Hello {{first_name}}. Today, 30 July, is the anniversary of the day I lost Naz, my fiancé, twelve years ago. For a long time, I did not know what to do with this date.
What I have learned, slowly, is that the day our foundation began has more to teach about storytelling than almost anything else I do.
To the 3,465 of us reading this newsletter, this week's edition is about your founding moment: the point your charity began, and how to tell it without reopening a wound.
And if you are a social impact leader rather than a founder, it is about how you help the charities you support to tell theirs.
In this edition
Last week’s poll results
Last week I asked what most holds you back from telling your own story. There was no clear winner. The votes split evenly. Some of you said the hardest part is knowing which version of your story to tell to which audience. Some said it is the emotion of it, the worry that you will get upset in front of people. Others said it was something different again.
The lesson is simple. There is no one overall reason that holds everyone back. Different people named different things, and your barrier is your own, specific to you.
So here is your action this week. Write down, in one plain sentence, the one thing that makes you hesitate before you tell your story. Just that one thing. That is what you work on, and everything in this edition is here to help you do it.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
The moment it became impossible not to act
Almost every charity has a founding moment. A single point at which someone decided this cannot stand, and something has to be done.
For some organisations that moment is a loss. But just as often it is something else entirely. An injustice someone witnessed and could not unsee. A world event that changed what felt possible. A policy that landed so wrongly it demanded a response. A single conversation that would not leave the founder alone.
Your founding moment does not have to be tragic to be powerful. It only has to be true.
Whatever form it took, it is the moment it became impossible not to act. That is the most important story your charity owns, and most charities handle it in one of two wrong ways.
The first mistake is to treat the moment as untouchable.
It goes unspoken, filed away as too raw or too private, and the organisation loses the single clearest answer to the question every funder, volunteer and supporter is quietly asking: why does this place exist, and why should I trust it with my time or money?
The second mistake is the opposite. The moment gets reopened once a year, retold in its rawest detail, wheeled out for effect on an anniversary or a campaign launch.
That works once. Then it starts to cost the teller something every single time, and audiences begin to feel the pull on their sleeve.
There is a third way, and it is the one I want to give you today.
Treat your founding moment as a keystone. A keystone is the fixed stone that holds an arch together. You do not rebuild it every year. You return to it.
You let it re-anchor everyone in why the work matters, and then you get back to the work.
The difference between the keystone and the wound is the difference between returning and reopening.
When I mark today, I am not reliving the worst hours of my life in public. I return to what that day set in motion: the decision to build our charity, Naz and Matt Foundation, so that other parents choose acceptance over rejection, and so that fewer families lose someone the way Naz's family lost him.
The loss is the wound. The mission it started is the keystone. I return to the second, not the first.
There is a second truth about founding moments that most charities never say out loud.
The moment is almost never yours alone to tell.
A person lost is also a family's son, a community's friend. An injustice happened to someone, and that someone has their own version. A defining conversation had another voice in it.
So telling a founding story well is not only a question of craft. It is a question of care. Whose story is this, really, and who else has a stake in how it gets told?
I know this one intimately. Naz's story is also his family's story, and the two of us saw parts of it very differently.
In nearly 12 years of telling this publicly, I have had to keep asking what is mine to tell, what memories are ours alone and stay private, and what belongs to others who loved him.
That discipline is not a constraint on the story. It is what keeps the story honest, and it is what has let me keep telling it without it collapsing.
Which brings me to the last principle, and the one that keeps a founding moment from becoming a memorial. A founding moment marked well ends in an invitation, not a silence.
It asks something of the person reading.
Today is the clearest example I have. Rather than mark this date with a candle and a caption, our foundation built Out and Proud Parents Day around it: a day that celebrates the parents who chose to love their LGBTQ+ children, and that asks other parents to do the same.
The date does something now. That is the whole point.
A charity's founding moment is not there to make people sad on a schedule. It is there to move them to act.
If you can do this with a loss, you can do it with any founding moment you have. Here is how.
Framework: The Keystone Return
Four steps. You can work through all four for your own charity in under an hour.
1. Name the moment. Write down the single moment it became impossible not to act. Then classify it honestly: a loss, an injustice witnessed, a world event, a policy, or a conversation. Naming the type matters, because it frees you from thinking your story is only valid if it is tragic. Anger, resolve and refusal are founding moments too.
