In New Westminster, B.C., more than 100 community members, including the mayor, recently signed up to host voluntary learning experiences centred on one of their passions, hobbies, skills or an experience they’ve had. Mayor Jonathan Cote, for example, is offering a behind-the-scenes-tour of city hall.

It’s exciting to see fresh practices and intentions around what it means to share stories as a community rising up in several places.

Below, we list four emerging initiatives, all representing a step into this ambiguous space that might best be called community-building and community-engaged journalism.

The broader community is at a crossroads of change; change in how we communicate, how we tell stories, how we gather, and most of all, how we include everyone in our community in this effort. So what’s a promising response to this crossroads?

If we’re not careful while doing the important work of creating the conditions for social change, we can find our hearts closing rather than opening. So what’s the antidote?

A just-released video documentary of the transformation of a once-failing U.K. primary school offers hope not only for our education communities, but also for the way we create the story of any community we care about.

David Cooper is feeling renewed hope after seeing his fellow residents of Ashland, Virginia step up to support a unique poverty-reduction effort.

PETERBOROUGH - A Jan. 14 jobs and local economy summit hosted by Maryam Monsef, Member of Parliament for Peterborough-Kawartha, offered a taste of what could be called deep democracy. People in the room co-discovered existing assets in the community, imagined new possibilities and considered their own level of commitment to bringing something new into being.

PETERBOROUGH - Canadian Federal Member of Parliament Maryam Monsef’s recent community gatherings in her Peterborough-Kawartha riding are modelling new forms of participatory process and citizen leadership. “I see citizens taking ownership of the question,” Maryam said, as over 120 citizens engaged in intimate conversations in circles of three at a January 11 town hall on jobs and the economy.

Last year we were thrilled to illuminate some incredible stories — stories that reveal our preferred future is already, in many ways, in the room.

From outliers to renegades, pirates and solitary forest wanderers, a few words cropping up in an international dialogue on Generative Journalism and the New Narrative Arts hosted by Axiom News this week surfaced a shared sense of being on the edge of something — the thrilling but also often lonely and anxiety-ridden edge.

Directly linked to that, there was a pulsing theme of gratitude to have found one another — to have discovered companions or, better yet, fellow pirates, as Jocasta Boone said, for the ongoing adventure into the unknown.