What Pastor Rice Small Grants Fund/NTFP-Asia, FUNBEA, and FASOL reveal about elevating community narratives with care and authenticity.
Storytelling has long been used in communication to convey meaning, emotion, and complexity in ways that data alone cannot. But when stories come from the ground up, shaped by proximity, trust, and the voices of those who live the realities they tell, their power becomes deeper. They become instruments of legitimacy, pathways for connection, and tools for shifting narratives about who leads change.
During a recent internal exchange among Alianza member funds, storytelling emerged not as a technique but as an approach that reshapes relationships, visibility, and accountability.
Three member funds – Pastor Rice Small Grants Fund/NTFP-Asia (Southeast Asia), FunBEA (Brazilian Fund for Environmental Education – Brazil), and Fondo Acción Solidaria, A.C. (FASOL – Mexico) – shared how they document and communicate stories. What emerged was a set of grounded practices that show how local funds are reframing how stories are created, shared, and understood within philanthropy.
Storytelling as Self-Representation and Movement-Building
For the Pastor Rice Small Grants Fund, storytelling is an essential means of enabling supported communities to document and share their own experiences in their own languages, through their own perspectives, without outside interpretation.
When communities tell their own stories, storytelling becomes more than communication, it becomes a bridge: connecting communities with one another, with wider audiences, and with funders and civil society actors. It humanizes complexity, diversifies who gets to speak, and often inspires collective action.
Beyond grantmaking, Lyra Puno, Programme Officer, explained, the fund accompanies grantees in developing communication and advocacy skills through photography, video production, narrative writing, and visual storytelling. Equipped with these skills, the groups transform reporting from a technical obligation into a process of learning, reflection, and influence.
As examples, Lyra referenced:
- youth who became local digital storytellers and trainers through the MAMACILA Higaunon Youth Initiative,
- young people documenting conservation stories rooted in their languages and territories (Forest of Her Childhood), and
- women environmental defenders using flexible funding to produce films that capture community-led change (Dare to Trust).
“Storytelling allows communities to tell their own stories, rather than having others speak for them. It helps them put a face to the work they do and promote their initiatives on their own terms”, highlights Lyra. It becomes a political practice of self-representation, collective memory, and movement-building, grounded in the realities of those leading change on the ground.
Community-Rooted Communication
The FunBEA team shared how storytelling became central to their communication strategy through a fundamental shift in orientation: from institutional messaging to a territory-based approach. For the fund, every story begins with listening to the local agendas, challenges, and community-led movements. This listening process shapes not only what FunBEA communicates, but how.
As told by Grace Luzzi, Communication Coordinator, FunBEA produces documentaries, investigative reports, children’s programs, social media series, and educommunication projects that train young people and local organizers to tell their own stories. Video plays a powerful role, expanding reach through media partnerships and festival participation, enabling community narratives to travel farther than institutional communication alone.
In written storytelling, Fernanda Biasoli, journalist at FunBEA, emphasized that communities and territories are always the protagonists. FunBEA appears only to contextualize, never to overshadow. She shared the example of Humberto, a caiçara leader restoring mangroves in São Paulo state: “The support is not the story; the work of the community is the story.”
To ensure stories circulate meaningfully, Suélen Silva, Communication Analyst at FunBEA, described FunBEA’s cross-media and transmedia strategies: adapting a narrative into videos, articles, behind-the-scenes content, reels, or trailers, each crafted for a specific audience. She also highlighted the importance of “organic influencers”: local leaders and knowledge-holders who amplify messages with authenticity and social legitimacy.
Storytelling That Moves People
FASOL’s storytelling approach begins with an elemental truth: people remember how a story makes them feel long before they remember any data. For that reason, communication must begin not with numbers, but with people, territories, and lived experience. Communities are not “beneficiaries” or supporting characters, they are the protagonists of transformation. The fund’s role remains part of the backdrop, never the center.
Alejandro Mejía Sarabia, responsible for the fund’s communication, illustrated this shift through “Gathering in the Territory”, a short film co-produced with the Panta Rhea Foundation, an example of how audiovisual storytelling can translate complex social and environmental realities into emotional, human-centered narratives. Stories connect through feeling, opening the door to deeper engagement and awareness.
Inside the fund, this has meant transforming annual reports packed with technical data into narrative-driven formats full of testimonies and personal accounts. Data now supports the story, rather than guiding it.
FASOL’s shift also responds to the current moment. In contexts of growing threats against territorial leaders, narrative strategies rooted solely in denunciation can increase risk. Storytelling anchored in resilience, collective action, and hope offers a safer and more generative path. Through this lens, storytelling becomes a tool for raising consciousness, strengthening alliances, and making visible the depth of connection between communities and their territories.
Stories That Shift Power
Across the three funds featured in this session, storytelling emerged as a practice rooted in proximity: listening deeply, honoring lived experience, and ensuring communities speak for themselves. These approaches do more than communicate, they help redistribute narrative power, strengthen collective memory, and build bridges between territories, movements, and the philanthropic field.
In the hands of local funds, storytelling becomes not just a way of reporting, but a way of reshaping how change is understood, who is recognized as a leader, and which voices guide the future.
