Building Our Own Table: Natalie Lartey

Hello friends,

It seems a long time since I put out the call for more people doing great things to feature in this interview series. That call has led to some impactful interviews during 2024, and I’m delighted to add Natalie Lartey, founder of Wood & Water, to that list. Please meet Natalie…

Natalie, tell me briefly about your background prior to founding Wood & Water

Before I launched Wood & Water, I worked as an activist, advocate, and communicator, for environmental and humanitarian organisations such as Greenpeace, Action Against Hunger, and Concern Worldwide. I still advise researchers at the International Institute for the Environment and Development (IIED) on racial justice concerns.

However, I’ve always felt frustrated that organisations I worked for didn’t understand or sufficiently address racial justice and coloniality, despite working in post-colonial contexts, or on issues that disproportionally effect Black people and ‘people of colour’. Though lip service was paid in full.

Without being put off by this race avoidant approach in my sector and the predominantly white spaces I’ve worked in, I’ve ensured my roles engage with issues of racial justice and coloniality. From engaging Black Britons in Greenpeace campaigns to creating research tools that analyse racism in development narratives.

I was also introduced to Pan-Africanism and socialism within the Black radical tradition, early on in my career which has been a huge resource and help. Embracing this type of Black radical thought while working in mainstream charities was hard going. Over the years, there have been small wins, and lots of experiences being side-lined. Then we had the first and second waves of the Black Lives Matter movements, and COVID hitting Black Britons harder than other groups. Suddenly it was acceptable to talk about racism and colonialism in environmental and humanitarian spaces. So, I took my chance, and I set up Wood & Water.

Give me the elevator pitch for Wood & Water

Wood & Water is a social enterprise, our vision is a world where humanitarian, development and environmental stories promote racial justice for all. We work with clients to help them understand and then address racism, saviourism, and Eurocentrism in their organisation’s narratives. As a social enterprise, we reinvest our profits into storytelling initiatives with young Black and Brown Londoners that have been marginalised from humanitarian and environmental conversation.

And in more detail?

Our work is focused on the humanitarian, development, and environmental storytelling done through fundraising, events, volunteering, media work, or celebrity appeals. But we also assess internal storytelling that happens when people write strategies, philanthropy proposals, or conduct research on issues like food crises in regions like East or West Africa.

We use bespoke narrative analysis tools designed inhouse to highlight ways that charity content and knowledge products erase racial injustice and colonialism as root causes of poverty in post-colonial contexts. This is important because this erasure is shaping our collective misunderstanding of what causes humanitarian and environmental crises – and what is needed to address these intractable conditions. Our work also seeks to disrupt long held and damaging racial stereotypes of white saviourism and Black victimhood that are dominant in humanitarian storytelling about parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

A new and exciting part of our work at Wood & Water involves leading by example and telling alternative environmental and humanitarian stories, from a racial justice perspective. We do this through the delivery of pop-up exhibition/learning spaces for young people. In these spaces we run two-day workshops that share subject knowledge and digital storytelling skills with young people, so they have the resources to tell stories on these topics on their own terms, from their own racial and cultural perspectives.

Our latest project is Climate Calling, it is an exhibition and learning space that discusses the intersections between climate, health and racial injustice. If you are based in London, you can see the exhibition at The Africa Centre from 10-17 October. The details are on our website, you can also sign up to get information on how Wood & Water can bring the Climate Calling learning workshop to a group of interested young people, or a school in the UK.

What inequalities were you trying to address, and why are they important?

The inequalities our work tackles address the ways that racism and white supremacy shape who gets to tell humanitarian and environmental stories and what topics are considered legitimate or not. Most importantly the work we do to re-write narratives addresses the fact that Black people and people of colour are often denied recognition as reliable sources of knowledge on environmental and humanitarian issues.

We also tackle the inequity faced by Black audiences and audiences of colour that in the main are still receiving content that hinders their ability to make sense of environmental and humanitarian concerns in ways that align with the rest of their racial and cultural lived experiences and awareness.

How’s it going?

At Wood & Water we have facilitated a lot of people through ‘light bulb moments’, we’ve started creating some great content, like our mini podcast series on environmentalism from a Black youth perspective and our Climate Calling exhibition. However within our charity work, lasting transformation is slow. Keep an eye out on our website for our first impact report which is coming soon.

To give you a sense of our scale, in our two plus years since inception, we have taken approximately 220 people through a short- or longer-term learning process. We have great partnerships with young people, through universities, colleges and youth services, we have written reports and blogs that are all available on our website. Our Climate Calling project uses digital technology to create content, including creation of a bespoke GPT chat function on our website that supports learning on climate, health, and race concerns. It’s called Black Ink, check it out. What I will also say is that the work we do takes time and patience, so I’m pleased with what we’ve achieved so far.

What’s next for Wood & Water?

Telling anti-racist stories about the humanitarian issues of hunger and malnutrition is a growth area that I am excited about developing. Narratives of vulnerable hungry Black children and children of colour are pervasive and need disrupting. Also watch this space for more charity learning programmes and spaces. If your readers know of philanthropy organisations that will fund the type of work in Britain, send me details of funders by email. If you are a charitable organisation interested in working with us commercially do get in touch for a free discovery call.

In relation to racism, what is your vision for the future?

I am very aware of the power that stories have, they shape how we see ourselves, others, and make sense of the world. My vision for the future is one where people are not afraid to use stories to destroy harmful race based the ideas, and recreate themselves and people anew. From there maybe we can create new ways of organising society and tell stories that remind us that the trappings of modern life are not serving our wellbeing, our health or our environment. Humans from all over the world had healthy happy lives before stories of whiteness and Blackness existed, we can create something similar but different in our future.

Folx, I love Natalie’s vision, don’t you? Please connect with her on her website, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Thanks for reading,

Sharon

Note: poll feedback is private - if you’re happy to share your thoughts in public, then please also leave a comment.

I am an anti-racism educator and activist, the author of “I’m Tired of Racism”, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast.

© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2024. All Rights Reserved. This newsletter is published on beehiiv (affiliate link).