Angeles
narrative intelligence
Every engagement begins the same way: research and deep listening (in English and/or Spanish). What differs is what we build after.
Narrative Archives
For institutions that need a record built to last - and to be found.
Memory is fragile. Whether in communities or institutions, the people who built them carry knowledge that is not in documents - and when they leave, or age, or move on, that knowledge goes with them unless someone has the initiative to record it.
This requires a conversation that is patient, unstructured, and ethically held; and an architecture that organises testimony into a form worth engaging with, citing, and preserving.
I design oral history projects that meet the ethical and archival standards of the Oral History Society (UK). Every interview is conducted under a formal consent framework. Every interviewee retains rights over their testimony. The archive is an instrument for individuals, communities and projects to see themselves in a new light, and to leave a testimony to the next generations.
Narrative Empowerment
For people whose knowledge deserves a platform - and has never been given one.
Across 25 years of practice, I have found people who existed outside the frame of what their society considered worth listening to.
A Peruvian sociologist working as a hairdresser in Bolivia. An Argentine woman on the outskirts of Paris, running sewing lessons and organising her community around causes.
People who had never been asked to share what they knew in a form that others could find, read, and build on.
These people are not inside organisations. They are in ordinary life. They are found through proximity, patience, and the specific skill of recognising knowledge that has no institutional home.
I find them. I conduct the conversations needed to surface what they hold but cannot yet articulate. I work with them through the editorial process - not to put my words in their mouth, but to help them find the form in which their own words carry the weight they deserve.
The published work belongs to them. Narrative sovereignty is the principle that guides the process.
Narratives of Impact
For organisations whose year deserves to be described, not just recorded.
Every organisation’s year contains knowledge that does not appear in monitoring data - the shift that happened in month seven, the approach that was tried and what it cost to establish, the outcome the numbers point toward but cannot explain. That knowledge lives in the people who were there. It surfaces in conversation, not in dashboards.
The self-reporting problem is structural, not personal. No one inside the work can simultaneously carry a year and stand far enough back to see where its argument is. That distance is what I bring.
I work alongside your existing reporting process. Using oral history methods, I conduct structured conversations with the people who carry that knowledge - programme staff, founding members, those closest to the work. From those conversations, I find the thread that connects your mission to the year’s evidence, in language the public can follow.
The sections I contribute to - activities, impact, what we learned, where we go next - are the narrative sections. They are where the data becomes a story.