Our Manifesto
This is our work in progress Manifesto which we will continue to iterate to meet the moment we are in.
We are a commitment to healing ourselves and our community in service of stewarding the change necessary to build a liberated future where empire is obsolete.
This is our radical commitment to meeting the moment we’re in at a personal, collective, localised and far-reaching level. Our commitment centres the experience of Global Majority people in the North of England as we navigate deeply decolonial practices to support us to heal and mobilise for a new world. We are artists, facilitators and experimenters, we design and practice for a liberated world.
Why do we use the statement, ‘we are a commitment to’?
We acquired this phrasing from Staci Haines’ The Politics of Trauma: Embodied Transformation in Polarization, Grief and Overwhelm course. This declaration, in present tense, known as a sankalpa in yogic philosophy, is a constant reminder of the future we are marching toward. Embedding this declaration in our embodied practices means we are committing to connecting our day-to-day actions to Conditions of Satisfaction (COS). This means we use these commitments to engage our somatic (body) work for practical change, and to mark strategic points of realisation where we are recognising that we have met our goals (COS).
A note on our lineage
We are a part of an interconnected chain of activists and artists, dreamers and creators, that travel through time; past, present and future. We acknowledge that our work is built on the road paved before us, the trauma experienced by our ancestors, biological and beyond, their resilience and joy runs through our veins. We acknowledge the work of our spiritual ancestors, who guide us in how we can heal the soul-loss colonisation enforced upon us and our communities.
It is important for us to name Octavia Butler here for her profound philosophy: Earthseed, which has directly influenced Story Of’s inception. Butler shares the gift of Earthseed in her books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, where God is Change. We do not worship this God of Change, instead we recognise the opportunity to shape god, to build utopia (heaven) in this life. Story of the Changing is a commitment to exploring how we shape change, how we steward the change necessary to organise toward a liberated world where empire is obsolete.
We are a commitment to exploring the following questions with the intensity of knowing everything that’s at stake:
● How do we heal ourselves in service to collective liberation?
● How do we rehearse a future of safety, belonging and abundance until we meet one?
● What is our most audacious vision for the future where empire is obsolete?
● How can we act as stewards of the change necessary to make our vision a reality?
● How can we use art as a radical medium for change?
We know that we do not have all the answers, and we are orienting away from certainty and the binaries of western thought leadership. These provocations are an invitation to inquire, to discover, to explore, to be in community.
Our Theory of Change
We embody the gentle spirit of organising and resisting, we use creativity and community as tools for healing, enabling us the capacities to build towards an alternative future for Global Majority people. We have three areas of focus, this is our ‘theory of change’: Together we heal, learn and practice.
We nourish our communities through multiple healing modalities and ancestral practices. We offer spiritual, mental, emotional and physical care for our communities.
We centre rest as an act of resistance. We ensure that our communities, including our organisers and the organisation itself, prioritises rest. Each time we make decisions centring rest, we rehearse our vision.
Embodied practices are our greatest capacity builder.
We use our new capacities to learn the necessary practice, tools and infrastructures for new life. We centre indigenous and decolonial wisdoms, pushing back on Eurocentric gatekeeping, hierarchy, extraction and competition. We strive to make the work of solidarity economies, assets unlocking, governance and healing accessible.
We learn by making mistakes, and give ourselves grace in doing this, we are anti-perfectionist in our learning. We hold ourselves to account in honouring lineages, our ancestors and elders who paved the way.
With new capacities created through healing, and new tools bestowed in our learning, we are intentional about practising for a new world. We build towards justice of land, beings and community, to thrive in abundance.
Our work today must look and feel like the future we dream of. We apply decolonial, creative and embodied methods to intellectually, emotionally and spiritually make our vision a reality. This requires experimentation, practising in the here and now. It requires rehearsing liberatory infrastructures, ways of being and a radical relationship to nature.
Step into our Dream...
We dream of a future where Global Majority folks in Northern geographies of the UK live in abundance, smoothly running the infrastructures that were seeded 50 years prior, by their elders in York, North Yorkshire.
A radical community wealth building initiative means we use revenue from our local hair shops, farmers market, art sales, theatre shows and yoga school to pay into our regenerative economic model, sustaining our community owned assets and homes.
Our physical spaces will bring the essence of the meetings that were previously held in parks, community spaces and the living rooms of our founding members. We hold spaces to connect to our ancestral practices; chanting, yoga, cooking and storytelling.
A weekly community meal is prepped by local families, who have been working together in shared allotment spaces, tending to and living reciprocally with the land. Our youngers attend radical Saturday school taught by our elders, where they connect to themselves, their histories and our planet, learning the values of interdependence, collective care, and accountability. Mother nature is our greatest teacher, we continue to heal the harms done by previous generations, we safeguard the land, our rivers and non-human kin with local sanctuary.
We celebrate diverse opinions and plurality of experience, navigating conflict with confidence and compassion. Our community is self-governed, we make collective decisions, continuing to iterate and change how we are governed in ways that are divested from whiteness.
Our radical library houses a revenue creating Caribbean café by day, and spoken word spot by night. We are all in a collective, continuous practice of healing, connecting, learning and building. Utopia is a process, and we rehearse the world we wish to be part of.
