At Journalism + Design, we believe that journalists can be active catalysts for structural change. Since 2017, we’ve been exploring how journalists can adopt a practice called systems thinking to unpack complex problems and inform opportunities to address them.

Through workshops with hundreds of journalists around the country, we've developed a series of tools from systems thinking to help journalists see in systems, cover the most complex issues of our time, and work with their communities to shift our systems toward health.

From the sessions we've led in our workshops, we developed this open-source collection of exercises and resources that are available for anyone to freely use and adapt for their own reporting and newsroom.

This toolkit is a manifestation of years of applied learning with our partners, testing and iterating on how to practically apply core tenets of systems thinking to journalism. We have adapted learnings and concepts from a variety of systems thinkers, drawing from a variety of fields and practices to inform our approach.