Helpful & Harmful Narratives
Examining the Stories and Messages that Contribute to Narrative
Organizing is a necessity. It is work people come to because they are trying to meet a need. Whether that need is education programs for incarcerated people, guaranteed income for parents, or reproductive freedom for all the work of the organizers behind these movements requires that they not only meet the needs of the people they’re working to serve, but also win people to their cause by utilizing effective narrative strategy.
For a narrative strategy to be effective, organizers must first take stock of the narrative landscape they seek to enter. This landscape is made up of harmful narratives you want to disrupt as well as helpful narratives you want to affirm in an effort to bolster your own. The narrative landscape is made up of stories, messages, and frames that create a narrative and contribute to a deep narrative.
Before we go any further, let’s break down those terms.
A story is a description of events happening to a set of characters. A message is the central piece of information you want people to take away from your story. The frame helps people interpret the story and the message so that they can form an idea and opinion based upon the information you’ve given them. This is how a narrative–made up of themes and ideas that permeate collections of stories–is created. And if these themes and ideas in a collection of stories persist for fifty years or more then you have a deep narrative.
This is why we say narrative organizing is generational work. It’s not enough to tell your story and convey your message once. One story, with one message, spoken/published one time is not going to help you disrupt and ultimately shift the negative narratives that have persisted for decades. Your story, your message, has to be repeated often and by many different people in various mediums for your narrative to fully form. Which is why it’s important to know what’s already out there.
A helpful narrative is one your own message and story supports, uplifts, and adds to that will make progress toward your long term organizing goals. A harmful narrative is one that prevents progress toward your long-term organizing goals.
So what does this work look like in real life?
Take for example Word Force Changemaker organization Mother’s Outreach Network. Their long term policy goal is to eradicate poverty thereby making the surveillance network of the child welfare system obsolete. Their programmatic work toward that goal began with launching a guaranteed income pilot program for parents - Black mothers specifically - who have cases with the child welfare system. The story they’re telling is that giving parents the money they need to care for their children will prevent the majority of child welfare cases because those cases are only brought because of behaviors and circumstances that appear to be neglect but are a direct result of poverty. The message of this story is that, if there was a guaranteed income for parents, they wouldn’t live in poverty, and therefore all the poverty induced neglect cases taken up by the child welfare system would not exist.
The story about Mother’s Outreach Network’s pilot program adds to stories already being told about the benefits of the expanded child tax credit and concerns over childhood poverty. It contributes to the narrative of the need for poverty reduction and deep narratives around poverty and "deservingness."That no one should live below the federal poverty line and that all people should be able to afford their basic subsistence needs are ideas connected to these narratives that have existed since the Johnson Administration unveiled its “War on Poverty” legislation in 1964.
But at the same time that the stories and messages seeded by Mother’s Outreach Network aspire to go further than President Johnson ever imagined, they must also do the work of shifting and disrupting the harmful narratives associated with social programs most notably the stereotypical trope of “The Welfare Queen.” The narrative of the welfare queen was first seeded in the 1960s by stories of welfare fraud–stories which were predicated on the racist and classist beliefs that poor people, Black people, and people of color exploit benefit systems for their own financial gain and therefore don’t really need and/or are undeserving of government financial support. The trial of Linda Taylor, upon whom the name “welfare queen” was first bestowed, fueled these beliefs. Her case was then used to vilify to communities seeking assistance and brand them undeserving "welfare queens" trying to get rich off of the government.
Taking stock of your narrative landscape means developing an innate understanding of the deep narratives you’re up against, while advocating for the beliefs and vision undergirding your programmatic and organizational work. Only then can you craft stories that highlight the helpful narratives you’re contributing to, while also having a prepared response that disrupts the harmful narratives you’re trying to shift, while still galvanizing forward motion toward your long term organizational goal.
In the case of Mother’s Outreach Network, this excerpt from an op/ed published in Ms. magazine best captures their understanding of the narrative landscape shaping their work:
“We as a society have been taught to believe that asking for support implies some sort of moral flaw. The system has somehow led us to believe that to have the bravery to ask for support to provide for your kids means you are a bad person. We at Mother’s Outreach Network say, that’s not true.
In the richest nation in the world, it shouldn’t be this difficult to make ends meet for yourself and your family. No one should ever have to work two or three jobs and still wonder if they can make rent, put food on the table or afford childcare. As a society, we can choose to prioritize parents and their families. And that starts by implementing a guaranteed income program that will empower Black families and women everywhere.”
The first sentence addresses the harmful narratives without repeating them and then makes the case for their proposed solution of guaranteed income while acknowledging the helpful narrative that poverty is the real problem.Understanding the stories and messages that contribute to narratives, harmful and helpful, helps you understand where you fit as an organization in the narrative landscape and the strategy you need to deploy to communicate effectively to reach your goal.