We are a robust, resilient community with an underground infrastructure built to last for generations. We are a constant commitment to moulding, navigating and harnessing change. We shape change, lean into it’s power and expect it’s presence.
We are Story of the Changing.
Values
As with all of our work, we won’t tie ourselves down to these values forever, we are listening and feeling for when change in the world calls for change in our tactics, but for this moment in time, these are the values which serve us and group us in our vision for a liberated future.
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We invite abundant dreams into our space, particularly those that may feel impossible within our current context. We give ourselves permission and create the capacity to imagine an existence that defies our existing knowledge of time, space, and life. Our visions are and should be limitless, we are not confined by the master's tools version of ‘innovation’.
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We allow the doctrine of Earthseed to guide us, enable us in our agency to shape the future we long for. We determine ourselves capable of making change possible, sculpting the necessary change for a liberated work, we mould this chaos like it is clay.
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We are an artist-led organisation, considering artists as the architects of change and designers of the future. We strive to provide funded opportunities for Global Majority artists based in the North. We know that artists have been strengthening the muscles of imagination, disruption, practice and creation - these transferable skills are our tools for new world building.
“The creation of things by hands leads to a better understanding of democracy because it reminds us we have the power” Betsy Greer
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Our bodies are sites of wisdom. We believe each of us has the capacity to lean into this wisdom through embodied practice. Some of us may have experienced trauma and find it difficult to connect with our bodies. We believe with time, collective practice and continuity we can all access the wisdom in our bodies, to help free us from the oppression of capitalism and colonialism.
“The white fathers said ‘I think, therefore I am’. And the black mother, the poet within each of us, whispers, ‘I feel therefore I’m free’.”
- Audrey Lorde
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We don’t let perfectionism and other tools of capitalism stop us from prototyping and progressing in our audacious visions. We recognise the necessity to unlearn the perfectionism that spawns from empire, liberating ourselves from this enables us to navigate uncertainty, provocation, to change our minds, and to break free of oppressive shackles that limit our radical practice. We experiment and explore, embracing anti-perfectionism, mistakes, complexity, messiness - prototyping and progressing in our dream for liberation.
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Everything we do and all that we offer is an invitation for inquiry and experimentation. We each have agency to engage or not to engage with the invitations. We normalise the answer, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’.
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We gently hold ourselves accountable to ourselves, each other and our vision for a healed and liberated world. We are guided by Shannon Pervez Darby’s Self-Accountability Framework. We ask ourselves three key questions:
Is there a situation where I acted out of alignment with my values?
What was going on for me at the time?
What do I need to do about it now?
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Translated from Sanskrit, yoga means unity. It means being in harmony with ourselves, each other and the world around us. For this value we ask ourselves the questions as devised by Susanna Barkataki: Is it or am I causing separation? Does this action create unity and connection?
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We strive to create life-affirming spaces and structures that centre joy. We understand joy as a resistance to oppressive systems. We actively seek joy and nurture it in community with each other.
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We seek to build mutual aid networks, as well as adopting mutual aid principles into our work. Our work is intended as scaffolding to build robust infrastructures of collective care for a solidarity economy.
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We value intergenerational spaces, particularly harnessing and nurturing the wisdom of children, young people and our elders.
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We centre disability justice and follow the framework created by Sins Invalid. We work toward a future where no one is left behind.
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We learn from and with queerness. Understanding the world through a binary lens is limiting. We see beauty and magic in the space in-between. We hold multiple truths, striving to take a both/and approach, instead of a binary either/or approach.
Our Work & Our Boundaries
In the last 4 years in our former format as York Anti Racist Collective (YARC) we found that we were stretched in many directions to meet the needs of the people around us in a geography that had little to no provision to support Global Majority artists, families and residents. In our decision to move away from YARC we are purposeful in choosing what we want to do, not on the basis of what local provision lacks, but for what we as organisers have the skills, energy and passion for, what builds life affirming infrastructures for ourselves and our members, and what we know is needed to meet the precarious moment we’re in.
Story Of aims to build transformative spaces that create the conditions for healing from an oppressive world in order to build capacities to build the new world that frees all beings and land from oppression. We contain hope, learning and community so that Northern global majority folk can transform their living realities to connect their actions to their values.
We use reindigenised practices, wisdom and community as medicines to treat the harms of colonialism, capitalism, ableism and individualism, creating the collective strength to meet the moment we're in. Tackling something that is bigger than us all, we are seeding hope in times of distress and uncertainty and practising navigating discomfort together in order to set a solid ground for our future generations.
Our Work
Radical School of Collective Wisdom: This is an online and in person learning space for communities to come together, process and share practical tips on how to apply the wisdom into our day to day. We’ll be covering radical knowledge, embodied and creative practices, including our beloved Art Liberation Workshops, in our sessions. The School includes community meals and is open to all people.
Saturday Lime: A monthly space for Global Majority folks of all ages in York to come and be together, to share experiences and build connections. Lime is a Trinidadian term that describes ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’. Everyone is together doing nothing, creating art, eating, resting, chatting, listening to music, all of the above. This space strives to be low pressure and for each person to choose how they’d like to spend the time.
