My work
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I offer workshops and presentations on Storytelling and Social Change, Storytelling and Evidence-Based Policy, Strategy as Story, Narrative Change, and Listening as a Political Act.
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I facilitate strategic planning and visioning processes for organizations and teams.
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I undertake research and help organizations think about how to integrate learning and assessment into their work.
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As Narrative Lead for IRIS – the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling – I'm coordinating an international conference on narrative change, and helping develop an international directory of experts and organizations working in narrative change and impact storytelling.
"Brett has been a joy to work with. His approach as a consultant is rigorous and he is an excellent thought partner whose insights cut to the heart of strategic dilemmas an organization is facing. Working with Brett allowed us to hear from our grantee partners and others and make sense of our communications grantmaking, setting us on a sure path to creating a more effective approach."
-Erin Malone: Director of Communications,
Foundation for a Just Society
Past work
Participatory Research Toolkit
During my time as a program manager at IDASA, a leading democracy institute in South Africa, I developed a participatory research toolkit, which community radio stations across the country used to map their communities so they could produce news and programming tailored to local issues and needs. This work was based on the thesis for my MA degree in Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University.
Listening as a Political Act
In 2017 and 2018 I co-organized a weekend-long workshop on Radical Listening, held at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. I went on to produce an audio performance on Listening as a Political Act, as an artistic thesis for my MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from New York University’s Gallatin School. The performance combines dramatic dialogue, first person narration (including elements of personal storytelling, poetry, and factual information), and sound (music, sound effects, ambient noise, human voice), to grapple with the complexity of listening as a crucial element of democracy. In doing so it touches on issues such as polarization, voice, power, racism, and authoritarianism. I am working to turn this into a live, in-person performance.
From Durban to Tomorrow
I executive produced the short documentary From Durban to Tomorrow, directed by Dylan Mohan Gray.
Among other awards, it won Best Human Rights Film & Best Social Justice Film-at the 2021 Hong Kong World Film Festival, and Best International Documentary Short at the 2021 New York Independent Cinema Awards
With the inequities of global health more evident and stark today than at any point in history, FROM DURBAN TO TOMORROW recalls the mass protests led by people living with HIV in Durban, South Africa, which radically transformed the global landscape for human rights in health some two decades ago. These events in the year 2000 gave rise to a series of major advances in public health for marginalized people the world over, yet recent years have seen many of these hard-won gains severely eroded, putting tens of millions of lives at risk and compounding the threat posed by a deadly global pandemic. In FROM DURBAN TO TOMORROW, the stories of five frontline health advocates from different parts of the world underscore this rapidly worsening crisis and herald the impending battle for a meaningful, universal human right to health. The trailer is here