Narrative Framing as Advocacy
Audience Engagement, Trust Building, and Trauma-Informed Communication
In This Section:
In the first three chapters of this book, we looked at creating a blueprint, your Narrative Framework, for finding stories that will disrupt the dominant narratives.
This chapter explores how to use it to curate and craft stories for change, beginning with the Area of Impact, where your change might likely be felt the most. In other words, those individuals, families, and children most likely to benefit from a change in policy or programming are in the best position to depict that change.
If we want that change to be tangible, we must illustrate it with lived experience. This section covers how to recruit families to articulate these changes and how to collaborate with them to be authentically on message without putting words in their mouths.
Stories from the Area of Impact
Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH), a national program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, advances health equity by addressing the social determinants that affect it. Stable housing, economic security, a living wage, and even reliable transportation all contribute to creating a safe, secure, and healthy community that can improve the well-being of all its residents. DASH works with more than 300 communities around the country to create multi-sector data-sharing collaboratives that improve the systems (and communities) we live in by removing barriers and bottlenecks, creating access, and increasing collaboration.
It’s heady stuff that informs policy and system change for everyone with real impact, but unless you have a background in data, policy development, or play a leadership role in one of these systems that change might not be immediately evident.
Here is a real-world example from a community they worked with on the West Coast. Unhoused individuals on a waitlist for transitional housing rely on shelters until an apartment becomes available. These lists are long, and wait times can be up to two years. If someone misses a bed check at the shelter, they can be booted to the bottom of the list, forcing them to start the whole process again.
The number one reason for missing bed checks in the region is being picked up for vagrancy and locked up overnight. The whole process becomes a revolving door, trapping the participant in a seemingly never-ending cycle of waitlists.
After DASH worked with the community to create data-sharing agreements, law enforcement began coordinating with local shelters to let them know when residents would miss curfew because of detention. This collaboration allowed them to keep their place on the list, so they weren’t stuck in this seemingly endless loop.
Odd Duck was brought in to work with DASH, collecting these stories of impact. Unfortunately, many of the organizations involved in these collaborations were disconnected from the people they were benefiting through their work. They were data scientists, researchers, epidemiologists, policymakers, and advocates who didn’t have connections “on the ground.”
We established a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-type network to navigate these barriers and build relationships with the community. We invited organizations to establish storytelling partnerships in the same way they would data-sharing agreements. Equipped with a Narrative Framework, we would find a person or a couple of people who have many connections to various parts of the communities we were trying to highlight and leverage those trusted connections to reach them. A direct service provider can be a great connection, but organizations should put safeguards in place to ensure they are not being exploitative.
It is important never to assume that you already have all of the trauma-informed pieces in place. Playing an active role in addressing trust and safety concerns goes a long way. By setting these trauma-informed principles in place and establishing guidelines on how the stories will and can be used, you create a safer space for those stories to be shared and help prevent some possible pushback.
A revolutionary Housing First program on the East Coast had a remarkable impact in ways not immediately intuitive to local, city, and state policymakers. Unhoused community members relied on the Emergency Department to address primary healthcare needs with exorbitant costs. Once their living arrangements were stabilized, this dependency on the hospital to meet basic care needs dropped off dramatically, saving taxpayers millions in healthcare costs by providing affordable housing.
The data was obvious and impressive, but the numbers didn’t speak for themselves. Even when the researchers created compelling, interactive infographics for stakeholders showing the evidence—ROI costs of housing versus Emergency Room dependency, decreased reliance on hospital visits for primary care—they just didn’t see it. The same arguments about expenses for affordable housing came up again and again as if they weren’t even looking at the data.
That was until one of the team’s social workers suggested they start incorporating their success cases into the graphs. Rather than focus the content and conversation on the steep line of ER dependency that tapered and dropped after the bold bar indicated a participant was housed, they plotted the participants.
A dozen stories of success were curated directly onto the interactive graph. Now, the presenters could click on the dots and lift the data off the page, introducing listeners to twelve newly housed participants sharing the lived experience that brought the data to life.