Teapot Solidarity Space: A weekly in person space open to all to gently move our bodies, meditate, engage in multiple embodiment practices that are rooted in healing in service to collective liberation. This class draws upon yogic wisdom and is open to those over 16.
Teapot: A home for healing in service to collective liberation. We offer online embodiment classes at our studio: Teapot. We guide classes that are rooted in yogic wisdom and offer a sacred online community.
Seasonal Magazine: Our seasonal magazine will centre the works of Global Majority artists based in the North. The magazine is dedicated to mobilising the resources of liberation and racial justice to wide audiences.
Practice Lab: We hold communities of practice that seek to prototype some of the theories and ideas we learned at our Radical School of Collective Wisdom and beyond. For example the lab may spend time creating and implementing mutual aid networks, consider asset procurement as well as art and culture efforts.
Open Office: We commit to sharing knowledge and support other unincorporated groups who are focused on work that is aligned to our mission. We do this through
our Open Office offering, where members of Story of the Changing will offer structured guidance and support to groups.
Radical Travelling Library: We host a Radical Travelling Library bringing our beloved radical books to our communities and offer book clubs to spend time reflecting and integrating how the reading made us feel and the things we learned about ourselves and the world around us.
Artist Residencies: We fund Global Majority artists based in the North to have a residency to explore themes that are in service to our vision.
Directory of Artists: We have a Directory of Global Majority artists and practitioners based in the North available on our website.
In addition to our self organised work, you can check our ‘work with us’ page to understand in what capacity we are available for contracted work, partnerships and workshops.
Our Boundaries
Whilst the above is not an exhaustive list of the work we do or would be excited to partner on, it is a list to support us in our boundary setting, and for external organisations to understand how to respect our time. If you’re looking to work with us, we encourage you to read through our list of boundaries prior to making contact.
We do not
1. Contribute to or share one-off unpaid surveys, meetings or projects that commodify the voices of global majority communities. If you’d like to work with us on a project, please do check that you feel there could be alignment with our values and do get in touch, and we may be able to explore a version of consultancy that is not performative.
2. Engage in unpaid work. Our time is limited, and we must be resourced for partnership work.
3. Work with the police or any other institutions that centre punitive “justice”.
4. Share posts on our communications platforms that aren’t aligned to our values. We strive to take the time to explain why the proposed post isn’t in alignment with our values, yet, if we are inundated with requests we may not have the time to share our feedback.
5. Respond to everything we receive. We do not have the capacity to respond to everything, therefore if you do not hear back this is due to a capacity issue. We prioritise requests that are rooted in our values and do not cross our boundaries.
Definitions
Collective liberation: We do not have a clear definition for what collective liberation is as this is one of our questions for inquiry. We know from yogic wisdom that collective liberation is what yogis would call samadhi, or bliss, which is where we are in harmony within ourselves, with each other, the planet and in harmony with what is beyond our intellectual comprehension.
Embodiment: Practices that are focused on embodiment are those that focus on bringing the body back into the conversation for example through pranayama (working with the energy prana), somatics, asana (movement) and more. Prior to Western colonisation, many cultures around the world, including here in the UK, were deeply rooted in their bodies, understanding the essential connection between body sensations and emotions for example. This connection was lost due to colonial violence. Now we take the time to relearn the connection to our bodies outside of the colonial structures that strive to keep us disconnected. Together we learn the wisdom that comes from including the body into the conversation in service to our vision for collective liberation.
empire: Growing up in the UK we were led to believe that British colonisation ended. Many of us will have heard teachers share their views of the ‘glorious’ British empire. Through using the term empire in our work we strive to reframe how empire is understood for what it is: an ongoing violent and colonial structure consisting of individuals that intentionally seek to dominate the world through any means necessary. The structure and mindset of empire harms us all. To name a few, It breeds transphobia, racism, anti-blackness, islamophobia, ableism, homophobia, genocides, climate crises, ageism, gender-based violence and epidemics of trauma and abuse more broadly. We believe by focusing our efforts on decolonising, by creating an alternative liberated world, we will do away with these hugely violent systems, ultimately deconstructing empire.
Heal: We define healing as the act of becoming in alignment with our values for a liberated world. To heal means to deeply unlearn the systems of violence understanding that these systems not only affect our own mind, body and spirit but the minds, bodies and spirits of all of us. We understand that healing requires us to unlearn these systems on a cellular level, it requires us to remember our bodies as a site for liberating ourselves from oppression. We focus on healing in service to collective liberation. This link is something we strive to further explore in our questions of inquiry.
Lineage: For us, lineages do not only have to be our biological ancestors. We believe our lineages consist of the people who came before us from the people who planted the seeds of wisdom that we root ourselves and our work in, to the people taking direct action resisting colonial violence in their homes and communities. Our lineage includes ancient spiritual practitioners, artists, writers, spirits, activists, deities and nature itself. Our lineage is everything that has come before us that helps us in staying close and accountable to our vision for the future. We honour our lineages as the places that ourselves, our ideas and dreams for the world stem from.