Health Equity Narrative House

By BLIS Collective, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Story Strategy Group

Contents

Introduction

The Health Equity Narrative Lab is a groundbreaking initiative designed to transform public perception of the need for health equity.

These guides provide storytelling and powerbuilding strategies to expand the choir and base of people supporting health equity.

About

Initiated by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and led by the BLIS Collective, in coordination with Story Strategy Group, the Lab developed an innovative narrative tool designed to help organizations, advocates, and funders inspire action to shift cultural perceptions around health in the United States. At the heart of this work is the Health Equity Narrative House, a comprehensive schematic that guides storytelling and powerbuilding strategies.

The Health Equity Narrative House

The purpose of the Narrative House is to provide an understanding of the narratives we need to disrupt, amplify, create, and organize around in order to build an environment and society where achieving health equity is possible.

The Narrative House is a schematic that can be used for framing, storytelling, organizing, and grantmaking.

The intent is to support the creation of a larger and stronger “choir” and “base” that actively work to advance policies, practices, and narratives, thus helping achieve our ultimate goal of a society where everyone, regardless of their identity, has a fair and equal opportunity to be as healthy as possible.

The key components of the Narrative House include:

Narrative North Star
Articulates the vision of society once health equity is achieved.
Narrative Areas of Opportunity
Framing mechanisms that can drive social change, including:
- “Repairing History, Reaping Equity”
- “Cultivating a Society of Belonging”
- “Faith in Action”
- “Endowing Our World With Care”
- “Building Loving Havens”
Core Narratives
Key themes underpinning the health equity movement, such as “Health is a Fundamental Right” and “Racism is a Public Health Crisis.”
Stories
Guides for developing narratives at various scales, covering topics like intersectional harm and repair, alternative histories and futures, and the connection between land, place, and health.
Deep Narratives
Foundational values including:
- Interdependence
- Radical Empathy
- Radical Hope
- Comprehensive Healing

The document identifies major narrative roadblocks that stand in the way of our Narrative House, including narratives of toxic individualism, deservingness, and scarcity and zero-sum.

The Narrative House is designed to be a flexible and evolving tool that can adapt to new narrative and social environments as the years progress. It aims to align interested parties and increase collaboration and collective action across various fields and movements related to health equity.

Excerpts

Here is a sneak peek into the resource.

Access Full Resource

The Health Equity Narrative House (PDF – 50 pgs)

The Health Equity Narrative House Action Guide

This Action Guide is meant to spark ideas and action. It offers suggestions for putting the ideas from the Narrative House into practice.

The Narrative House is a tool that suggests the narratives we need to create, amplify, and organize around in order to create an environment where health equity is possible.

The Narrative House can be used for framing, storytelling, organizing, and grantmaking. The Narrative House is intended to support the creation of a larger and stronger “ base and choir” who actively work to advance policies, practices, and narratives to help get to the ultimate goal—a society where everyone, regardless of their identity, has a fair and equal opportunity to be as healthy as possible.