Everyone agrees. Nothing is moving. You can change that.
Find the Story
Why regenerative initiatives stall, even when everyone says they want the outcome.
How you can find the story blocking progress and shift it
Free workshop · 75 minutes · Live online · Max 10 participants
A free workshop for people working toward a different economy in their organisation, their community, or their neighbourhood.
You know exactly what needs to happen.
Something keeps pulling back.
You've made the case. You've built the relationships. You've sat in the room where, for a moment, it felt like things might genuinely move. Then someone says 'we need to be realistic.' A funder asks for measurable outcomes by quarter two. A colleague who seemed fully on board reverts to the old language.
You can feel it happening. What you don't yet have is the precise language to name it or the framework to show others where it can shift.
The thing blocking your work isn't a strategy problem. It's a story problem. And once you can name it precisely, see its shape, trace where it came from, and find where it's vulnerable, everything changes.
The economy isn't a law of nature. It's a story. And stories can be rewritten.
Somewhere along the way, we absorbed the idea that the economy is something that happens to us: too complex, too entrenched, too far above our heads to be touched by people like us. That story isn't true, but it has become part of our autopilot.
These stories have been operating in your organisation for longer than anyone currently working in it. They’re below the surface of every initiative, every conversation about what's possible, every attempt to build something genuinely different.
They also block the people who most want to change things, including you.
Not because you lack vision or commitment or skill, but because the cultural stories holding the old economy in place are running in the background of every room you walk into. Making the implicit explicit, mapping those stories precisely, and finding where they can shift — that's the work. And it's learnable.
This workshop gives you the tool to find the story, name it precisely, and see where it can shift. Not by fighting the current system, but by making the invisible visible. That's where the power is. And it's within reach.
What happens in the session
Find the Story is a 75-minute live workshop using Mentimeter, Miro, and real-world examples to make visible something that usually stays invisible: the economic stories operating in the room, and in your organisation.
Surface the economic stories still operating in your own thinking in real time, with curiosity rather than judgement
Map where those stories came from across the ecosystem of your life: home, school, workplace, and the cultural norms around you every day
See how those same stories operate inside the organisations and communities we're trying to shift, and understand why they're so persistent
Learn the Narrative Constellation framework: the tool that shows why changing one message doesn't change the underlying belief
Understand how beliefs actually shift through proximity, trust, and shared experience
Build a Narrative Roadblock Map for your specific context, ready to use the very next day
No prior reading required. You bring your context.
The session gives you the framework.
I’m Heather Thomas, the founder of Together Culture, and I'm so glad you're here.
Whether you found us because something in your work keeps stalling despite your best efforts, or because you can see exactly what needs to change and can't yet find the lever, I want you to know that I understand where you are.
I've spent my career sitting at the intersection of culture and change. I studied history. Worked in cultural strategy, social change and tech for good. I got my MBA in Copenhagen to better understand how the system worked to try and change it. I studied the Nordic Food Movement, opened a cultural hub and wrote a book about how people could connect to their true nature as a part of nature through food culture.
And then one morning, five years ago, I woke up and discovered that my neighbourhood in Cambridge had been sold to a multinational private equity firm thousands of miles away. I lay there scrolling through the news thinking: how on earth did we get here? And what does it actually take to change things?
What I kept returning to was this: real change isn't about fighting for a seat at the table that already exists. To paraphrase the iconic feminist Gloria Steinem, it's about building a new table, with entirely different rules.
That's when Together Culture was born; in Cambridge, one of the most socially unequal cities in the UK. We built methods to get to the root of building a more inclusive and ecological economy: our culture. After all, it's our attitudes, values, and behaviours that limit or expand our reality. If we want complex change to happen, we have no choice but to change our culture.
That’s exciting, because from that point of view you don't have to be a policy wonk to be an economist. Policy wonks don't shape our culture; we all do, each and every day.
And culture, that I know. I'm a social scientist working on my PhD to better understand how culture change at the neighbourhood scale creates the tipping points that make a regenerative economy real.
We’re all economists now. I trust you are ready to stop absorbing the resistance and start working with the power you already have. So you can build the skills, the tools, and the relationships to make an economy that enables all of life to thrive.
What shifts when you have the language to name what's happening
You stop absorbing the resistance as a personal failure, and start seeing it as a story operating in a system.
You go into a conversation with a senior colleague and, for the first time, you can name precisely what's pulling the initiative back.
You stop waiting for the organisation to be ready. You start working on the cultural conditions that make readiness possible.
