Gather. Weave. Share. Shift.
Services
encommon brings together multiple disciplines—narrative strategy, facilitation, qualitative research, and systems practice—in response to a central animating question: how can we tell ethical stories that show how change actually happens?
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Learning & impact for systems change
Enduring shifts within complex issues—health equity, food insecurity, climate change—can be hard to understand through quantitative data and metrics alone. Meaningful change often accumulates through new relationships, evolving assumptions, and trust that grows through collaboration. This is the texture of change that metrics don’t reach, but story does. And story doesn’t just capture the texture—it helps us learn from it.
encommon designs and leads story-centered research processes that apply rigorous qualitative methods to reveal how change unfolds. Every process is built around shared inquiry—a practice grounded in the belief that when research shifts from a data-gathering process to a learning one, it participates in the change it's trying to understand.
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Our approach is grounded in ethical, participatory practices that center the people most affected by a system alongside those working to change it. We draw on frameworks like The Water of Systems Change to structure the inquiry and surface how change moves across structural, relational, and transformational levels. Through the resulting story, we bring visibility to the iterative steps that hold essential learning, multiple (sometimes even conflicting) perspectives from people throughout the system, transformed relationships, and evolving mental models.
We can work with you to:
Design end-to-end equitable research processes, including document review, interview protocol development, qualitative analysis, narrative synthesis, and story-holder* reviews
Facilitate participatory sensemaking so people can learn from each other’s stories in real time
Build data systems that hold both measurable outcomes and nuanced human experience
Develop story-based products (impact stories, case studies, and research-to-narrative publications) that serve multiple audiences: funders, practitioners, and the communities whose voices are at the center
Stories of Change: How a Systems Change Approach is Transforming a Region, a publication and growing body of work encommon leads for Rotary Charities of Traverse City, was named by an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as a shining example of emerging approaches to systems change evaluation.
*A term drawn from Storytelling for Systems Change: Insights from the Field (Centre for Public Impact, Dusseldorp Forum, and Hands Up Mallee), referring to the people whose stories are at the center of the research process.
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Systems storytelling
The dominant narrative of social change follows a familiar arc: one problem, one solution, one hero. This narrative is pervasive. It shapes whose voices we elevate, what we expect, what we fund, and what we imagine is possible.
encommon’s systems storytelling practice interrupts this pattern. Rather than following a predetermined arc, it starts with listening to multiple voices across an issue. Through the process of listening together, a truer picture of change emerges—one that surfaces relationships, holds complexity, and reflects what adds up to lasting change.
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Our approach uses participatory facilitation and narrative craft to surface what simpler stories leave behind and to honor everyone a system touches, from those working to change it to those living its effects. We design and lead relational processes grounded in the belief that listening together—across roles, levels of power, and vantage points—is itself a form of learning. In this way, sharing and receiving stories goes beyond documentation to deepening relationships and expanding understanding.
We can work with you to:
Design and facilitate collective storytelling sessions—including Collective Story Harvests and similar participatory methods—that invite multiple voices to shape meaning
Develop narrative synthesis and story-based materials from what surfaces through the facilitated storytelling
Build listening arcs, story frameworks, and facilitation guides tailored to the systems your organization or initiative is working to shift
Read about this approach in action in the Organics Waste Diversion Initiative project.
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Complexity-conscious communications
Groups working on complex issues face specific communications challenges. The current moment requires that adaptive, collaborative programs and their impacts are clearly understood by a range of audiences. The pressure to communicate simply has never been greater, nor has the cost of oversimplifying. And in networks and multi-partner initiatives, where shared understanding is the connective tissue, communications that are opaque or inconsistent erode the trust that relationships and collaboration depend on.
encommon brings a systems lens and journalistic sensibility to strategic communications, partnering with clients to develop strategy, synthesize learning, and produce resonant materials that keep people informed, aligned, and moving forward together.
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Our approach draws on more than fifteen years of experience developing communications for regional and national funders, collaborative networks, and social impact organizations navigating complexity across sectors, partners, and scales. With a starting point of careful listening—to what groups are learning, to the tensions they hold, and to what their audiences most need to understand—we produce clear, accessible communications that honor the nonlinear nature of change.
We can work with you to:
Design communications strategy and systems—including editorial calendars, channel plans, and evaluation frameworks—that evolve with your work and illuminate what’s shifting
Synthesize learning, strategy, and perspective into written materials and roadmaps that nourish shared understanding across teams and partners
Develop and sustain communications for collaborative networks, where transparency, alignment, and timely information-sharing are essential to collective action
Write thought leadership, ghostwritten pieces, and funder-facing documents that translate an organization's theory of change and impact into compelling narratives that resonate across audiences
Recent work with Collectrify, a frontline-led climate justice fund, includes a strategic roadmap, thought leadership, and case study work that together demonstrate this approach in action.
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Workshops & tools
encommon designs and leads learning experiences that help individuals and groups tell more ethical, complexity-conscious stories. Our approach draws on facilitation practice informed by systems and complexity theory, adult learning principles, and years of direct experience designing learning experiences for diverse, international audiences.
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We can work with you to:
Design and facilitate workshops that build the narrative capacity of your team or network—grounded in ethical, systems-based storytelling principles and tailored to your issue area
Develop rubrics, frameworks, and practical tools that give groups a shared language and structure for evaluating and improving their storytelling over time
Offer storytelling coaching—as a standalone engagement or as a follow-on to a workshop—to support integration, practice, and continued development
encommon has delivered storytelling coaching for more than a dozen grantee-partners of Rotary Charities of Traverse City and storytelling workshops for the School of Systems Change, reaching practitioners across 16 countries.
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Coaching
encommon offers one-on-one leadership coaching, drawing on extensive experience working alongside people grappling with complexity in their professional lives. Our approach is grounded in powerful questioning, deep listening, and careful attention to the emotional dimensions of change—creating the conditions for clients to notice patterns and to move toward decisions and ways of being that align with their values.
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Jessica holds a transformative coaching certification from the Certified Coaches Alliance and brings to every engagement the same curiosity, care, and complexity-consciousness that runs through all of encommon's work.
PROJECTS
