Both ENDS: Building a Strategic Narrative for Global Environmental Justice

How Yulu helped a global environmental justice organization align its positioning, messaging and communications around one enduring strategic narrative.

About Both ENDS

Both ENDS is a Netherlands-based environmental justice organization working alongside more than 500 partners worldwide to advance locally led solutions that protect ecosystems, strengthen communities and reshape the systems driving climate and environmental injustice.

The Challenge

As Both ENDS prepared to enter its next strategic chapter, the organization needed a clearer way to communicate the breadth of its work and its distinctive role in advancing environmental justice.

Its work spans climate justice, sustainable finance, biodiversity, trade and human rights. Those issues are deeply interconnected, but difficult to explain through isolated messages. Different audiences needed to understand not only what Both ENDS works on, but how locally led action connects to broader systems change and why the organization is uniquely positioned to bridge the two.

Both ENDS needed more than campaign messaging. It engaged Yulu to articulate and codify an enduring strategic narrative that could align communications across the organization and create a stronger foundation for its next phase of impact.

Our Approach

Yulu partnered closely with the Both ENDS team to synthesize decades of organizational expertise into a clear, cohesive communications framework that teams could apply across audiences, channels and future initiatives. The work combined organizational discovery, communications research, benchmarking, audience analysis and collaborative narrative development. Rather than creating a one-off campaign, Yulu developed reusable strategic communications infrastructure that could support the organization over time.

The engagement resulted in:

An organization-wide strategic narrative
Core messaging pillars
Audience-specific messaging

Storytelling guidance
Strategic communications recommendations to support implementation

Throughout the process, the focus remained on strengthening how Both ENDS communicates its existing expertise, systems-based approach and commitment to environmental justice without oversimplifying the communities, rights and power dynamics at the centre of the work.

Results

The project gave Both ENDS a shared strategic communications foundation designed to strengthen consistency, organizational alignment and clarity across future communications.

Outcomes included:

→ A shared organizational narrative grounded in Both ENDS’ mission, values and decades of advancing environmentally just processes and practices.

→ Clearer messaging that articulates the organization’s distinctive role in connecting locally led action with global systems change.

→ Audience-specific messaging that gives teams a more consistent foundation for communicating with partners, funders, policymakers and public audiences.

→ Strategic messaging that informed the organization’s ongoing website refresh and future communications planning.

Why It Matters

Environmental justice organizations often operate across interconnected systems – climate, finance, policy, biodiversity and human rights – that are difficult to communicate through isolated messages.

A strong strategic narrative helps organizations explain how those issues connect, clarify the role they are uniquely positioned to play and give teams a common foundation for fundraising, websites, reports, thought leadership, stakeholder engagement and public communications.

For Both ENDS, Yulu translated decades of expertise into one strategic narrative that strengthens consistency, supports internal alignment and makes the organization’s systems-level work easier for diverse audiences to understand.

Services Provided

Strategic Communications
Strategic Narrative Development
Organizational Positioning
Messaging Framework Development
Audience Research
Environmental Communications
Nonprofit Communications Strategy
Impact Consulting

This type of work is especially relevant for organizations navigating a strategic plan, repositioning, website refresh, fundraising evolution, leadership transition or expansion into new audiences.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is strategic narrative development for an environmental justice organization?

Strategic narrative development creates a clear framework for explaining what an organization does, why its work matters, how change happens and what makes its approach distinct. For environmental justice organizations, that often means connecting issues such as climate, finance, policy, human rights and locally led action without losing the people and communities at the centre of the work.

How can communications support environmental justice fundraising?

Strong communications can help funders understand not only what an environmental justice organization does, but how funding contributes to systemic change. Clear positioning connects locally led work with broader policy, financial and institutional outcomes, helping organizations demonstrate their distinctive role, credibility and theory of change without reducing justice-led work to transactional fundraising language.

What is the difference between messaging and a strategic narrative?

Messaging provides specific language for communicating individual ideas. A strategic narrative establishes the larger architecture connecting those messages. It explains the problem, the organization’s role, its approach, its differentiators and the change it seeks. That foundation helps teams communicate consistently across fundraising, websites, reports, thought leadership, stakeholder engagement and public relations.

How does Yulu apply an equity lens to environmental communications?

Yulu examines who holds power in the story, whose expertise is credited and whether communications accurately represent the people most affected by environmental and climate issues. In practice, that means centring community agency, respecting local and Indigenous knowledge where relevant, testing terminology for cultural context and avoiding language that turns communities into passive beneficiaries of externally imposed solutions.

Can Yulu support both strategic narrative development and implementation?

Yes. Yulu’s strategic communications work can extend from discovery and narrative development into media relations, thought leadership, stakeholder and rightsholder communications, digital strategy, campaigns and other implementation channels. The right mix depends on the organization’s objectives, audiences, evidence base and communications capacity.

Let's Work Together

Yulu Public Relations combines strategic communications and impact consulting to help purpose-driven organizations clarify who they are, why their work matters and the change they are uniquely positioned to advance. We build the narrative architecture behind stronger fundraising, websites, thought leadership, stakeholder engagement and public communications.