How Future Narratives came to be

The Future Narratives methodology grew through practice, iteration and revision, conversations between practitioners in four countries, and the determination to build something genuinely transformative and transferable. This is the story of how it was built.

The origin

Future Narratives began as a conviction held by Nerina Finetto, founder and director of Traces&Dreams: that the capacity to tell, read, and reimagine stories — at the personal, community, societal, and futures levels — is among the most consequential human competencies, and among the most systematically neglected in formal and non-formal education.

The framework was first articulated and presented publicly at the World Forum for Women in Science in February 2020. The core proposition — that narrative literacy is not a cultural luxury but a democratic necessity, and that it can be systematically taught and developed — was the intellectual foundation on which everything that followed was built.

To test that proposition rigorously, and to develop a methodology transferable across cultural and institutional contexts, Traces&Dreams brought together a consortium of youth organisations across Europe and applied for Erasmus+ co-funding. What followed were five years of implementation, iteration, and consolidation that transformed an idea into a documented, validated, freely available methodology.

Future Narratives 1: 2020 to 2022

Erasmus+ project reference: 2020-3-SE02-KA205-003019

The first Future Narratives project brought together six organisations across Europe with a shared conviction: that young people, particularly those from migrant and disadvantaged backgrounds, needed tools to understand and author the stories shaping their lives, not merely to receive the stories others told about them. Traces&Dreams coordinated a partnership that crossed four countries, with Federación Andalucía Acoge in Spain, Inter Alia in Greece, Machart GbR in Germany, and Möjligheternas Plats in Sweden. Each brought the methodology into contact with a different national context and a different community of young people. Euro Project Lab (Italy) provided administrative, financial and compliance expertise.

Between 2020 and 2022, the partnership organised a series of transnational events in Spain, Greece, Germany, and Sweden, creating the first spaces in which young people and youth workers could encounter the Future Narratives approach: combining personal storytelling, community narrative, and futures literacy in an integrated experience. The digital platform was launched as a shared learning space for participants across countries.

The key outputs were: European Guidelines for the Innovative Use of Narrative and Storytelling in the Empowerment of Young People, the first systematic articulation of the Future Narratives methodology and its theoretical foundations; Future Narratives Informal Innovative Pathways, structured activities designed to empower young people through Futures Literacy, narrative and storytelling.

What the first project made clear was that the methodology had genuine power, and that it needed deeper development, more systematic training, and a transferable curriculum if it was to move beyond the consortium and reach practitioners across Europe.

Future Narratives 2: 2023 to 2025

Erasmus+ project reference: 23-1-SE02-KA220-YOU-000159977

The partnership continued for our second project, designed to do exactly what the first had shown was needed: to systematise the methodology into a transferable curriculum, to train practitioners who could implement it in their own contexts, and to build the knowledge infrastructure that would allow the community to continue growing after the project ended.

Between 2023 and 2025, the partnership:

• Developed the Future Narratives Curriculum for Youth Work, a comprehensive, adaptable guide for practitioners working with young people across formal and non-formal education contexts. The curriculum covers all four levels of narrative literacy and provides practical tools, facilitation guides, and adaptation frameworks.
• Built the Knowledge Hub, a freely accessible repository of theory, methodology, curated resources, and community content organised around the four levels of the framework. It is designed to be used, not archived.
• Delivered training and mentoring for youth workers, practitioners, and educators across Germany, Greece, Spain, and Sweden, piloting the curriculum in diverse cultural and institutional contexts and documenting what transfer requires.
• Ran national and transnational workshops with young people across all partner countries, giving trained practitioners direct facilitation experience and giving young people the tools to reimagine their own futures.
• Launched the Future Narratives Festival in Italy in Spring 2025, a public event that brought together practitioners, young people, policymakers, and international guests to experience the methodology, see the results of five years of work, and contribute to what comes next.

The key outputs are all freely available here.

What comes next: the community of practice

The Erasmus+ projects have ended. The methodology has not.

Future Narratives is now maintained and developed by Traces&Dreams as a living community of practice open to educators, researchers, youth workers, facilitators, and organisations across Europe and beyond who want to apply, adapt, and extend the framework in their own contexts.

The Curriculum is free to use. The Knowledge Hub continues to grow. The Future Narratives Pathway is available for anyone who wants to run it. If you want to implement Future Narratives in your context, train with us, commission a narrative-informed Futures Literacy Lab, or contribute to the development of the methodology, we want to hear from you.