Introduction
Explore this collection of resources—a toolkit, film, and discussion guide—created by California Newsreel in collaboration with Higher Ground Change Strategies and the Berkeley Media Studies Group, designed to help build and understand narrative power across institutions and cultural spaces
Building Narrative Power Toolkit
This toolkit is designed to help you explore actions you and others can take to build narrative power where you live and work.
Narrative power is the ability to make the foundation stories we tell-the stories about how things work, our sense of history, who and what matters, and our relationship to one another and the planet-the main stories people use to make sense of the world over time.
We don’t build narrative power by simply telling stories. We build narrative power by rooting and reinforcing our stories across the many institutions and cultural spaces that shape what we think, know, and believe.
So narrative power is not about any one story and it’s not just about storytelling. Narrative power is also about changing—or creating!—the institutions that reproduce our world views not only in what they say but also in what they do.
Here’s a preview of the resources – scroll down to access the full toolkit.
Contents
- Narrative Power: The Epic Adventure — Animation discussion guide
- Moving from powerful narratives to narrative power
- Reframing for a new big picture
- Laying the foundation for effective meta messages
- Power mapping planning tool
- Cutting your issue: An interactive process you can use with your group
- Exercise: Identifying initiative goals
- Exercise: Assessing your targets
- Go in-depth: Examples and tips
- Tobacco as a public health hazard: Building infrastructure for lasting narrative power
- Recommendations for journalists: Narrative power in reporting
- Pushing back against “backlash”: How a common term undermines social change and narrative power
- Open Sesame: Going behind the scenes of Sesame Street to understand narrative infrastructure
- Indigenous victories: What decades-long endeavours to create inclusive policies and stories can tell us about narrative power
Strategies to Build Narrative Power
Building narrative power requires a combination of strategies.
Strategies to Tend the Soil
Advocate for policies that expand the infrastructure to root and reproduce our ideas and values.
If narrative power is a forest grown strong, this is the work we do to create a healthy environment for planting our narratives.
Strategies to Plant & Cultivate Seeds
Develop and share our values, ideas and stories so that they are aligned, clear and effective. This is the work we do to make sure that our narratives seeds are healthy and strong so they’ll grow with the depth and reach we need.
Strategies to Prune the Forest
Disrupt harmful narratives that help drive systemic inequities. This is the work we do to uproot harmful, unhealthy narratives so that our ideas and values will thrive.
Over time, we need to move on the whole range of strategies for building narrative power but not every organization has to work on every aspect. Some groups may focus on one or another aspect of change—tending, cultivating, or pruning—depending on who they are, what they prioritize, and what their partners are doing.
Key Questions to help Clarify Direction
We need to be bold and fearless in imagining the world we are trying to create. Even though developing a clear vision of where we want to go can be the hardest part of our planning, this is precisely what lets us measure progress and achievements.
With a vision, we can assess whether the short-term opportunity is actually taking us in the direction we seek. A clear direction prevents us from confusing short-term opportunities and objectives with our long-term goals for change.
- How are you using this moment to build narrative power?
- What criteria can help you assess conditions and identify the near- and long-term outcomes you seek?
- What are the conditions that are hindering or helping you?
Identifying Key Framing/Re-framing Activities
Addressing the Current Context
- What are the current conversations and “state of belief” on this and related issues among our key constituencies?
- How are the words that define our frame being defined in the public conversation? What room is there for our definition(s)?
- Who are the actors shaping the conversation and what is their credibility? What are the opportunities for amplifying our voices?
- What institutions and structures play a role in shaping our thinking and belief about the issue and how do they shape them?
- Is there a sense that we can solve these issues? What solutions are being offered?
Bridging Toward Our Goals
- What must our constituencies and other key “publics” understand and agree on in order to support this agenda?
- What “evidence” (stories of success, data and beyond) needs to be developed and disseminated to build credibility for our framework?
- What are the fundamental, competing beliefs that must be deconstructed/reconstructed to create more “social space” for supportive beliefs?
- Where/how can we intervene and shift how these institutions operate in the shaping of discourse and belief?
- What are the opportunities to provide a glimpse into a future with our better policy ideas?
Building Infrastructure/Making the Change
- What will the public conversation and belief look like and sound like when we succeed?
- What are the key concepts and terminology that will help drive this era of transformation and how and where will they be defined?
- Who will be considered experts and their input critical to informed decisionmaking?
- What kinds of meaning/beliefs would transformed structures/ institutions produce and how would they produce them?
- What will be considered best practice and good policy?
See pg. 14 for examples of key framing/re-framing activities to advance environmental justice.
Watch Film
Watch the animated film Narrative Power: The Epic Adventure and see the companion discussion guide and toolkit.
Join Fannie and her new-found friends on their journey through the narrative forest as they work together to discover the truth about narrative power—and what we can do to build it right where we are.
Access Full Toolkit and Discussion Guide
Explore Further
- Explore Story Podcast
Hosted by Makani Themba, the Beyond Story podcast features three fun, silo busting episodes as she talks with some of the leading actors who are actually building narrative power for transformative change. - Narrative Change: Start Here
- Changing Our Narrative About Narrative: The Infrastructure Required for Building Narrative Power
- Conditions to Flourish: Understanding the Ecosystem for Narrative Power
- Narrative Change, Popular Culture and Cultural Strategy
- Impact Storytelling: The Ecosystem, the Evidence and Possible Futures
- Inspiring Narrative Change Quotes
- Narrative and Storytelling: Training and Planning Tools
- The Narrative Directory
- Storytelling, Narrative and Messaging Courses
- Films and Documentaries about Social Justice, Movements, Victories and Leaders