Introduction
For communicators, activists, advocates, and content creators to understand what kinds of stories they can tell to convey the realities of poverty, they need first to understand what existing narratives they’re up against.
This report identifies the major poverty narratives found in the existing body of narrative research and offers practical advice about how to deploy counter-narratives to create better stories—and, ultimately, create social change.
Contents
Introduction 3
Existing Poverty Narratives 6
Counter-Narratives and Strategies
for Shifting Poverty Narratives 18
Outstanding Questions and Areas for Further Research 28
Summary Recommendations: How to Tell Effective New Stories 30
Endnotes 34
About FrameWorks 46
Summary Recommendations
How to Tell Effective New Stories
There are still questions about the larger counter-narratives discussed above, and more research is needed to answer these questions. Future research should focus on refining and supplementing the counter-narratives reviewed above in order to understand how these narratives can be used most effectively, including how they might be combined.
While there is more to learn, the research clearly points to storytelling practices that all communicators should adopt, no matter which specific counter-narrative they are looking to employ.
Below, we summarize recommendations from the research on existing and counter-narratives. Some of these ideas were touched on briefly above, while others did not come up in the discussions of specific narratives and are introduced here for the first time. Practitioners can use these strategies to tell stories that shift public perceptions of poverty and build support for anti-poverty programs and policies:
- Carefully consider how your stories might reinforce existing unproductive narratives.
Because the dominant narratives around poverty are highly familiar to us all—we’re all used to Bootstraps stories and stories about “inner city” dysfunction—we unconsciously fit new stories that we hear and read into the narratives that we have been conditioned to expect.
As a result, when people read a story about a protagonist who is struggling to get out of poverty,
they’re likely to read it as a Bootstraps story even if the story doesn’t actually suggest that the
individual’s willpower is what’s driving outcomes.
By keeping these existing narratives in mind and developing an understanding of what story features activate them, communicators can avoid repeating or unintentionally cuing unproductive narratives. - Emphasize individual and collective action to build efficacy.
Stories that focus exclusively on systemic problems—without including discussion of solutions—can lead to fatalism and a sense that nothing can be done.
Stories that focus on individual and collective actions against unfair systems can be particularly useful in building a sense of efficacy—the sense that what people do “actually matters,” as Color of Change describes.
Being concrete about the steps needed to address poverty is critical to leaving people with a clear sense that change is possible, motivating them to act, and building support for specific systemic changes.
And as the Storytellers’ Guide to Changing Our World puts it, emphasizing that “together, we have the power” to make change can help people see a role for themselves in the change that must happen. - In telling individual stories, bring the social setting to the foreground.
When stories about poverty focus on individuals only, they tend to reinforce the idea that poverty is caused by individual traits and must be solved through individual choices.
Instead, stories should place individuals in systemic contexts and bring into view how social and economic systems perpetuate poverty, how these systems came about, and how they can be changed. The best ways to do this depend on the medium—TV dramas, for example, are unlikely to get into the finer points of the New Deal and the War on Poverty, but they can spotlight how current social welfare programs fail to provide the stability that recipients need. - Look for narratives that can shift the public discourse broadly.
Narrative change is about shifting culture broadly. The ultimate goal is to move deep and widely shared assumptions about poverty to create a different context for collective decision making. This means shifting the broader narratives that circulate throughout our society as a whole.
While short-term political communications often adopt a segmented approach—targeting the specific groups who need to be mobilized or persuaded to achieve a particular goal, like moving a particular policy up the agenda or getting people to vote for a particular candidate or initiative—narrative change necessarily takes a longer-term perspective and must focus on the broader public.
Particular campaigns or initiatives will, of course, target particular audiences, and knowing which groups are most likely to be early adopters and disseminators of a new narrative is incredibly valuable. But those engaged in narrative change work should look for new narratives that have the potential to spread widely and catch hold across audiences. And since new narratives can only make their way into discourse through heavy repetition, narratives must be usable by different messengers, with different groups, and across different channels.
These narratives must, of course, be tailored and adapted as they are used with different audiences and contexts, but only by disseminating narratives broadly will they begin to permeate our discourse and change culture. - Foreground racial justice.
As the Solidarity narrative establishes, counter-narratives around poverty must take racism head on and explain the links between racial and economic justice.
While there are outstanding questions about how best to do this, a basic point is clear: Deepening understanding of racism and its connection to economic inequality is necessary for our society to address poverty and economic inequality in a just way. Skirting the issue limits the progress we can make. - Use messengers to validate messages, challenge stereotypes, and amplify voices.
Messengers are powerful. They can validate messages, making an argument credible to those who might otherwise be skeptical. They can challenge stereotypes—this is the thinking behind having veterans or older people speak about their own experiences of poverty to counter people’s assumptions about who experiences poverty. And by giving excluded groups a platform, advocacy or activist organizations and media channels can amplify the voices of those who are typically erased, which itself can help challenge widespread assumptions about who deserves to speak.
Deciding which messengers to use depends on goals and contextual considerations. Narrative change practitioners should generally try to match messengers to their audiences and immediate goals. If they want to persuade an audience, practitioners should choose messengers that an audience finds credible and legitimate. If their goal is to counter stereotypes, practitioners should choose messengers that don’t fit stereotypes to stretch an audience’s understanding.
Long-term culture change requires amplifying the voices of groups who are currently silenced or sidelined. It’s important to acknowledge that this goal can be in tension with short-term persuasion of harder-to-reach groups.
In the short term, for example, elevating messengers from advantaged groups—say, white professionals—may be the best way to reach hard-to reach white conservative audiences.
The problem, of course, is that this reinforces the idea that dominant groups’ voices are the ones worth hearing. Realizing racial and economic justice requires challenging existing assumptions about who has and should have social authority, and amplifying the voices of marginalized groups is a crucial way to do this. Practitioners should look across communication to ensure that, taken together, the mix of messengers employed advances all of their goals.
By coalescing around effective new narratives about poverty, the field can tell mutually reinforcing stories that, over time, shift public perceptions of and attitudes about poverty in the right direction.
Understanding the existing narratives about poverty in the United States is a critical step toward this goal. And by understanding possible counter-narratives, including their limitations and potential downsides, practitioners can move toward more effective storytelling. By taking seriously the critical findings of the research we have synthesized and following the recommendations for effective storytelling that emerge from it, practitioners can begin to shift public discourse and lay the groundwork for changing the narrative around poverty in the United States.
Excerpts
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Talking About Poverty: Narratives, Counter-Narratives, and Telling Effective Stories (PDF)
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