The Change the Story Creative Resilience Model

Change the Story is a creative resilience-building model developed through year-long practice with groups at increased risk of suicide due to isolation, trauma, loss, or systemic pressure. Led by Carmen Marcus and Josie Brookes, the project worked with five community groups to explore how creativity can gently restore agency, connection and belief in change.

What emerged is a five-step creative process that places trust, play and participant leadership at its core. The model is designed to be flexible and responsive, offering a scaffold rather than a prescription, and can be adapted across health, community and cultural settings.

Step One: Invitation

Rewriting the rules of creativity

If I say, “Draw an elephant,” many people immediately feel anxiety: Will it be good enough? I’m not creative. I don’t like elephants. These responses are shaped by judgement, education and past experiences of being told we are “doing it wrong.”

So we start differently.

Participants are invited to make a mark — any mark — onto a shared story blanket: a 160cm x 100cm square of blank calico. There is no correct outcome. This first step is about permission to disturb the big scary white space: letting go of ideas of right and wrong, loosening fear, and opening the door to play. Creativity begins not with skill, but with invitation.

Step Two: Voice

Restoring agency

Entering services and systems often means losing agency: assessments, pathways, criteria and decisions made for you. Our model deliberately disrupts the relationship between expert and user, we start from a place of mutual curiosity.

Through conversation, observation and gentle experimentation, we listen for interests, preferences and sparks of curiosity. Activities are adapted in response, allowing individual voices to surface and shape the direction of the work. Voice is not demanded — it is nurtured — and agency is rebuilt through being heard and responded to.

Step Three: Escape

Creating a sanctuary for creative risk

Before people can take creative risks, they need safety. The creative space becomes a sanctuary — somewhere to leave labels, diagnoses and daily pressures at the door.

Using participants’ ideas and interests, we introduce tools and methods that invite playfulness and imagination. Escape here is not avoidance; it is relief. Low-demand creative agency allows people to trust themselves again and to rehearse the feeling that change is possible.

“Creating a place for escape, somewhere I can leave my stuff at the door.”
“Not get bogged down by life.”
“When I had to go into hospital, the first thing I asked for was my junk journal.”
“A great way to have that escapism, while still facing up to things.”

The Misunderstood Moth, for example, can be enjoyed as a story about a moth and a giraffe dancing in moonlight — and also as a deeper exploration of transition, fear and courage.

Step Four: Problem-Solving

Creativity as rehearsal for life

Once trust is established, we introduce positive pressure: creative challenges that require collaboration, decision-making and perseverance. These might include working within material limits, researching local history, or shaping a shared narrative.

Creativity becomes a rehearsal space for life skills. In South Shields, a group who wanted to tell the story of local heroine Dolly Peel took on defined roles, wrote a shanty, and worked collectively to complete an animation. Through making together, participants practised negotiation, responsibility and confidence.

Step Five: Transformation

From participation to leadership

By session three of six, our role shifts. We step back from leading and become facilitators as participants find their place within the group — whether as researcher, storyteller, organiser or visual maker.

This shift marks the heart of transformation. Participants move from believing they cannot affect change to demonstrating that they can. They take ownership of direction, narrative and outcome. This change in belief — that change is possible and I can be part of it — is the foundation of creative resilience, with impact far beyond the sessions themselves.

Why Creativity Matters

Creativity allows people to process life’s challenges indirectly, safely and meaningfully. It builds understanding, confidence and connection — not by fixing problems, but by restoring the inner resources needed to face them. In suicide prevention, this belief in the possibility of change is not a by-product; it is the work.

Replication

The Change the Story Creative Resilience Model is designed to be transferable without losing its care-led, artist-centred integrity. Rather than relying on fixed outcomes or art forms, the model is built around principles — invitation, voice, escape, problem-solving and transformation — which can be adapted to different settings, communities and levels of need. This makes it suitable for use across suicide prevention, mental health, education, community development and cultural programmes.