Services
Services
Moving Hearts and Minds Through Story
Change Narrative designs customized services for individuals, organizations, government agencies, companies, and community groups. Each project is tailored to unique audiences and goals and co-produced through collaborative processes.
Whether engaging the public to act on climate change or supporting people to translate stories into testimony, Change Narrative thoughtfully facilitates experiences that move hearts and minds through personal narrative and other value-based approaches that resonate.
Our signature storytelling processes include Step One: Discovering Your Story, and Step Two: Amplifying Our Stories for Impact. In addition, Change Narrative offers specialized programming for Coping with Climate Emotions, and Public Speaking.
Step One:
Discover Your Climate Story
Start with the story. Host a facilitated storytelling experience for your community that empowers participants to reflect, craft, and share their personal climate stories—building connection, confidence, and collective momentum for change.
Click the options below to explore processes that help transform climate stories into compelling written drafts.
Climate Storytelling Workshop Series
Part 1: Crafting Your Climate Story
90-minute facilitated workshop
This interactive group experience is designed to support reflection and the writing of personal climate narratives. Through guided prompts and a think–pair–share model, participants explore the power of their voice while building confidence by sharing “imperfect drafts” in a supportive, affirming setting.
Participants leave with a compelling story spark, short blurb, or early draft, along with a deeper understanding of how their lived experiences can contribute to collective solutions for a better world.
Part 2: Sharing Your Climate Story
60-minute Story Circle (typically held one week after Part 1)
This follow-up session provides space for participants to independently reflect on and refine their stories before coming back together to share them in a facilitated, affirming environment. The Story Circle fosters connection, belonging, and confidence—both in individual storytelling and in recognizing shared themes across a broader collective narrative.
Rooted in a spirit of learning in public, participants strengthen their storytelling skills while witnessing the power of shared experience.
Part 3: Creative Ideation & Amplification (Optional Add-On)
Two 60-minute sessions
Following the storytelling workshops, participants reconvene as co-creators to explore how their stories can live in the world for greater impact. Together, the group ideates pathways for amplification—such as publication, podcasts, public testimony, live events, or creative expressions including art, poetry, and spoken word.
This optional session focuses on turning stories into action and expanding their reach beyond the workshop space.
Individual Story Coaching
Change Narrative partners with organizations to support a set of individual community members in developing powerful, first-person climate stories. Through a collaborative process, we work with a selected group of participants to reflect a wide range of geographies, lived experiences, histories, identities, and perspectives on climate change and climate solutions.
Each participant is supported in crafting a written climate narrative (300–500 words) that is authentic, compelling, and ready to be shared. Final stories are ready to be amplified through published blogs, public testimony, media engagement, presentations, or other communications channels.
How the Process Works
Story coaching is conducted through one-on-one sessions with an experienced story coach who guides participants through reflection, storytelling, and editing refinement. No prior storytelling experience is required—and no pre-existing idea of what your story should be. All that’s needed is a willingness to reflect, and engage in the process.
Each participant works with an experienced story coach for a total of up to five hours, which includes:
- Up to two 1-hour coaching sessions (via Zoom or in person), scheduled within the program timeline.
- A guided storytelling process, using thoughtful prompts while the coach listens deeply and captures key moments and themes
- Draft development, with the coach creating an initial written draft based on the coaching conversations
- Collaborative editing and refinement, working together to ensure the final story feels complete, authentic, and true to the participant’s voice.
The result is a story that is honoring to the storyteller —whether shared with family and friends, as part of a presentation, in legislative testimony, at a public event, or through media engagement.
Organizational storytelling
Change Narrative works with teams, to support the internal staff and board of an organization. Held over a series of storytelling engagements, and listening activities, team members discover the “why” behind their care, and work together to map connections from individual stories to the collective mission and vision of the organization, recognizing that our personal stories influence the style in which we lead in our professions.
Director, Communications (Fresh Energy)
Step Two:
Amplifying Our Stories for Impact
Written stories serve as the foundation for creative expression. Once climate stories are drafted, storytellers become co-creators in deciding how their narrative can live in the world for greater impact. Change Narrative helps amplify and extend each story’s reach in vibrant ways, inviting deeper meaning and engagement in solutions. Through a collaborative model, we work with storytellers to edit and weave refined first-person narratives into campaigns, pitch to media, prepare for live stage productions, and collaborate with artists to adapt stories into visual art, short films, and other platforms.
