The Swords into Ploughshares (SiP) project group of Brighouse West Yorkshire Area Meeting (BWYAM) began in 2020, growing out of a concern from Hebden Bridge Quaker meeting (HBQM), which was adopted by BWYAM. Initially we were focussed on achieving a progressive, global annual redirection of military spending towards the real threats to human security this century – such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, living beyond planetary boundaries and increasing inequality.
The SiP group consists of Quakers and others supportive of the idea, who have met more or less monthly since. After an initial scoping exercise reviewing activities in this area by others, attempts were made to get an established think tank to work on scenarios towards progressive redirection of military spending, with some funding provided by a member of the SiP group. While the think tank declined to take it on, the offer of funding remained.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. States’ attention turned to redirecting and increasing spending into the military believing, in our view falsely, that this will increase security. More likely as arms races continue, and different states and peoples are demonised, the weapons developed will be used and eventually lead to major wars. Our question became: What lies behind the cultural desire for conflict and the use of violence to settle disputes? What are the patterns of thinking, the myths, beliefs and stories that take people down paths to violent conflict and war? We decided we that we need new stories and pathways to create a peaceful future.
The SiP Group was able to connect with others thinking about this in 2023 - Paul Ingram, a Quaker who was then Academic Programme Manager and Senior Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge and Sarah Woods, an award-winning writer, activist and teacher. They developed People and Patterns: Transforming the ways we think and connect when everything is at risk, involving joint research between CSER and Sarah Woods. This aimed to expose the systemic reasons that lead people and societies to accept that violence and war are the best ways to act.
SiP facilitated this work, seeking to help people see patterns of thinking and behaviour that lead to conflict and war. As part of this process, Paul and Sarah held three workshops, focussing on nuclear weapons, the experience of trauma and global catastrophic risk.
Paul (CESR) and Sarah (SiP) then held a workshop on the People and Patterns project at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna in July 2023 and Sarah established good working relationships with Brian Fath (IIASA, Towson University, ecosystems ecologist) and Elena Rovenskaya, (Program Director Advancing Systems Analysis Program at IIASA) which has led to further collaboration. Sarah talked further with Brian Fath while she was in the USA on a Fulbright Scholarship, also meeting with systems thinker Fritjof Capra in Berkeley and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, as well as exploring the People & Patterns methods with a diverse range of students on a BA course in Systems Thinking.
In 2024, Sarah contributed an essay to a series organised by the magazine of ProSocial World, This View of Life. She held initial discussions with Charlotte Cooper, Peace Lead at QPSW about how to involve Quakers during this process, and delivered a workshop for Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in June 2025. Sarah took part in a SiP online special interest group meeting before Britain Yearly Meeting on July 7th 2024 which 20 Friends took part in, with a report about the meeting on page 17 of the Friend of 12th July. On August 12th Sarah and systems ecologist Brian Fath lead a workshop at IIASA called ‘Patterns for Life’, exploring how patterns we find in ecological systems can be useful for us in managing complexity in human made systems. Fifteen experts from different disciplines attended and IIASA developed a position paper on the work.
To reach a wider audience, Sarah developed a 5 part series for the BBC, with funding from the Network for Social Change (NSC), revealing how story has changed, its power over us, and how to better live with it:
We make sense of the world through story, using it to maintain our identity and manage change. More than something we read or listen to, it’s a way of thinking”. We are at a crisis of narration: story has narrowed in form and widened in use and reach, becoming a subject of study – narratology – put to work by corporations, politicians and the modern media.
ONE – Stories we’re told
We know stories can be dangerous, but when they come at us continually it’s hard to discern truth from lie. Faced by false narratives and unreliable narrators, how can story get us back on track?
TWO – Stories we tell ourselves
What’s possible for us is shaped by the life-story we tell ourselves, and conversations with our inner voices, yet we’re hardly aware of either. How can better knowing our inner story world help us?
THREE – Stories we share
We share stories with family and friends – actual and online – making bubbled worlds it is hard to see out of. What are we missing by telling the same stories?
FOUR – Stories we know
We carry stories through our lives, including religious and national histories, that enable some beliefs and disable others. How do these foundational stories affect us?
FIVE – stories to guide us
For two decades, our future visions have been dominated by dystopias. We need positive future visions to get through the darkness, but when story equals conflict, how can we tell them?
The podcast series made it through the first stage of commissioning by the BBC but was not chosen in the final round of five proposals. However, Gaby Hornsby, the BBC’s Content Editor and TV Lead for Sustainability, asked Sarah to present our work at the Climate Creatives conference 2025, attended by commissioners and creatives from companies including the BBC, Sky and ITV. Sarah was on a panel in the morning and ran a workshop in the afternoon. You can listen to the panel discussion here.
Sarah has also given lectures and workshops on the research, visiting Norway and Denmark, with Public Lectures at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in mid-Wales in both 2025 and 2026. She wrote a feature for the CAT magazine, Clean Slate, in their Summer/Autumn 2025 issues, no 136, and one for Resurgence & Ecologist May/June 2026.
Many people Sarah has spoken to about this work have found it inspiring and transformational. We feel that the best way forward is for Sarah to write a book communicating the research, followed by a wider dissemination of the work.
The Story Crisis: how story makes and changes the world - a book and beyond
So far, thanks to a small amount of funding from HBQM and BWYAM and much more substantial funding from a member of the SiP group and the Network for Social Change, we have invested some £46,500 in this work. What we are trying to help achieve is a huge change in the people’s mindset and to re-write the stories that underpin the acceptance of violence and war as ways to solve conflicts.
Sarah has written the book outline, and has now begun writing the book, which reveals how stories have changed over the last 50 years, their current power over us, and how we can restory the world. The book has three parts:
PART ONE – The Big Story
Explores the roles story plays in our lives and how we have arrived where we are with it. Using monoculture agriculture as a lens, it establishes the Monomyth, the dominant story form of our time, and its key patterns of conflict, heroes and villains and binary opposites. Finally, it shows us how this story form has moved out into culture and society, and how the individualistic hero, driven by conflict and seeking victory, has become the story of everything.
PART TWO – A World of Story
Explores the idea that story is not a singular thing in our lives, but a landscape in which we live, with popular travel routes, borders, and places that feel like home. It unpacks this ‘map’ of story in our lives, from the stories we tell ourselves to those we tell each other, the dominant narratives we are told by all sorts of agencies and those we carry with us through our lives from our religious, cultural and national histories. It finishes with the stories we tell about the future and why they are currently dominated by dystopias and catastrophes.
PART THREE – A New Story
A handbook of ways that story can help us manage the complex problems around us. It explores alternative storytelling forms from global traditions to those inspired by ecosystems and the natural world. It then identifies alternative ways of working with story, for individuals, groups, campaigners and creatives, to challenge dominant narratives about militarisation, immigration and the climate crisis, and restory our world.
It will take Sarah a year to write the book. To do this, she needs to step away from other paid work, but she still needs to pay her bills at home and cover expenses involved in writing the book, like buying key research texts.
During this time, we also want to create a website, short videos, workshops and other ways of sharing these insights into how to change the stories that underlie our approach to violence, conflict and war.
To support Sarah over the next year, we want to raise £25,000. Anything raised in addition to that will go towards the website and content sharing.
For information on how to support the project, see the Swords into Ploughshares appeal page.