Join us for a one-hour webinar plus Q&A where you’ll learn how to awaken your impactful project story and connect with a community of supporters.

Webinar Recording

Event date: 02. September 2021 | 13:00 CEST (UTC 11:00)

OpenForests is collaborating with ReWild Africa to offer this storytelling webinar. As guests, we have invited Misha Teasdale from Greenpop, and Dr. Bernard van Vuuren from African Origin Oils to present their remarkable project stories.

ReWild Africa, a storytelling agency for transformative story crafting, has more than a decade of experience coaching and implementing value-driven communication concepts for restoration and rewilding projects throughout Africa. ReWild Africa is interested in providing guidance and examples of how to find and build stories that have the potential to make real changes possible.

Standing for the Wild Ones | A ReWild Showreel. Inspirations and solutions of stories that ReWild Africa have been able to witness and tell.

OpenForests, a platform developer for project presentation and transparency, empowers forest landscape projects with their map-based platform explorer.land to present projects in time and space. By combining exciting storytelling (emotions) and reason (facts) their platform inspires funders to focus their investments on restoring healthy forest landscapes. OpenForests is interested in showcasing how various story elements, e.g. news, photos, video, maps, and data layers, can be combined to create a powerful story canvas for high-quality and transparent projects.

Why register for this webinar?

Every project has a unique story to tell. However, communicating their intricacies and impacts – generally, the end consumers who ultimately eat or use the project’s outputs – can be a real challenge. Considering the power of storytelling and its potential for cultural change, it’s a pity that many wonderful and engaging project stories never reach a wider audience. Or if they do, it is usually through static PDF reports. Nature restoration projects, however, are far from static. They are dynamic by nature (literally!), and so too should their communication.

With this webinar, we want to guide and inspire communicators of landscape projects to discover their stories while developing strategies to reach the audience. Examples will be presented of how stories can benefit from being told using maps, infographics, data, photos and imagery, video, timelines, biographies to name a few!

Every forest landscape project has a great story worth sharing with the world. And every organization can grow its following and impact. 

Who is this webinar for?

This webinar is not for those looking for a fast track to success! It is an initial online webinar for those who are willing to make a considerable time investment to make a change.

If you are responsible for one of the following activities:

  • Communication of project activities, e.g. stories about people, nature, the project successes, and failures, the real story;
  • The conception of the communication strategies for your organization and landscape project;
  • Caring for the relationships with stakeholders, donors, investors, buyers of forest products, and the public;

then this storytelling workshop is for you!

What’s in this webinar?

Storytelling for a Wilder World by Samuel Chevalier, Rewild Africa (25 min)

  1. The origins of storytelling.
  2. Creating Empathy through authenticity.
  3. Science in storytelling.
  4. Behaviour change for impact.
  5. Re-discovering your why; what is your story to create a wilder world.

Example: Kalahari Melon Oil by Dr. Bernard van Vuuren, African Origin Oils and Nêô Sephiri (12 min)

Kalahari Melon Oil’s success story and how Melon Seed Oil help building back a sustainable and climate-resilient economy. A story of origin, sustainable supply chain, and transparency.

Example of how active planting itself has become the powerful story by Misha Teasdale, Greenpop (12 min)

How building the story can move people from being anxious to being active.
Misha speaks to the power of action through storytelling,

Q&A (15 min)

The presenters will answer your burning questions.

About the speakers

Meet our main Presenter Sam Chevallier
Director and Restoration Story Design Expert @ ReWild Africa

Sam is Co-Founder and Director of ReWild Africa. He is a specialist in using design thinking to craft transformative stories with his clients. Sam uses the element of storytelling within educational activities such as biomimicry courses, training, concepts, filmmaking, and the use of innovative platforms (such as explorer.land). His own deep experiences in the natural world are the foundation for his passion, methods, and belief in stories of change.

Learn more about ReWild Africa

Meet our Presenter Dr. Bernard van Vuuren
Director @ African Origin Oils and Co-Founder @ NÊÔ SEPHIRI

After his family-owned farm in South Africa was hit by the worst droughts in 80 years, the indigenous Kalahari Melon, being the last plant still standing, captured their attention as a potential source of economic rehabilitation. The seed’s oil turned out to be extremely rich in natural Vitamin E and Essential Fatty Acids with a premium quality for the international beauty industry. Today Kalahari Melon Oil has found its way into the premium cosmetic products with the potential to reinvigorate the agricultural industry and bring back employment into remote Kalahari regions that were lost to the effects of climate change.

Learn more about African Origin Oils and Nêô Sephiri
Explore the project

Meet our Presenter Misha Teasdale
Co-Founder & Director @ Greenpop

Misha is a creative catalyst and the founder and Tree-E-O of Greenpop, a South African-based environmental organization on a mission to get active (not anxious) about the state of the planet. Together with like-minded individuals in Cape Town he planted 1000 trees in 1 month and hasn’t stopped since – now together they have planted over 130 000 trees across Sub-saharan Africa and inspired many more people to get active! In 2011 he was selected as one of the Top 200 Young South Africans by the Mail and Guardian nominated as one of SA’s top climate leaders in 2013. Further, Misha is a youth fellow at Yali Africa as part of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and am part of the Club of Rome African Youth delegation.

Learn more about Greenpop
Explore the projects

Meet our Moderator Alexander Watson
CEO and Founder @ OpenForests

As a forest investment expert and a manager of several sustainable reforestation projects in Latin America and South-East Asia, Alexander has broad experience in implementing and promoting international forestry projects. In 2011, with two partners, he founded OpenForests,  a consulting company for forest information management, which recently launched the explorer.land project presentation portal. To his academic merit, he holds a Bachelor in Forestry from the Technical University of Dresden in Germany and a Postgraduate Certificate in Social Banking and Social Finance from the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.

Learn more about OpenForests and explorer.land platform.

Author

Founder and CEO, OpenForests. Passioned about finding answers to the burning questions of our time. With our tools, we want to connect people and forests.