Click the options below to explore ways to transform climate stories into creative works.
Community Engagement Events
Change Narrative’s signature storytelling slams and stage events blend freshly crafted climate stories told live with education about climate change and solutions—often interwoven with music, poetry, and art. Producing and emceeing over 100 unique storytelling slams across the Midwest and beyond.
Independent Review, Cherry and Spoon (Change Narrative’s 2021 MN Fringe Show)
“This show transcends entertainment into something more meaningful. Based on the premise that stories move people more than facts and figures, it presents the human side of climate change. Rather than a depressing lecture, it is an inspiring and engaging show that provides a ray of hope that if we’re thoughtful and work together, we can create a better world for all of us.”
Creative Climate Studio
Through a co-production model, Change Narrative pairs creatives with storytellers to adapt written climate narratives into short films, illustrations, visual art, anthology books, and more. The following examples highlight the range of possible projects.
Short Film
Change Narrative collaborates with filmmakers to transform written narratives into compelling short films. This process includes adapting stories into visual storyboards, developing scripts, and conceptualizing b-roll to bring each narrative to life on screen.
Watch the story of Leslee Gutiérrez Carillo above. Her narrative was adapted into a short film for social media after she partnered with Change Narrative to prepare and share her story live on stage at the Minnesota Fringe Festival as part of Changing the Narrative: Climate Stories for Justice (2022).
PSA Poster Series
Great Lakes PSA Poster Series, featuring climate stories coached by Change Narrative and illustrated by Heartseed Creative, humanizing the habitat restoration work of Coastal States Organization
We partner with organizations to translate complex, technical climate work into compelling, public-facing PSA (Public Service Announcement)–style campaigns. This project, created in collaboration with the Coastal States Organization, brought engineering plans for habitat restoration in the Great Lakes into public discourse by centering human stories alongside data.
Through individual story coaching, three community members developed full narratives and powerful pull quotes, which were illustrated by Heartseed Creative LLC. The resulting PSA posters connect lived experience to technical restoration plans and link audiences directly to solutions through QR codes.
The posters were displayed at the National Adaptation Forum 2024, where attendees received a free poster in exchange for sharing their own Great Lakes story.
Anthology Books
We curate climate story anthologies that highlight the lived experiences of climate change through diverse voices rooted in your community. These books creatively engage the public and build awareness of the depth and intersectionality of climate impacts through firsthand eyewitness accounts and testimonies. Change Narrative manages the entire anthology-making process—from cultivating stories through workshops, individual coaching, and open calls, to collecting submissions, curation, creative design, and editing. Each anthology represents a range of impacts, responses, and solutions. These books serve as literary activism, sharing testimony as a lasting resource to inform, inspire, and mobilize action.
One example is Eyewitness: Minnesota Voices on Climate Change, self published by Climate Generation, was gifted to every Minnesota legislator and used as public testimony from Minnesotans across the state calling for climate policy change.
See a review of the Eyewitness book here.
Communications
Change Narrative partners with organizations to communicate climate solutions through story-driven content, including blogs, climate story collections, and educational materials. We combine clear, accessible information with personal narratives that deepen understanding and relevance.
We collaborate on client projects, such as developing discussion guides for the 62 episode— Drawdown’s Neighborhood, a city-by-city video series by Project Drawdown. These guides help classrooms and communities host meaningful climate conversations while connecting participants to practical solutions and resources.
Civic Engagement
Change Narrative partners with cities and civic institutions to support community-centered climate action efforts.
City Climate Action Plans
In Hopkins Climate Stories, we worked with three community members through individual story coaching, then worked with city staff, and technical experts to infuse their stories into the City of Hopkins Climate Action and Resiliency Plan as a necessary complement to the data and action steps outlined in the plan. The plan was adopted by the Hopkins City Council in summer 2025, and the storytellers also shared their stories live at a 2025 Earth Day community event.
By pairing lived community experiences with local climate impacts and solutions, cities can develop more inclusive, effective, and community-informed action plans that strengthen public engagement and support the implementation of local climate commitments.
