We Have to Collaborate: Launching The Good Stories Fund at Blue Earth Summit

Last week we spent three days at Woolwich Works in London for Blue Earth Summit, and we came home once again renewed and with one conviction louder than any other: we have to collaborate if we want to change things.

This year we attended as a Partner, exhibiting A Few Good Things and starting our soft launch of ‘The Good Stories Fund’.

We left with a stack of sign-ups from charities and investors, and the strong sense that this is where our people hang out! The room was full of founders, investors, scientists, campaigners and creatives who aren't waiting for permission. Many of them already have solutions working on the ground. What they need now is each other.

Why we launched The Good Stories Fund here

The Good Stories Fund exists to generate sponsorship for documentaries made for charities and NGOs. It comes from something we've seen again and again in our work with museums, heritage organisations and publicly funded cultural projects. The organisations doing the most important work for people and planet are often the ones least able to afford to tell their story.

Communications budgets are usually the first thing to go when money is tight. So the river clean-up, the rewilding project or the community food scheme that is quietly changing lives stays invisible to the funders, policymakers and public who could help it grow. We want to help to close that gap.

Blue Earth felt like the right place to start. Its whole purpose is to find and fund solutions, and bring the people behind them into one room. A fund built on connecting good causes with good backers belonged there.

We HAVE to collaborate

If there's one thing we'd want anyone to take from Blue Earth, it's this: no single organisation, sector or discipline is going to fix this alone.

The climate crisis is a systems problem. Energy, food, water, housing, health and money are all tangled together. Solve one piece in isolation and the pressure simply moves somewhere else. Real change happens when the pieces move together. That means the investor talking to the grassroots charity. The scientist working with the storyteller. The corporate sustainability lead learning from the community group that's been doing it for a decade on a shoestring.

That sentiment echoed across the Summit. Attendees like James Sancto of We Make Change came away noting that impact is no longer a nice-to-have for business but a necessity. We'd add that impact at scale is impossible without partnership. Collaboration isn't the soft, feel-good part of climate action. It's the mechanism.

It's also something we know first-hand. As a small, documentary-led production company, we've never done our best work alone. Every film we make is a collaboration with the people whose story it is. The Good Stories Fund simply takes that principle and builds it into budgets and new work flows.

Where storytelling fits

Facts and evidence matter enormously. But people rarely act on a statistic alone. They act when they can see themselves in a story, when a project stops being a line in a report and becomes a place, a face, a community. When it’s human! 

That's where film earns its place in the climate conversation. A well-made documentary can carry a small charity's work into a funder's boardroom, a councillor's inbox or a stranger's social feed. It builds trust, and trust is what unlocks collaboration. 

So our role in all of this is clear to us. We're not the scientists or the engineers. We're the people who help the world see what they're doing, and help the right partners find each other.

What happens next

The response to The Good Stories Fund was more than we hoped for. Charities told us they have stories they've been desperate to tell. Investors and partners told us they want their money to do more than one job. Now the real work starts: following up, matching causes with backers, and getting the first films into production.

If you're a charity with a story the world needs to hear, or a business, funder or investor who wants to back that storytelling, we'd love to hear from you. And if we met at Blue Earth, thank you. Let's keep the conversation going.

None of us can do this alone, and none of us have to.

Register your interest in The Good Stories Fund; HERE

Natasha Arciniega and Gareth Lang, A Few Good Things