This paper describes a narrative collective practice model that was applied in a Singapore community that experiences financial difficulties and other complex issues. The ‘Pocket Kering’ (‘no money’) project involved four stages. First, conversations with families in their homes elicited rich descriptions of their experiences of Pocket Kering, and the skills, values and knowledges they had employed to respond to it. The second part of the project brought the ‘small people’ together in a day camp where they engaged with the ‘Pocket Kering Monster’. The children identified and shared their ‘superpowers’: the skills, values and knowledges they had used to shrink the monster when it had appeared in their lives. The third part was called ‘Operation M’ (for money). The children were employed to plan and run a small income-generating project using their superpowers. The final stage of the project entailed a definitional ceremony in which the stories of the children were told and retold, and their preferred identities were acknowledged by an audience of community members and parents. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the project, including considerations of power and privilege.

The narrative therapy practice of de nitional ceremony and outsider witnessing can create spaces for people and communities to move through dominant problem stories to new, richer stories of hope and connection. This paper looked at the use of outsider witnessing in a new setting, with a long-term survivor of HIV/AIDS, and his family. This paper introduces David, his history of experiences with HIV/AIDS stigma, trauma, and homophobia, and his current struggles in his relationships with his family. The outsider- witness experience with David and his family is described, with detailed re-authorising conversations between me, David, and his family. Outsider-witnessing practices provided David and his family a way to move through dominant stories of stigma, shame, and disconnection, to richer stories of love, connection and commitment to one another. The paper discusses recommendations and ideas for re-creating these experiences with other long-term survivors, in community and in partnership with AIDS service organisations. The paper concludes with reflections.

This paper describes a therapeutic journey with a man who reclaimed his life from ‘illness fears’ and their devastating effects. It invites the reader to become an audience to the client’s resistance to dominant mental health discourses and the pathological self-narratives these discourses shaped. The article highlights particular turning points where the client reclaimed places in his life that fears and medical discourses had previously occupied.

Maintaining a narrative practice within conventional organisational structures that are informed by modernist and medicalised ideas of identity, professional expertise and ethics can present a variety of challenges. In some contexts, governmental regulations and market-based funding directly affect the practices of service providers by imposing regulations and limits that stand in opposition to the relational intentions of narrative practice. This is particularly true for narrative practitioners who work alongside marginalised communities with intentions of doing justice. One organisation, RECLAIM, in St Paul, Minnesota, USA, is striving to meet this challenge. RECLAIM is building a community organisation that serves queer and transgender young people. Julie Tilsen (co-editor of this issue) sat down with RECLAIM’s founder, Janet Bystrom, to learn how, as an organisation, RECLAIM aspires to embody narrative practices and principles, not only in the therapy room, but also in its policies, procedures and everyday organisational practices.

This paper is many things, it started as a conference paper exploring what would happen, as community service workers, if we stepped away from language like the ‘complex needs client’, instead playing with an archetype such as the Rascal, the mischievous ‘trouble maker’, and seeing the Bother in trouble as a way to connect, to a journal piece that invites you into a liminal space I shared with one particular client in an LGBTIQA+ specialist organisation, who taught me how the dispossession of hope, which I came to acknowledge as her resistance, in the face of not being deeply seen, but wanting to connect with others, was cause for honour. This journey is peppered with Queering narrative approaches such as externalising, re-authoring and acknowledging the absent but implicit as acts of exorcising that which has been internalised, carving alternative identities and writing oneself back in from the margins, so endemic in the struggles of the collective LGBTIQA+ communities and our histories of erasure. Finally, it has become a reflection on my decentred practice; a love letter that strikes the blood of my work.

This paper explores how the Tree of Life was re-created and adapted for a group of young Muslim women living in Sydney, Australia. Blossomed from these conversations was the nourishing source offered from trees, and from the Islamic faith. Reconciling these two sources led to an uncovering of ‘survival skills’ that the young women draw on to resist the struggles of everyday life. The innovation of women guest speakers from the local Muslim community added to the richness, and power, of these conversations. The Tree of Life opened up a space, and an appreciation for, alternative knowledges, alternative stories, and a stronger sense of community amongst the young women.

As an Aboriginal person, I see firsthand how the dominant culture influences relations of power and privilege through systems, institutions and dominant ideas about best practice. My work involves exploring ways narrative practice aligns with Aboriginal worldviews and how this can support respectful and decolonising practice with Aboriginal people who consult us. In this paper I describe practices that challenge damage-centred accounts that locate problems within individuals and communities. Guided by our Aboriginal worldviews, I work alongside the people with whom I meet in my work to and ways to decolonise our minds and explore multi-storied accounts of people’s lives by starting with and building upon stories of strength using narrative maps of practice.

I write this article not to step into an expert role as a narrative therapist or to speak for all First Nations People, but rather to share my experiences of narrative practices and how they helped to reclaim my relationship with my mom 26 years after her death. I write this, too, as a personal account of reclaiming my identity as a First Nations woman. I do not wish to speak in an instructive way that would suggest all people should reclaim their identity in this particular fashion, but rather to explain the impact on me as I restored parts of my story that had been lost to a modern dominant cultural worldview that often overlooks the importance of stories. Another important focus of this article is how knowledge drawn from both First Nations Cultures and Narrative Practice has influenced my work with people who are dying and their families. The weaving of these knowledges brings a different strength and a new pattern emerges.

This paper introduces ‘My Meeting Place’, a process that integrates Aboriginal art practices and narrative practices to facilitate culturally appropriate counselling by Aboriginal practitioners working with Aboriginal children and young people. It offers an Indigenised therapeutic framework that contributes to the decolonisation of Aboriginal people. The paper includes a step-by-step description of how My Meeting Place was used in a one-on-one counselling session to create and guide narrative conversations.