Who gets heard? Storytelling, power and social change

The Storytellers Fund was created in 2023 to help diverse storytellers share hopeful stories with new audiences and explore what helps those stories travel. This Reflection looks back at its findings on how we can support social justice storytellers to have their work heard, valued and shared.

Storytelling as social justice work

The stories a society tells about itself matter. They shape who is seen, who is valued, whose experiences are recognised, and what futures feel possible. A healthy society depends on a diversity of people being able to contribute their perspectives, experiences and ideas. It is widely acknowledged across movements, creative practice, campaigning and philanthropy, that stories can help people connect human experience to wider social realities, cultivate care and open possibilities for different futures.

Stories help people recognise themselves and one another, create moments of joy and connection, and invite compassion where there might otherwise be distance. But stories do not circulate equally.

The ability to share stories, have them heard and sustain their influence over time is shaped by access to resources, relationships, institutions and platforms. Some stories circulate widely. Others may not move beyond the communities or spaces where they were first created. Storytelling is therefore not only about creativity, it is also about power. By this we mean whose stories are heard, whose experiences are recognised, and who has access to the platforms and relationships that enable stories to travel.

The Storytellers Fund was launched in 2023 as a pilot initiative to support those aiming to inspire change to share their content more widely and reach new audiences. Established by the Movement Effectiveness Team at JRF, the fund supported storytellers working across theatre, film, journalism, gaming, podcasts, exhibitions and community storytelling to extend the reach of existing cultural work and connect with new audiences.

Following 2 rounds of pilot funding, the Movement Effectiveness team worked with learning and evaluation partners — tialt and Unity Effect — to reflect on what the support enabled. Thank you to the storytellers for sharing their experiences as a part of this, which has made this learning possible.

This learning work has raised broader questions about power, participation, and the resources and relationships that help stories reach new audiences.

Find out more about the funded work and read the full evaluation by tialt and Unity Effect here.

The reflections that follow explore 3 lessons we have taken away. We hope these reflections are useful to others thinking about how storytelling can contribute to social change, and how funders can better support the people and relationships that make this work possible.

Stories matter when they are seen and heard

Stories do not contribute to social change simply by existing, they become meaningful when they are seen, felt, shared and discussed. The evaluation found that funding stories to help them travel further addressed a critical dissemination gap within storytelling for social change work. In exploring this gap, the findings highlight the reality that if stories shape how we understand ourselves and one another, then who gets to hear stories is a question of power.

Power isn't just having a voice — it's being heard

Looking across the portfolio, the evaluation highlighted that access to audiences is shaped by resources, relationships and opportunity. This often-invisible infrastructure determines whose stories are heard, shared and amplified, and the evaluation helped make those dynamics more visible.

The Storytellers Fund did not seek to change these wider systems on its own. But it did help reduce some of the barriers that prevent storytellers from reaching new audiences, supporting opportunities for stories to circulate through festivals, partnerships, touring, community venues and digital platforms that might otherwise have remained out of reach.

As shown in the evaluation, this looked different across the storytellers' work. Supporting the not-for-profit campaign group, Round Our Way, amplified place-based storytelling through a digital library, making the growing impact of climate change in low-income communities urgent and relatable, including in coastal areas and across the north of England. Supporting the documentary Black, Queer & Done extended the reach of the film, enabling global dissemination, awards, and long-term visibility.

Supporting the podcast Antisocial Economics, which translated complex research into accessible public storytelling, helped economic ideas to be shared beyond academic audiences. In each case, JRF’s support was about creating opportunities for existing stories and ideas to circulate more widely.

Reach and depth both matter

Another reflection we’ve drawn from the evaluation is that diversifying who gets heard is not simply about reaching more people, but about how people engage. Many projects expanded their audiences through touring, digital dissemination and partnerships, bringing stories into community, educational and online spaces. Supporting a play adaptation of the book Windrush Child, for example, removed cost and access barriers, and through creative storytelling introduced primary-aged audiences to themes of racial justice.

Other projects worked through deep forms of participation such as immersive and collaborative approaches. When we look at these projects alongside and in relation to each other, we are reminded that breadth and depth are not competing measures of success. Both contribute to widening whose stories are heard, how people connect with them, and the conversations they make possible.

Rethinking impact

The evaluation also reminds us to be thoughtful about how we understand impact. Stories rarely create social change on their own, and their influence cannot be isolated or measured in a simple, linear way. They are encountered, interpreted and shared within wider social, cultural and political contexts.

Rather than asking what impact a single story had, it is perhaps more useful to ask whether storytellers had greater opportunities for their work to be seen, discussed and taken up by others. This shift moves us away from attributing change to individual stories, and towards understanding the role storytelling plays within wider processes of social change.

Stories shape how we understand ourselves, one another and what is possible

Stories help us make sense of ourselves and our relationship to one another. They can reinforce narratives of individualism and scarcity, or they can invite us to see care, cooperation, dignity and shared responsibility as part of what make us human. Across the Storytellers Fund, projects created space for audiences to connect emotionally with experiences that are often misunderstood or excluded from public and cultural life.

