By Lennon Flowers
It’s no longer novel to say that storytelling matters. Ours is the age of TED and RSA Animate, of Follow the Frog and animated PSAs featuring catchy tunes and walking eggs getting eaten by grizzly bears, of It Gets Better and (gulp) Kony 2012. We live in a time in which anyone with a cause is likely to find themselves, at some point, brainstorming around a conference table about their latest viral video fantasies.
And that is, for the most part, a good thing. There’s increasing recognition, after all, that no one organization can tackle a problem on its own—that achieving true systems-change means that we move beyond spreading programs to spreading ideas, and changing the patterns through which we view and interact with the world around us.
The intersection between great storytelling and lasting social impact remains nascent, however. What does it take to not merely convey a message, but to change attitudes and mindsets and the actions people take after a story is told? What goes into the making of a modern-day movement—one capable of achieving not just buzz, but sustained change? And if our goal is not simply to achieve a respectable number of YouTube views or Web hits, but to catalyze behavior change among people whose names we’ll never know and whose lives we’ll never directly touch, how can we tell if we’re successful?
We sat down with the team at Wondros to begin to answer those questions. A full-service production company specializing in translating complex business and pro-social ideas into simple media messages, Wondros has worked with everyone from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to Desmond Tutu, TED, and the MIT Media Lab.
We were joined by a handful of today’s best storytellers, and people who have great stories worth telling. Many around the table had reached numbers that would leave most in the social impact sphere salivating: a half a million voters here, 50 million impressions there. And yet they continued to struggle with a deeper question: what does it take to break through our cultural narrative—to change the very way in which we think about a particular population or an issue, be it aging or the role of young people in society?
Here’s what we found:
1) Unleash moral imagination, rather than moral obligation.
When trying to galvanize people to action, it can be tempting to focus on scare tactics or to just focus on “what not to do.” (Think the Sally Struthers videos of yore, or the “Just Say No” campaign, in which the egg (i.e. your brain) is smashed by the frying pan (i.e. drugs), or their modern counterparts—anti-bullying PSAs and their ilk.) On the surface, that makes sense. To call people to action, you must first convince them there’s a problem, right? Wrong. The keys to lasting movement-building—the kind that’s about more than signing a petition—lie in invoking our sense of purpose and the values that we share, and our natural desire to participate. “We don’t call our young people to anything … we don’t invite them into greatness,” says Eric Dawson, president and co-founder of Peace First.
Last year Eric and Peace First launched the Peace First Prize, essentially a “Nobel Peace Prize” for kids. The organization put out the call for 8-22 year olds who’d taken on the role of being peacemakers in their schools and communities. They were looking for young people who’d demonstrated compassion by crossing lines of difference to connect with others, courage by taking personal risk and persevering, and collaborative change by mobilizing others to join in the work. The result? 658 stories from 47 states and the District of Columbia. They received applications with stories from young people like 10-year-old Brooklyn, who took on the superhero persona of Earth Saver Girl to educate kids about the environment and to show them that they could make a difference in protecting it, and Nicholas, who, at the age of 12, met a homeless boy whose only pair of shoes was a set of his mother’s fur-lined boots. This indignity compelled Nicholas to action. Now 14, Nicholas has already donated 8,000 new shoes to homeless shelters. Eric is now using those 658 stories to generate a million acts of peacemaking.
Crafting a powerful narrative demands that you carefully choose the words you’re using, says John Woldenberg, a former tech entrepreneur turned independent filmmaker and producer. “Words can be unifying and bifurcating, and sometimes people take that a little bit too lightly,” he says.
2) Forget lone heroes. Look for proximal greatness.
When choosing which stories to tell, we tend to pick the most harrowing and the most heroic. Yet the best stories are often those of “proximal greatness”: inspiring, but still relatable, impressive but not intimidating.
Tim Carpenter, an Ashoka Fellow and the founder of EngAGE, is working to change the way in which we design retirement communities, turning the drab and depressing halls we know all too well into artists colonies—think college campuses for seniors—and to change the very way we think of aging, from something that’s a bad thing to one that’s embraced.
Tim shared the story of Suzanne Knode, a 68-year-old woman who raised two kids alone and had never really done anything for herself. Depressed and in poor health following a serious accident, she moved into the Burbank Senior Artist Colony on the feeling that she might be a writer. For her first writing class, she wrote a screenplay titled “Bandida.” It told the story of an older woman who takes public senior transportation across town, and, equipped with her walker with tennis balls on the front legs, saunters into a liquor store, dons a mask, and starts to rob the place. In the course of the robbery, she becomes friends with the older Armenian gentleman behind the counter to the point where he lets her get away with the crime. The team at EngAGE helped Suzanne turn her story into a short film, and her story eventually became the subject of a TV episode of This American Life, aired on Showtime.
Tim doesn’t need a million Suzannes, he needs just one, whose story closely mirrors those of the millions of people wondering what’s next as they grow older.
3) Stop planning. Set the table, and be ready for whatever happens next.
“The most powerful call to action is not one that’s handed to you or demanded of you, but rather one that’s self-generated,” says Eli Kaufman, director of video production at GOOD.
Nirvan Mullick, the filmmaker behind Caine’s Arcade, never set out to build a movement. He told an inspiring story and observed carefully as kids from around the world spontaneously started creating their own arcade games out of cardboard. Realizing Caine was suddenly part of a global community, Nirvan launched the Global Cardboard Challenge and the Imagination Foundation to give that community oxygen. This kind of thinking demands that we throw out our traditional business plans and desire for hyper-control.
“We don’t know what these stories are going to inspire,” says Eric Dawson. “We need to be ready to catch them and figure it out.”
4) Don’t just tell stories. Unleash story-makers.
4) Don’t just tell stories. Unleash story-makers.
Successful “activation” campaigns do not simply tell great stories, they create a platform through which people can share their own and discover in the process that they’re not alone. But we realized that the best ones take it one step further. They inspire people not only to share their own stories, but to make their own stories—to create new experiences and spark more meaningful relationships with the people in their own lives and communities.
Ashoka Fellow Ai-jen Poo is launching a nationwide campaign around “care story-sharing.” As the founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Ai-jen has dedicated her life to improving the legal safeguards for domestic workers, and to raising the level of respect for the profession. A few years ago, however, she and her team started receiving calls from their members for training in elder care. As demographics were shifting, housekeepers and nannies were suddenly being called upon to take care of the aging relatives of their employers. So she launched Caring Across Generations, bringing women’s groups and senior services together with immigrants’ rights organizations, domestic workers’ groups and ordinary American families to unite them behind a common vision for a more caring economy—one that’s able to meet the needs of both the growing number of people in need of care and those serving as caregivers.
What makes it powerful, says Ai-jen, is that everyone has their own care story, whether it’s a person who cared for you growing up, or a person you love who was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, or cancer, or who can no longer operate a stove on their own and whose well-being is a daily concern. To date, more than 40,000 people have come together for what she calls Care Congresses: multiracial, intergenerational town hall-style gatherings in which people freely share those stories as the basis for conversations about the future of the country.
The hope is that in hearing others’ stories, people will be moved to change the way they view difference and treat the caregivers in their own lives.
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