Donald Smith is a well-known person in the cultural world of the Scottish capital, Edinburgh. Not only was he the founder and first director of the National Theatre of Scotland and director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre. He also directs the Scottish International Storytelling Festival (SISF), an annual celebration in which, since 1989, storytellers and custodians of oral tradition from all corners of the planet have participated. The SISF is also one of the great events of the biggest cultural festival in the world, the Edinburgh Festival.

After learning about Grian’s research, Donald Smith proposed to him a project which would become an obligatory extension of The Earth Stories Collection. Raising the question of “If not now, when?” —something like “if it’s not now, when are we, the storytellers, going to involve in the transformation of our civilization?”—, Donald proposed the creation of a global network of activist storytellers who will, among other things, count traditional stories from The Earth Stories Collection. In this way, the change of collective vision of the world that Grian considers can be achieved through traditional stories would receive a tremendous boost in all corners of the globe.