Seeds of Change, Activation
Change Narrative Activation Station, Grades of Green Community Gala, Los Angeles (2025)
Seeds of Change is a participatory civic engagement initiative that uses seed paper postcards as a creative medium for climate action. Participants contribute short written stories and artwork that express their personal climate commitments and calls to action. Together, the postcards form a collective narrative reflecting the voices, values, and hopes of the community.
As part of an activation campaign, postcards may be mailed or hand-delivered—along with a letter to local decision-makers, urging climate action remain central in policy and planning efforts, and asking leaders to literally plant and water the dreams of the communities they serve. By blending creativity, personal storytelling, and grassroots advocacy, Seeds of Change empowers community members as agents of change, sparks climate conversations and cultivates a shared vision rooted in hope, memory, and imagination.
Specialized Programming:
Coping with Climate Emotions
Climate Narrative offers programming in collaboration with experienced practitioners to support processing climate emotions, and imagination for a more vibrant and bright future.
Click on the options below to explore these offerings.
Climate Grief to Joy: Healing Circles
Rooted in Indigenous thought, Climate Grief to Joy Healing Circles are small-group workshops that create space for participants to name, hold, and release the emotional weight of climate change while exploring how we arrived at this moment. Through cycles of music and poetry, participants move through an outdoor, sensory-rich experience that supports individual and collective healing.
These circles invite reflection, connection, and the possibility of shifting the stories we tell—opening space to reimagine the futures we are building together. Healing Circles is supported by Oyate Hotanin through Society of Mother Earth (S.O.M.E) project, and held in collaboration with musical duo Buffalo Weavers and Change Narrative.Host this unique offering in your community or organization or partner with us on a seasonal series for deeper, year-long engagement. Watch the trailer to learn more about this experience.
The River of Nourishment (held annually)
The River of Nourishment Retreat, an immersive, multi-day rafting experience in Oregon’s wild and scenic Rogue River Valley. Designed for climate advocates experiencing burnout, this annual retreat offers a chance to fall back in love with the world—to seek adventure, feel alive in a stunning natural setting, and reconnect with the “why” behind the work. The retreat includes expert river guides from Momentum River Expeditions and a creative facilitation team—Kristan Childs, Teddy Kellam, and Jothsna Harris—leading individual and group sessions focused on reflection, renewal, and resilience. All meals, equipment, and on-trip lodging are included, and a portion of fees supports the local work of Indigenous youth nonprofit Rios to Rivers. Applications open each fall and are reviewed on a rolling basis. No prior rafting experience is required; the retreat is designed for both first-time and experienced rafters. Learn more here.
Rising Within: A Workshop for the Future
An immersive and reflective workshop experience designed to help participants alchemize climate grief/burnout and awaken their visionary resilience for a livable future. Rooted in storytelling, mindfulness and somatic practices for healing, this offering creates a space for an emotional release and visioning. Through music, guided meditation, group dialogue and creative reflection. Debuting at Florida Climate Week 2025, 100% of participants reported leaving the Rising Within workshop feeling more grounded, connected, and resourced to meet the climate crisis (and its intersecting challenges) with courage, clarity, and care. This workshop is based on Change Narrative’s audio meditation, of the same name, which you can listen to here.
Somatic Movement Workshop
Held in partnership with Deeper Water Arts / Mind & Body Studio, this workshop weaves together multiple modalities—somatics, improvisation, artmaking, dance, and mindfulness practices—to mobilize head, heart, mind, and body as valid responses to the present moment. Participants build personal agency and strengthen collective capacity to facilitate change through embodied practice and creative expression. The workshop also explores what it means to be an artist citizen, stepping into the power of your creative voice to strengthen democracy and using the body as a tool for resistance, renewal, and the imagination and creation of new worlds.
Public Speaking
Founder Jothsna Harris is a sought-after keynote speaker, emcee, and panel moderator, engaging international audiences from New York Climate Week to major climate conferences with thousands of attendees. Jothsna is known for speaking into the truth of the moment with clarity and depth, sharing the power of climate stories to drive impact, and the importance of imagination to build a better world. She consistently uses her platform to elevate others—bringing additional voices into the conversation whenever possible to demonstrate the power of storytelling in real time and to highlight local people and initiatives.
