What lives below

In a forest, the understory is the layer beneath the canopy. It is shaded and easy to walk past, yet it holds the conditions for a diverse range of species to grow, offering protection and regenerative potential. It provides the nutrient-rich environment needed for animals and plants to thrive. Some of the tallest trees in the forest can spend decades here first, in the quiet, rich soil underneath.

Ideas grow the same way. They need space and time to develop. The thinking that takes shape over a decade rarely arrives directly in the headlines. It gathers first in the margins, outside the largest institutions and the usual consensus. UnderStory is the layer beneath the news, a place to collect deep thinking, give it shape, and connect the dots.

What it is

A living archive of constructive ideas, organised around three topics. Each one, a crisis that is also an opening.

From polycrisis to possibility.

Our bond with the earth. Our bond with each other. Our bond with ourselves. Everyone answers from the same small set of questions, so that people with distinct ways of seeing the world can be read side by side.

Who’s in the room

The heart of UnderStory is who gets to speak. A scientist and a novelist. A musician and an investor. A film director and a sociologist. A twenty-five-year-old and a seventy-five-year-old. Voices from Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America and Oceania.

What someone has lived counts as much as what they have studied. A carpenter and a professor can sit on the same page. Difference here is not a problem to even out. It is the whole point. A poet and a scientist answering the same question may reveal more than ten specialists trained in the same way.

How it’s curated

We select voices that bring depth, clarity, and a distinct perspective, shaped by different cultures, disciplines, and ways of thinking. If writing isn’t your thing, we can do it as an interview and write it up for you. After that, we stay out of the way. Entries run with a two-line bio and no editing of the argument itself.

A door for getting in touch remains open. We’re always looking for new voices as the archive grows.

Five values hold it together

Constructive imagination

Critique is welcome, but it needs to lead somewhere. We are interested not only in what is wrong, but mostly in what could be made better. We want to make room for thought that is imaginative, corageous, and not too restricted by current assumptions.

Diversity as strength

A poet and a scientist answering the same question may reveal more than ten people trained in the same discipline. Here, difference is central to the method.

Intellectual honesty

No position is beyond question, and no credential is a defence. What someone has lived counts as much as what they have studied. What matters is the quality of the argument, a willingness to be wrong, and a readiness to change one's mind.

Common humanity

None of us chose the world we arrived into. That's good reason to judge less, care more, and treat the common good as everyone's responsibility.

Deep listening

Good conversation requires more than self-expression. It requires attention, patience, and a genuine openness to being persuaded.

Where it could go

The archive is only the start. The longer view is a living record, and a community around it.

A searchable living archive

A way to find patterns across hundreds of voices answering the same questions over years. For example, entries might reveal how the sense of "balance," "trust," or "belonging" could shift over time.

An annual gathering

Small, in-person events where contributors meet and conversations are carried off the page.

A commissioning platform

Pairing contributors to answer one another. A novelist replies to an economist. A musician replies to a scientist.

A resource for classrooms

Clear questions and a genuine range of voices that teachers can actually use, a small answer to the sameness of most teaching material.

A collective curriculum

Contributors are invited to sketch one piece of an ideal curriculum for a thriving future. Answer by answer, it could add up to a syllabus no single mind could write alone.

A signal

Over time, a place to notice ideas surfacing before they reach policy. An early warning for what is coming.

A note on who's behind it

UnderStory is put together by Valentina Ramírez and Sophie Legros.

Valentina has spent more than fifteen years in finance, several of them building bridges between capital markets and climate. She finds joy in singing and practicing capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian practice that is part game, part dance, part fight.

Sophie Legros studies how social norms change, and why some of them hold on. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, where her fieldwork followed the everyday sharing of work and care in Medellín. She works where research methods, gender, and the wellbeing economy meet. She finds peace practicing tai chi, a Chinese art of slow, flowing movement grounded in the Taoist idea of harmony with the natural way of things.

We started UnderStory as a way of opening our ongoing conversations to the world, and of gathering wise, generous, and constructive voices in a fractured time.