Introducing Our Generative Journalism Alliance
We've grown from early connections into a high-calibre crew
The Generative Journalism Alliance is held by a small core group led by Jack Becher, Sam Walby, Tchiyiwe Chihana, and Peter Pula.
Our wider circle includes experienced facilitators, interviewers, editors, writers, and storytellers hailing from around the world and working for transformational change. We use generative interviewing and hosting to create space for people to make sense of the world and the work they do, catalysing change through stories and relationships.
The Generative Journalism Alliance is more than just a network, it’s an ecosystem of living practice with a shared commitment to story as a tool for healing, truth-telling, and transformation. We are a community of people who believe journalism can do more than inform - it can reveal, restore, and reimagine.
What’s waiting to emerge when story becomes a shared act of sense-making and solidarity?
We Are A Stance for Possibility
How might we tell stories that don’t just describe the world, but help to remake it together?
Communities carry within them the wisdom and capacity to renew and regenerate, and journalism, when rooted in care, justice, and imagination, can help surface and steward that process.
What becomes possible when we honour the wisdom already held in our communities, and choose to tell those stories together?
Principles for a Life-Giving Journalism
The practice of Generative Journalism, while not widely publicized, is decades old. It’s early practitioners identified a few key principles which attracted us too. As our new alliance took shape we’ve continued to evolve our understanding and ethic.
These principles are some of those we hold most dear at the moment and in our latest language.
Honour Human Dignity
Orient to Possibility
Surface Preferred Futures
Privilege People’s Stories Over Institutional Ones
Protect Stories from Being Co-Opted
Preserve Source’s Story Ownership
Enable and Ennoble Agency
Generative Journalism places a high value on emergence. So true to the practice, we imagine continuing to refine and evolve our understanding of these principles and how best to communicate them, together.
What We’ve Been Working On
Our early beginnings were loose and informal, our projects emergent and collaborative. We’ve since built capacity together through workshops, topics of inquiry, and a major project including:
Lankelly Chase Foundation Legacy Project - Publishing Soon
Just Transition - A Work in Progress
What is a Just Transition? An Inquiry. Interviews underway. An article planned for a major U.S. journal.
Agency in the Workplace - Now Then Magazine
This inquiry had the added element of being commissioned by a collaborative of organizations.
Beyond Patriarchy - Beyond Patriarchy Blog
Jack Becher, who led this inquiry is hosting a second learning journey this fall.
You can learn more and register here.
Foundations Earth - Insights
What if we could respond inclusively and effectively to planetary-scale problems?
Neighbourhood Democracy Movement
Right to Thrive - Now Then Magazine
This series is produced in collaboration with the River Dôn Project with funding from Sheffield Hallam Research and Innovation Fund.
Pathways to Generative Journalism Workshop Series
GJA member Peter Pula has a September 2025 offering of his well-loved, classic workshop series. You can learn more and register here.
Keep an eye on these pages for new workshop offerings by GJA.
Our Intentions
Our intention is to hold space for Generative Journalism to take root in movements, networks, communities, and organizations anywhere in the world where someone is interested.
Our practice is rooted in justice not just as a principle, but as a lived, local, and global imperative. Whether you’re speaking from a street in Nairobi or a kitchen table in Manchester, from a frontline climate struggle or a quiet place of care work, we believe your perspective has value, and your story belongs in the centre, not the margins.
Our possibility-oriented approaches help people and organisations to see more clearly what is often right next to them, and what their part in that change could be.
As a group we have developed a highly adaptive approach to projects which meets the needs of our partners, wherever you are at at any scale, while honouring our sources and aligning our work with our generative principles.
This is journalism not as spectacle, but as stewardship. We’re here to hold stories, not extract them. To generate new life from old truths. To create the kind of narrative ground where different futures can take root.
We’re not here to compete with mainstream narratives or replicate media models that have long failed our communities. We’re here to ask different questions. To slow down. To sit with complexity. To listen with reverence. And in doing so, to create space for people to make sense of their own lives, struggles, and joys on their own terms
In times like these, we don’t just need better headlines.
We need deeper meaning, and collective courage to imagine what’s next together.
We Are Opus serves as our administrative seat and fiscal agent.