Get
Heard and Build Power by Connecting through Stories
People tell stories to make meaning and communicate with each
other. Storytelling is a billion-dollar business, often in
the hands of major corporations and other powerful institutions
that hire big buck specialists to use storytelling to influence
how people think and behave. Stories are everywhere - in the
gossip we share over coffee with friends, on television in
the form of news and entertainment, in newspapers, on blogs
and on YouTube.
Knowing how to effectively tell stories helps
you communicate political ideas, build campaigns and create
movements. But
stories are also a powerful metaphor for social justice organizing.
The same elements of good storytelling map to the key ingredients
of strong community building, leadership development and
values-based organizing models.
Story
as Metaphor: "We win by writing our own story."
A mantra of the United Workers
since its inception has been that "we win by writing our own story". The push
to write the story and to control the agenda have been central strategies
for the low-wage workers of the United Workers.
The
idea of ending poverty - the goal of the United Workers
- is absent from most public discourse. It’s out of
the news, not on the lips of politicians, presented as impossible
by academics
and beyond
the imaginations
of most, even some progressives.
In order
to make the end to poverty possible, more people need to
start talking
about poverty as endable. Poverty needs to be talked about
as a political problem created by
political
choices, not an avoidable condition or fact of history.
The organizing
work of the United Workers is like a story in that it is
authored, or constructed. Anything is possible in story.
The only limit
to storytelling
is the
limit of imagination. By "writing history" we take power
into our own hands rather than waiting for those with power
to help us or write us into their story.
The idea of being
authors, or participants, of our own liberation is central
to the work of the United Workers and is at the heart of
the Battle of Stories framework.
Story
as Strategy: Talk in ways people will understand,
remember and act on.
Stories make for effective communication. That's because
narrative structure organizes information in ways that
are memorable and interesting. Understanding how to construct
a narrative through political action, and how to weave
narrative through all your organizing work.
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