How to share your story
The Climate Stories Map is made of ordinary stories. Not reports, not statistics — what people noticed, what they felt, and what they decided to do about it.
If you have such a story, we would like to put it on the map. You do not publish it yourself. You send it to us, and someone from the project team — from your own country wherever possible — will help you finish it and publish it for you.
1. What kind of story?
Every story on the map belongs to one of four kinds. Pick the one that fits yours; it does not have to be all four.
👁 The Witness
Stories about observing environmental or seasonal changes across life. You have watched something change — a river, a garden, a winter, a bird that used to come.
🔧 The Problem-Solver
Something you changed in your daily life and what inspired that change. You started doing something differently, and there was a reason.
⚡ The Turning Point
Stories about moments when climate change became personal. There was a day, a flood, a summer, a conversation — and afterwards it was no longer abstract.
🔭 The Visionary
Stories about imagining a positive future. What your street, your town, your work could look like if this went well.
2. How long, and in what form
- Write between 500 and 5000 characters — roughly 100 to 800 words. Long enough to be a story, short enough that people read it to the end.
- Write in your own language. Croatian, Slovenian, German, French, English — whatever the story happened in. We add a short English summary ourselves, so people in other countries can find it.
- Write as yourself. First person, plain words. The strongest stories on this map are the ones that sound like someone talking, not like a leaflet.
We also accept stories that are not written text:
| Format | What we need |
|---|---|
| 🎥 Video | Filmed horizontally, up to 5 minutes. Good sound matters more than good picture |
| 🎧 Podcast or audio | Up to 15 minutes, recorded somewhere quiet |
| 📷 Photo story | 1–12 photographs, at least 1200 px wide, with a sentence about each |
| A finished document — a school project, a small publication | |
| 🎙 Interview | With the other person's permission, and their name or "anonymous" |
| 📚 Lesson | A ready-to-use classroom activity, if you are a teacher |
Video and audio are published on the project's YouTube channel and linked from the map, so you do not need anywhere to host them.
3. What to send us
Send an e-mail with:
- The story itself — in the body of the e-mail, as a document, or as a file.
- The place — the town or village the story belongs to. That is where the pin goes.
- Your name, or a note that you want it published anonymously or under your first name only.
- Photographs, if you have them — and who took them.
- One line about which of the four kinds your story is.
None of this has to be perfect. If something is missing we will write back and ask.
Where to send it
| Country | Write to |
|---|---|
| Croatia | eko.brezna.info@gmail.com |
| Slovenia | (Inštitut Antona Trstenjaka — address to be added) |
| Germany | (Wisamar — address to be added) |
| France | (M3 MCube — address to be added) |
| Anywhere else in Europe | eko.brezna.info@gmail.com |
Stories from every European country are welcome, not only from the four project countries.
4. Two examples
"My grandfather's garden", Slavonski Brod, Croatia — The Witness
My grandfather has kept the same garden for fifty years. He knows it the way you know a room in the dark. This spring he planted the beans two weeks earlier than his father ever did, because the ground was already warm — and then a frost came in the middle of April and took them anyway. He stood at the fence and said: I no longer know when to plant. He is eighty-one. That sentence is the whole climate crisis, said by someone who has never used those words.
"Tuesday evenings", Leipzig, Germany — The Problem-Solver
After the heat of that summer I could not go back to doing nothing, but I also could not face another petition. So I started opening the community room on Tuesday evenings, with two soldering irons and a box of screwdrivers. People bring things that have stopped working. Last month it was a toaster from 1974, and it works now. We are not saving the planet on Tuesday evenings. But forty people who used to throw things away no longer do, and I sleep better.
(Each translation of this page should replace these with two local examples.)
5. Rules we ask you to respect
- No party politics. Write about what you saw and did, not about who should win an election.
- Nothing that insults people on the grounds of nationality, ethnicity or race. Stories that do are not published.
- Be careful with other people. If someone else appears in your story or your photographs, ask them first.
- Please do not send photographs of children. If a child is visible in a photograph we publish, we blur the face.
- You must be 13 or older to have a story published on the map.
6. Your rights
By sending us your story, photographs, video or audio, you agree that we may publish them on the Climate Stories Map and use them for the non-commercial educational purposes of the 3H project.
- Your e-mail address is never published.
- You may ask to be shown as anonymous or under your first name only.
- You may ask us to change or remove your story at any time — write to eko.brezna.info@gmail.com and we will do it.
- Full details are in the privacy policy.
7. What happens next
We read everything that arrives and reply as quickly as we can. If your story is going on the map, we will write to you first — to check the place, the name you want shown and the English summary — and we will send you the link once it is live.
Thank you for telling it. Someone in another country will read it and recognise themselves.