THe Ministry of Change Podcast

People often ask me how I got into storytelling. There are many ways to answer that, but one of the most important parts of my journey into telling stories was a project I started in 2017 called Ministry of Change, which in itself stemmed from a mad project called UNiBus, I led with the wonderful Nana Woo, where we borrowed a bus and spent six weeks in the summer of 2017 driving a group of young people around the UK exploring what was happening at the edges. I received funding for Ministry of Change from a Brighton based organisation called Seedbed, which enabled me to spend nearly three years travelling around the UK in my little red campervan, Ruby, meeting incredible people, and recording real life stories.

The project stemmed from my desire to get a better understanding of my own experiences of depression (which only recently have I also been able to link to my experiences as being autistic). Over those years running Ministry of Change, I crafted my story of my experiences depression and challenge to make sense of my own experiences, and helped others to craft their own stories to do the same. I often found myself invited to share my story at events and hold spaces for others. Perhaps the part of the project I am proudest of was the Ministry of Change Podcast. Over those three years I recorded nearly 50 episodes, with a wide range of people. I even found myself recording a conversation one day in a remote Swedish village with one of my heroes, Charles Eisenstein

The project  started out more specifically as an exploration of depression, but soon morphed into an exploration of the ups and downs of being human - exploring wide ranging topics such as anxiety, ecocide, living with Dissociative Identity Disorder, the Messiah Complex, the benefits of wild swimming, permaculture,  addiction, and of course, as the journey went on, it increasingly became about storytelling.

When I began meeting people that called themselves storytellers, like Roi-Gal Or at Emerson College, Dafydd David-Hughes at Felin Uchaf, and Martin Shaw at Schumacher College I soon realised that the folktales, myths and wonder tales that I so enjoyed could be used as a way to hold a space to get people to open up and talk about the challenges they were facing in a much gentler and more fluid way than simply asking them to open up and share their feelings. Around 2019, I put the Ministry of Change project to bed, to begin focusing more specifically on storytelling.

I am immensely proud of Ministry of Change, and so it doesn’t evaporate into the ether entirely, I have decided (thanks to a prompt from my friend James Arnoldi) to post it here for prosperity.

Please feel free to enjoy the conversations I recorded on that incredible journey, in that time, before lockdown and the shift we saw in the world. I hope they provide you with joy, connection and understanding that you are enough.