Narrative Framing as Advocacy
Narrativizing Your Vision & Objectives
It is standard practice for most companies and organizations to have a vision statement—a grand, ideal plan for what they want to achieve in the future.
In a similar way, we suggest every narrative campaign set a vision for the world they are trying to achieve with the change they are proposing.
In this section, we share how to do exactly that and how to turn this vision into something tangible, achievable, and concrete.
Cultivating Hope with a Vision for the Future
In 2016, activist and artist Ingrid LaFleur threw her hat in the ring to run for the mayor of Detroit. The city has the unfortunate distinction of having the country’s second-highest number of vacant buildings. Entire neighborhoods are filled with abandoned homes lining both sides of the street. Once opulent theaters, train stations, office buildings, and factories now sit empty. Scattered throughout the city, derelict buildings sit in disuse and disrepair.
As one resident put it, “You’d be hard-pressed to find a better symbol for the years of neglect brought on by systemic racism and oppression than the abandoned buildings that fill our city.”
LaFleur did with her campaign what many grassroots activists seeking elected positions would do: she held listening sessions with the community to create her campaign platform. In session after session, she found residents were good at articulating the problems and injustices they’d experienced. However, when she suggested they co-create solutions, her future constituents couldn’t put forward any ideas.
A sense of hopelessness and despair pervaded these conversations.
While listening to people’s problems was a good start, LaFleur wanted to find a way to approach listening sessions so that they could also begin brainstorming solutions. How could she overcome this chasm of hopelessness?
That’s when she turned to her artistic roots, incorporating concepts from Afrofuturism, a movement in music, art, and literature using science fiction themes to envision Black-centric futures that allowed people to imagine the possibilities if the shackles of racism and oppression were lifted.
That inspiration gave her and her supporters to imagine solutions to generate universal basic income, ways to revamp and reshape the city, and solutions for other problems. LaFleur did not end up winning the mayoral race, but today the methods she developed are used in grassroots activism around the country, and she continues to advocate in Detroit for the platform put together in her campaign.
Today, Detroit is recognized as a world leader in urban farming! We would be hard-pressed to think of a more suitable symbol for possibility, opportunity, and hope than a lush, green garden growing in the soil at the city’s center.
Creating a Narrativized Vision: Putting Hope at the Center of Our Story
Many of us, when setting out our goals, lead with constraints. We consider the opposition and obstacles first. What will people say? What kind of resistance will we encounter? We limit ourselves to challenges and objections. Just like the Detroit residents Ingrid LaFleur gathered to inform her campaign, we can deny our vision for what is possible before it is even put forward by thinking only of limitations.
This approach is intended to think beyond constraints.
Story 101 usually teaches us to focus on conflict. We typically build our story around that challenge— the world as it is and the build-up to that confrontation—with plot points centered around the challenges we encounter and problems we solve along the way.
The narrativized vision focuses on the world we are creating and what it will look like once our vision is achieved.
What are you trying to build towards? What does the world (or your community) look like when your vision is accomplished? How do we bridge that gap? What stands in our way?
Answering these questions brings your reader or listener into your vision.
For instance, when we talk about climate change, people are often overwhelmed by the issue. Our minds immediately go to extreme disasters, which prevent us from thinking further. We are paralyzed with fear and overwhelm, thinking of rising sea levels, melting ice caps, super storms, and natural disasters.
When U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The Intercept worked to create her Green New Deal PSAs, they envisioned a world where the deal had already been implemented. This allowed people to feel hopeful.
It can feel daunting, indulgent, and even unnatural to begin framing your visions and challenges in reverse, like this, as if they have already been accomplished (we have included a worksheet at the back to help), but once you pass that initial hurdle, thinking of the possibilities and planning things becomes exciting. It also becomes much easier to make connections and see opportunities you couldn’t imagine otherwise.
You should be able to envision your narrative and objectives so clearly that when asked about your plans for the future, people almost believe that you have actually already completed them, and now you’re retelling the story.
Planning for the future does not have to be this ominous, overwhelming task. It can be exciting and riveting, allowing for new collaborations and innovation to make your community better than it already is. It just takes courage and creativity to switch up the model and think beyond what you thought possible.
Most of us are trained in storytelling for advocacy and non-profit work to think with a problem-forward formula. We open our story with the issue we are focused on, detailing the problem we aim to address. We describe our approach, explain our unique position on the issue, and suggest possible solutions in the form of our desired outcomes. This format is often used in grant writing, appeals, policy briefs, and white papers, and we weave stories that illustrate these sections.
In order to apply a vision-forward narrative approach, one that imagines beyond constraint, we need to retrain ourselves. We use an exercise inspired by Ingrid LaFleur’s turn to Afrofuturist art movements that invites storytellers to project themselves into a hopeful future of possibility, opportunity, and optimism.
We call it our “Documentarian of the Future Exercise,” where participants group into pairs and take turns interviewing each other five years to the date in the future. Odd Duck has led hundreds of nonprofit, advocacy, healthcare, and scientific leaders through this exercise. It is challenging and can feel a little weird when you are in it, but the results are often game-changing.
Imagine you have won an award exactly five years in the future. A film crew sits down to ask you about your accomplishments. Take turns playing the role of the filmmaker and your future self.
Ask:
- What does your work look like at this time?
- What have you accomplished?
- What are you most proud of achieving in the last five years?
The challenge is to answer in the present tense about things that haven’t happened yet. This can feel a little awkward, somewhat strange, and even frightening, but when you fully commit to the exercise, you can shift your mindset to a more hopeful orientation. We’ve included a more detailed version of this exercise at the end of the chapter and encourage you to try it.
Making Change Measurable
Once you’ve completed the exercise, write a vision for the future using your answers. Add detail wherever possible to really make this story come to life. Write in first-person, present tense. Try to feel the future you are creating.
When participants first embark on this exercise, we often hear it feels a little too “woo-woo” to be practical—like an indulgent waste of time. It is important to note that this is not a visualization exercise; it is a blueprint.
After it’s been fully crafted, your Narrativized Vision serves a few purposes.
First, it becomes part of your rallying cry—a galvanizing vision to recruit allies to your cause. The Narrativized Vision should inform your talking points, marketing materials, and content to promote your campaign.
Second, reverse engineering your vision can help you develop concrete steps, milestones, and measurable benchmarks for achievement. We often encourage participants to use the Narrativized Vision as a starting point and work backward creating an action plan of objectives that will help you realize your outcome.
Third, the Narrativized Vision helps you identify audiences (the focus of our next chapter) by answering the question: Who can help me accomplish this work? After you’ve done the big lift of articulating your vision and creating objectives, it is far easier to consider what audiences you need to sway to move things forward.
We will turn our attention to that question in the next chapter, but getting your Narrativized Vision in place makes the effort of identifying audiences a far lighter lift.
Resources
- If you found the discussion about AOC’s Green New Deal video with The Intercept intriguing, you can check out the whole video here to see firsthand how they utilized hope as a seller for her campaign.
- If you want to learn more about futurescaping, check out futurist Jane McGonigal. For a more in-depth review, her book IMAGINABLE offers a pretty exciting and insightful approach to navigating the uncertainty of the future.
- You can also check out Cameron Herold on creating a Vivid Vision here, featuring more of a business perspective: “Your Vision Statement Sucks.”
- Odd Duck’s interview with the NPFX Podcast on flipping the script on the traditional change narrative approach also offers a more detailed view of these topics.
- For another interesting listen, Nancy Durate’s TED Talk “The Secret Structure of Great Talks” covers her mapping of similarities between MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Steve Jobs’s “IPhone Announcement.”
