What lives below

In a forest, the understory is the layer beneath the canopy. It is shaded, easy to walk past, and it holds most of the life. The movements that change things often start there, in the quiet, rich soil at the edges.

Ideas grow the same way. The thinking that shapes a decade rarely arrives 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 that thinking, give it a shape, and read across it.

What it is

A living archive of constructive vision, 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 the same small set of questions, so that very different people can be read side by side without being flattened into one voice.

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 person of twenty five and a person of seventy. Voices from Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the UK, and the US.

What someone has lived counts as much as what they have studied. A carpenter and a professor can sit on the same page. Fame is optional and depth is not. Difference here is not a problem to smooth over. It is the whole idea. A poet and a scientist answering the same question will often show you more than ten specialists trained the same way.

How it’s curated

Voices are chosen with care, for clarity and for a point of view you will not find everywhere. After that, we stay out of the way. Pieces run with a two line bio and no editing of the argument itself. A door for getting in touch is always open, and it opens wider as the archive grows.

Five values hold it together

Common humanity

None of us chose where we were born, who raised us, or the world we arrived into. That ought to make us slower to judge, quicker to care, and less inclined to treat the common good as someone else's problem.

Diversity as strength

A poet and a scientist answering the same question may reveal more than ten people trained in the same discipline. Difference here is not a concession, but part of the method.

Constructive imagination

Critique is welcome, but it ought 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, bold, and not too bound by current assumptions.

Intellectual honesty

No position is beyond question, and no credential is a defence. What matters is the quality of the argument, a willingness to be wrong, and a readiness to change one's mind.

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. How does the answer to "what is power?" shift between 2026 and 2036?

An annual gathering

Small, in person, warm. Contributors meet and the conversation carries on 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 signal

Over time, a place to notice ideas surfacing before they reach policy. A gentle 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.

But the project is not really about the two of us. It is about the voices it gathers. We invite you to read the index and get in touch if you want to connect and/or contribute.