Stories create space for hope

The Storytellers Fund began with an interest in supporting hopeful stories. Looking back, an important insight from the evaluation, particularly in today's political context, is that hope is rarely created through simple optimism or easy answers. Across the portfolio, hope emerged through recognition, creativity and the possibility of collective action.

Rather than resolving difficult issues, storytellers such as those behind Mandala Theatre’s show Seed Guardians and Spoken Futurism Live’s immersive theatre shows, invited audiences to imagine lives, communities and futures that challenged fatalism without ignoring the realities of injustice. The newsletter Conversations on Poverty addressed issues of extraction and exploitation in media storytelling head on by creating a space for questions about ethics and representation to be raised with leading writers.

Looking across the projects, the evaluation also showed that hopeful storytelling is not about simplifying complexity. The play Port Talbot Gotta Banksy for example, showed that it is about creating space for people to recognise themselves and one another, to connect across different experiences, and to imagine that the systems shaping our lives today are neither inevitable nor beyond change.

Recognition builds agency

Many of the most powerful moments came not simply from people hearing stories, but from people seeing their own experiences reflected with honesty and dignity. In work such as community-driven literary projects Authors of the Estate and She Could Fly, people’s experiences of different social justice issues were not treated as something to be represented after the fact, it shaped the stories themselves.

More widely, communities participated in creating projects, interpreting and sharing the work, which built confidence, ownership and a stronger sense of agency. We learnt that some significant shifts therefore came not from stories reaching communities, but also from communities shaping the stories that reached wider audiences.

Funding shapes whose stories are heard

Reflecting on the fund in this way has also prompted us to think about our own role as funders. Funding is never neutral. Every decision about what to support influences which stories circulate, which storytellers gain visibility and which forms of knowledge are recognised as legitimate. One of the things that surprised us was that the projects that generated the richest learning were not always those that reached the largest audiences. The evaluation reinforced that storytelling is deeply contextual and relational, and that diversifying who tells stories — and whose experiences shape them — is just as important as expanding where those stories are heard.

Storyteller agency is supported through relational infrastructure

Many of the most meaningful outcomes identified in the evaluation were relational rather than transactional. Agency grows when storytellers have access not only to funding, but to the relationships, infrastructure and ecosystems that support their work to endure.

Relationships and engagement nurture longer-term change

Audience numbers matter, and the fund supported several projects to reach very large audiences through digital platforms, touring and cultural partnerships. Projects such as YouTube channel Gary's Economics, and the Belfast Photo Festival, demonstrate the catalytic potential of dissemination funding to extend the reach of existing work.

However, an important learning for our team's ongoing work is that the value of this work cannot be understood through numbers alone. Digital platforms make it easy to measure views, clicks and shares, yet these tell us very little about how people engage with stories or what happens after that initial encounter.

The evaluation highlighted that some of the most valuable insights and outcomes emerged through the relationships, collaborations and new opportunities that followed. Storytellers consistently described these as some of the fund's most significant impacts, often extending well beyond the original aims of their projects.

Relationships need resources

The evaluation also reminded us that relationships do not sustain themselves. Building trust with communities, maintaining partnerships, developing collaborations and creating opportunities for participation all require time, care and ongoing investment.

Projects such as English Touring Theatre’s Museum of Austerity illustrated the value of this longer-term relational approach by working across both experiential performances and workshops delivered with long-standing social-justice partners. This meant that space was created for reflection and personal connection to the issues explored, and action mobilised.

At the same time, storytellers spoke about the challenges of short-term funding, the emotional labour involved in participatory practice, and the difficulty of sustaining momentum once project funding came to an end.

Storytellers need ecosystems, not just projects

Perhaps the most significant insight, shaping our ongoing work in narrative change, is that storytellers and their practices of sharing and connecting are sustained through networks, institutions, collaborators, peer learning and the wider cultural and movement ecosystems of which they are part.

This suggests a different role for funders. Rather than focusing solely on commissioning content, we can also invest in the structures that enable storytellers to sustain their practice, learn from one another, build partnerships and continue contributing to wider movements for social change. If we value the connections, collaborations and communities that storytelling creates, then we also need to value, and fund, the infrastructure that makes those relationships possible.

Strengthening what helps stories get heard

Looking back, one of our strongest reflections from the Storytellers Fund is that the barriers facing storytellers are not about creativity, they are about unequal access to resources, relationships, platforms and opportunities. These shape whose stories are heard, whose experiences become part of our political and cultural conversations, and whose visions of the future feel possible.

The fund has also informed how we think about hope. Hope does not come from stories alone. It depends on whether storytellers have the time, relationships and support to keep creating, build trust with communities and ensure their work can reach beyond the spaces where it began. Hope in itself is a radical act.

This reflection has shaped how we are thinking about our future work. Alongside the recommendations from the evaluation, it reinforces the importance of supporting not only storytelling itself, but the people, relationships and infrastructure that allow stories to circulate, connect and endure. It is those connections, as much as the stories themselves, that deserve our attention and investment.

If we want a richer diversity of stories about who we are and the futures we can build together, then our task as funders is not simply to back compelling stories. It is to invest in the relationships, opportunities and ecosystems that help those stories find one another, and help more people find themselves within them.

These learnings are informing JRF's evolving approach to narrative change — please get in touch with the Movement Effectiveness team if you want to collaborate in taking this forward.