The collaboration between the direct service provider, homelessness prevention advocate, and data science team created compelling materials that helped secure increased local, city, and state funding for the project. The team attests this wouldn’t have happened if any one of the organizations had continued to “go it alone.”
By treating storytelling the same way they approached data-sharing, these organizations made a case far stronger than any of them could have independently.
Storytellers & Story Holders
An activist in community violence prevention and second-chance advocacy lamented NPR coverage as the story of his groundbreaking prison re-entry program made the news.
“Why do these reporters always insist on introducing me by the crime I served time on?” he asked sourly of what objectively should have been a celebratory conversation. “It doesn’t matter that I have been working on community improvement efforts for way longer than I was in the streets or that I served my time. They always got to lead with the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
We have heard variations of this argument from people with lived experience sharing their stories in all matters related to change-making campaigns. It isn’t always about mistakes either, as hard-earned coverage can reduce people to the worst situations they’ve ever experienced in an effort to get the point across. Even well-meaning media coverage often errs on the side of sensationalism when putting forward solutions in an attempt to get eyeballs.
Unfortunately, the same is sometimes true in our advocacy work, though not always for the same reasons. Our organizations are resource- strapped and pressed for time. Storytelling is one more thing on the to-do list that we are trying to squeeze in as a deadline approaches. We may not intend to invalidate someone’s feelings or devalue their experience in our rush to share their story, but in our haste, we can shortchange the time it takes to build rapport and develop trust, which in turn leaves our those sharing their story feeling shortchanged, as well.
Odd Duck developed a person-first, first- person approach to storytelling in partnership with activists, organizers, and people with lived experience that recognizes (and often compensates) storytellers and story-holders with equal weight, approaching story-sharing efforts with a trauma-informed lens.
The term story-holder comes from the ethical storytelling movement in Australia, which arose in response to the way documentarians, journalists, and others were replicating colonizing dynamics in the stories they collected. Even when the focus of the work was intended to expose or challenge social injustice these storytellers were often perceived as extracting stories and exploiting their collaborators.
In line with the story holder principle, there is a movement around trauma-informed care. This is often used in the justice space and education. You never know where someone is coming from, so how do you create the space to allow for some of the tensions and avoid some of the triggers that may come up with a traumatized speaker?
There are six principles of trauma-informed care, which have been adapted to the story sharing context:
- Safety: Making sure individuals are in a good place to share their story and will not be retraumatized by the telling.
- Trustworthiness and Transparency: Be honest and forthright about why we are using this story.
- Peer Support and Mutual Self-Help: Creating a peer network to support individuals beyond this instance.
- Model and Collaboration: Working together to share the story, not just taking over.
- Empowerment, Coice, and Choice: Ensure story holders feel valued and, wherever possible, compensated as consultants.
- Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues: Recognize, acknowledge, and observe what you all are bringing into the experience.
From there, we can distill trauma-informed care down to three principles: respect, trust, and consent.
With respect, we want to ensure that the story holder feels in control and maintains autonomy over their story. We want them to feel that this is their story to share and recognize the responsibility that comes with sharing it.
Building trust means developing a relationship beyond just the exchange or transaction of sharing a story and how that story is promoted.
Finally, we have consent. Oftentimes, we think it is sufficient to get signed consent once, granting our organization permission to use it in advocacy work, in a newsletter, at a gala, and so on.
But securing consent for each use, not just once for everything, is crucial to reinforcing that trust and respect. This ensures that the stories are being shared sensitively and that we are aware of the impact they could have.
Putting these safeguards in place can feel burdensome and time-consuming, but they are critical to honoring the power of story, respecting the story holder, and building lasting trust. They also make for better stories.
Resources
- The podcast Somebody is a masterclass on providing avenues for the audience to own their story. When we talk about Trauma-Informed storytelling, this is what we are talking about.
- 1619 with Nikole Hannah Jones is a good look at the basis for our Looking Back to Move Forward.
- Check out the attached Interview Protocol tipsheet for advice on how to conduct interviews that allow your participants to feel comfortable and open up.
