Nicole LaJeunesse and Bob Stilger. Each one is a space for genuine human connection—you'll be invited, never pressured, to share your thoughts and let your voice be heard.

Full details and registration at the link in comments.

We would love to see you there.

08/06/2026

"Saturday afternoon I wondered if anything I knew mattered. By Monday I remembered I know what to do in these times. Listen. Connect. Breathe. Find the next step—and take it. Together." — NewStories founder Bob Stilger

The Spokane Complex Fire has been moving through the place NewStories calls home. Three members of our team live here. Nearly 70,000 of our neighbors are displaced.

We share this not to center ourselves in a story that belongs to an entire community, but because it has clarified something we already knew: the work of accompanying communities through disaster is never abstract. One day, it may arrive at your own door.

Our latest newsletter shares three things:

Ashes to Resilience: Finding Your Way After Disaster — a guide created with Regenerating Paradise, gathering practical wisdom, emotional support, and hard-earned lessons from people who have lived through catastrophe. Nineteen practical orientations for the days, weeks, and years ahead. It belongs to anyone who needs it.

When Disaster Comes Home — NewStories founder Bob Stilger has spent more than 50 years accompanying communities through rupture in Japan, Zimbabwe, Northern California, and beyond. This week, that work came home. His reflection is published now on Great Transition Stories.

Thursday Gatherings — beginning August 6, a weekly Zoom space to listen, reflect, and be with others navigating disaster and recovery. Open to anyone.

Recovery is rarely one dramatic moment. More often, it is thousands of small ones.

You can read the newsletter with links to all mentiones in our comments.

08/04/2026

The hearts of everyone at NewStories are with the Spokane community as these devastating fires continue to unfold.

Headquartered in Spokane, members of our team call this community home.

In moments like these, it's easy to become overwhelmed by the flood of information and the uncertainty of what comes next. We created these two companion resources to offer a little orientation: one shares gentle guidance for navigating the days ahead, and the other gathers trusted local resources for those affected by the fires.

Please share them with anyone who may need them.

With thousands of our neighbors still displaced and many communities continuing to face uncertainty, we are holding everyone affected in our thoughts—including the families who have lost homes, those waiting to return, the first responders, volunteers, and all those caring for one another in countless quiet ways.

07/30/2026

The regeneration we need is not coming from the top down.

It's already underway—practiced by people choosing to work with life rather than extract from it, in bioregions and neighborhoods and community gardens across the world. Growing food. Repairing soil. Tending watersheds. Building the relationships that make genuine resilience possible.

This summer and fall, that work is gathering. Our latest newsletter maps permaculture and bioregional gatherings across each region of the country:

🌲 West — Permaculture Symposium in Spokane and the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress in Oregon
🏜️ Southwest — REGENERATE Conference in Santa Fe, bringing together ranchers, farmers, and land stewards around arid working lands
🌾 Midwest — Wisconsin Permaculture Convergence in the Driftless region
🌊 Southeast — Florida Permaculture Convergence at London Island
🍂 Northeast — where new gatherings are taking shape

Plus a look ahead to the Transition Network's 20th anniversary gathering in Portugal in 2027.

Wherever you are, there is likely something closer than you think.

Read the full newsletter with links to events via the link in comments.

07/16/2026

For more than 25 years, NewStories and Kufunda Village in Zimbabwe have walked alongside each other—learning, building, grieving, and dreaming together about what communities become when they organize around life rather than against it.

Kufunda was born out of collapse. When Zimbabwe's economy unraveled in the early years of this century and the world cut ties, Ubuntu—the infrastructure of reciprocity and trust—began to thrive. "I am because we are" became community strategy.

This August, Kufunda is opening its doors to young people from around the world for Rooting & Rising — A Two-Week International Youth Gathering, August 10–22, 2026.
Designed for people ages 18–28 who find themselves at a threshold: navigating transitions, asking what is calling them forward, and ready to explore those questions in genuine community. Two weeks of land, creativity, shared meals, art, movement, storytelling, and participatory practices that engage body, heart, and mind.

More than anything: the gift of belonging.

Participation fees: $550 Global North / $300 Global South. Partial scholarships available.

If a young person comes to mind as you read this—someone ready to root down before rising up—please share this with them.

Learn more and register at the link in comments.

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.

Address

Spokane, WA

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Website

http://www.NewStories.org/, http://www.GreatTransitionStories.org/, http://www.AfterNow.Today/

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