2. Separate the keystone from the wound. The keystone is not the pain. It is what the moment set in motion. Write the mission, the decision, the first action that followed, rather than the rawest detail of the event itself. This is what makes a founding story sustainable to tell year after year, and it is what stops an anniversary becoming a performance of grief.
3. Map who else it belongs to. List every other person or group with a stake in this moment: family, the people it happened to, a community, colleagues. For each, ask two questions. Have they consented to how we tell it? Are we honouring them, or using them? This is the step most charities skip, and it is the one that protects both the people in the story and the trust of the people reading it.
4. Decide what people should feel, and do. A founding moment marked well ends in an invitation. Choose the single emotion you want to leave people with, and the one action you want them to take. If you cannot name the action, you are not ready to tell the story publicly yet. (This is the Emotional Destination from Edition 1, applied to the hardest story you own.)
If you are a social impact leader rather than the founder of the charity in question, this moment is not yours to own. It is yours to support. You are the ally, and the ally has two jobs.
Amplify without overwriting. Your platform and your network can carry a small charity's founding story far further than the charity can reach alone. But amplification means lending your reach, not rewriting the story in your own voice or quietly making yourself the hero of someone else's keystone.
Share it as it was given to you.
Put the source front and centre.
Protect the people the story belongs to.
The test is simple: after you post, is the charity more visible, or are you?
Help the founding moment evolve. Founding stories age. A moment that defined an organisation in 2005 can feel tired, or land wrongly for a new generation, by 2026. This is where an ally is most valuable.
You can help a charity expand the story into new applications, reimagine the framing with fresh language for the same true moment, adapt it for a new channel or audience, and evolve it so it connects to where the mission is heading next. You bring the outside eye the founder is too close to have.
Three things you can do this week. Amplify one charity's founding story to your own network, with the source named clearly. Offer a charity you support a fresh reframing of a founding story that has started to feel stale.
Or, if you know a partner charity has a difficult anniversary coming, offer to carry the amplification for them that week, so a founder who finds the date hard does not have to do the public-facing work alone. That last one is often worth more than any campaign.
Template: The Keystone Return statement
Complete this before you next tell your charity's founding story:
Our charity exists because of: [The moment it became impossible not to act. Name the type: loss, injustice, world event, policy, or conversation.]
That moment set in motion: [What it started. The mission, the decision, the first action. The keystone, not the wound.]
This story also belongs to: [Who else has a stake. And note how you have honoured them: consent given, credit shared, details they asked you to keep private.]
When we mark it, we want people to feel ___ and to ___: [One emotion. One action. If you cannot fill the second blank, hold the story back until you can.]
AI Prompt: Pressure-test your founding story
Copy and paste the text below into your preferred AI tool. Works best in Claude or Gemini.
Replace the content in the [SQUARE BRACKET]
For extra context, download my free Social Impact Storytelling Framework
(ogston.com/framework), then upload the PDF alongside this prompt. It will make the responses even more useful
You are helping me tell my charity's founding story well. Here is the story:
[Paste your Keystone Return statement, or a rough draft of how you currently tell it.]
Please do four things, using UK British English:
1. Tell me where this reads as a keystone I am returning to, and where it reads as a wound I am reopening for effect.
2. Flag anywhere it uses someone's grief, hardship or experience without clearly honouring or crediting them, and anywhere the story may not be mine alone to tell, where someone else's consent is needed first.
3. Point out where it risks feeling like a memorial rather than an invitation to act.
4. Name the single feeling this should leave people with, and suggest one clear, specific action it could end on.
Be honest and challenge me. I would rather hear the problem now than after I publish.WEEKLY POLL
When it comes to your charity's founding story, what is hardest right now?
Poll results will be shared in next week's edition.
Today is Out and Proud Parents Day.
It is the campaign our foundation built on the date we lost Naz, to celebrate the parents who choose to love their LGBTQ+ children unconditionally.
It is the clearest proof I have that a founding moment can be turned into an invitation to act rather than a day of mourning.
If it speaks to you, you can find out more and share it at
Help a friend or colleague with their storytelling
If you enjoyed reading this newsletter and found it useful, I would really appreciate you forwarding this to a colleague or friend and asking them to subscribe (free): www.impactstoryteller.org
Until next Thursday, please stay safe, and take care.
Warm regards,
Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
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