IEM's PROGRAMS

HELP US TO SEE WE ALL HAVE IMPORTANT PARTS TO PLAY

IN ONE GLOBAL STORY

WHAT WE ARE SEEKING TOGETHER

is a coming together of generations and nationalities and faiths, enjoying participation in healthy competition and purposeful collaboration. As we work together to find solutions, new understandings and new ideas for the common good, we shape a new story and this is at the heart of the mission of the Foundation and Impact Entertainment Media story.

It takes account of Professor Yuval Harari’s analysis that “to get a lot of people to cooperate , you need to convince them to believe in a shared story.” Our purpose and plan is centered around the recognition that people will only listen, understand and relate to a new story when they themselves have a role to play.  

Stories must engage people at every level – not just in their minds, but in their emotions, as social change experts continually point out.  The story that is required must be better than the story that populists offer and must give people a meaningful, actionable way to participate and feel involved.  So lets summarise this quartet of key points:

The Rationale

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. 

Believing is Belonging 

 A strong belief system unifies us under a common sense of purpose. 

A Great Story to Tell

At the heart of every belief system is a narrative that makes political action less a calculation of interest than a moral imperative. Few forms of human behaviour are as ubiquitous as storytelling. From earliest childhood, we tell (and are told) stories. When we go to the movies, or read a novel, or watch the evening news, we are consuming stories. We are storytelling animals. Stories have the ability to call us, and to move us to act. 

Community vital to a Healthy Economy

Throughout history, human beings have always invented social communities first – they develop rules of social exchange, embed their members in complex and reciprocal relationships and build social trust. Only when these relationships and the trust that is built from them are firm can communities enter into commercial trade and set up markets for exchange and agree upon supporting change.