We have to admit we took a small liberty with the quote of film producer David Jammy featured on our newly redesigned Field Guide website. "We" should instead read "transmedia."  Despite the liberty, we  believe we have preserved Jammy's meaning. We will explain why shortly, but first here are Jammy's exact words in their context:

“By collectivizing ownership of narrative, transmedia breaks down the ‘us’ and ‘them.’ 
It is no longer 'you' supporting  'our' work to help  'them.'  Rather it is all of us working together to meet and overcome a challenge.”

Transmedia, narrowly defined, is a technique for telling a story across a variety of media and media platforms in interactive formats. Transmedia strategies are now a part of the toolkits of every branding agent and corporate marketer of our consumer culture.  But the power of transmedia can also be pressed into the higher service of system transformation, because it enables people to work collectively on new system narratives.  

Indeed, Jammy’s quote is taken from a much-shared slideshare by the founder of Transmedia Activism, Lina Srivastava.  Transmedia Activism is “a framework for strategy to create social impact, influence perception, and build community through fragmented storytelling by decentralized authors who share assets and create entry points into issues and solutions across multiple forms of media,” as Srivastava explains it.  It is not so much focused on the "trans" in "media," but on the collaborative storytelling process, that digital media has so empowered, around a shared value system.

As Srivastava says, this brand of activism is "media agnostic," flowing through whatever vessel of communication it finds its way into.  To paraphrase Lina, the framework is powerful because it allows us to tell a story of a complex system together, with the story itself being one of the elements of system change.

The digital era is unleashing the human desire to collaborate that is embedded in our biological dna at a moment in our human history when we need it most for our very survival on this planet.  As evolution biologist and futurist Elisabet Sahtouris explains in a talk she gave at the San Francisco Presidio in 2000, "Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future"  (hat tip to our friend and mentor Carol Sanford for sharing this brilliant thought piece with us), "All living systems self-organize and maintain themselves by the same biological principles ... among them the empowered participation of all parts."   

Please consider the Field Guide a shared asset where we can all be contributors to and participants in the narrative design of the living system that is the regenerative economy.

posted by Susan Arterian Chang

One of the qualities we seek out in the projects and businesses we highlight for the Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy is a striving for right relationship.  In their book Right Relationship, Peter Brown et al. describe this quality as something that underpins all wisdom traditions, encouraging people to “live life according to cherished values built on caring for other people and being stewards of the earth’s gifts.” We’ve been discovering that wherever we see people and projects operating in right relationship we are also seeing all the other qualities of regenerativeness emerging.

This month’s Field Guide “Share your Story” teller Sara Day Evans is the founder of Accelerating Appalachia. She has been fortunate to have had many opportunities to experience right relationship and it has informed her life’s work.  A sixth generation Kentuckian she grew up in a family that loved the outdoors and spent her childhood in it “from sunup to sundown.”  She also counts Wendell Berry and his daughter, Mary, as lifelong friends and mentors.   Sara Day founded the accelerator to nurture nature-based businesses, and has been supported and guided in that effort by the collective wisdom of people like Kevin Jones and Rosa Lee Harden of SOCAP and Good Capital, and Ross Baird of Village Capital. 

Like all regenerative projects we have studied, Accelerating Appalachia does not take a needs-based approach to healing the regional economy in which it operates.  Instead it tunes into the region’s abundance of human and natural capital, but always in right relationship.  “Even though we know there is plenty that is broken,” says Sara Day, “we are working to support a post-extractive, post-coal economy for Appalachia and beyond, by building on our region’s assets.”

Read Sara Day’s story here.