Opinion: Storytelling to Win Support for a Cause Should Be Tied to Social Change

Last fall I attended a talk by David Simon, creator of the “The Wire,” a TV crime drama set in Baltimore that has been called “Dickensian” in its complexity and scope, and “Tremé,” a series about New Orleans musicians in the years after Hurricane Katrina.

I expected him to say he was drawn to his subjects by a desire to change society, but he said that’s not at all how he sees it. Instead, he’s drawn to “fault lines” in the culture. Not coincidentally, it’s at those fault lines where issues of social import lie. But social relevance is not necessarily the same as social change.

That’s an important distinction for nonprofits that use storytelling to raise money, rally support, or build solidarity, and for the foundations that in recent years have been pouring lots of money into creative storytelling efforts.

It also underscores the anxiety I have felt ever since I started a small project in storytelling for community building in 1995. Through the years I’ve been involved in theater, film, oral history, and other narrative projects that engage social issues such as health care and prisons. Like other nonprofit do-gooders, I am always wondering: “Am I really doing any good at all? Does this work matter?”

The world is cluttered with pointless storytelling projects.

I won’t name any names, but surely you’ve seen more than a few nonprofit websites that encourage visitors to “tell your story,” and that post maybe 10 or 15 video entries on a given topic, maybe one or two that are any good, and anyway the last update was over a year ago, and you wonder, probably rightly, “Why did they waste their time and energy?” And then, inevitably, “Why am I wasting mine?”

Or in a more optimistic scenario, you may share such a video on Facebook, and then a few of your friends share it too, and it works everybody up into a self-righteous lather, and it gets a bunch more views and the sponsoring nonprofit puts that in their next grant proposal, though let’s face it, what do all those social-media metrics mean anyway, and does anybody really care?

That’s not to mention all the negative comments you see in response to web videos—the haters, the doubters, and the political polar opposites who will never change their minds no matter how many nuanced stories you upload to YouTube.

Think about the seemingly endless social-issue documentary films that are screened in art-house cinemas and, if the producers are lucky, on PBS. Maybe you go to such a screening, watch a serious film about some grave injustice, nod your head thoughtfully during the post-film Q&A, and your “awareness” is raised.

But then, your awareness was already pretty high, and just about everyone in the audience agreed with the director’s perspective anyway, so the film didn’t change any minds. And then people in the audience are invited to share their experiences with the grave injustice, and someone tells a story and they cry, and maybe you cry too, and then another speaker drones on too long and the whole thing starts to feel self-indulgent.

On the plus side, it may have prompted some audience members to drop $20 in the donation jar for the organization working on the grave injustice, but why didn’t funding go to them in the first place instead of to some film that cost maybe half a million to make?

Stories might not only do little or no good for social change; they might even be harmful when they distract from the larger issues at hand.

The Yale psychology scholar Paul Bloom, writing in The New Yorker, said that our attention may be drawn to dramatic individual cases—say, a baby stuck in a well and the heroic efforts to rescue her—while ignoring the vast numbers of other babies in wells, proverbial or real, and the rational moves we could take to prevent them from falling into those wells in the first place.

Drawing on the shooting massacre in Newtown, Conn., as an example of this phenomenon, Mr. Bloom describes the countless toys and millions of dollars that flowed into this relatively affluent community despite its repeated requests that those gifts be directed elsewhere; Newtown’s “story,” if you will, had aroused the compassion of people nationwide, but their charity might logically have been better directed at mental-health care or gun control.

That is a vital lesson: Good storytelling may humanize abstract policy issues, but stories that personalize issues too much also run the risk of creating a benefit for one person or small group of people, and to the detriment of social change. Maybe what we really need is clear-headed policy makers and economists. Maybe storytelling is just an entertaining diversion from the real work of social change.

Storytelling has gotten so much ink and air time in the nonprofit world in recent years that it deserves whatever dose of skepticism comes along with it. And yet, let’s consider a few projects that stand up well under scrutiny:

• After a spate of headline-grabbing suicides by young gay people, the “It Gets Better Project” made its debut in 2010. Since then it has collected more than 50,000 videos from LGBT adults and allies who share their own personal stories and urging young people to stick around long enough to get to the good stuff. The videos have been viewed more than 50 million times, providing life-saving encouragement to untold numbers of youth. Proceeds from the sale of a companion book support an LGBT youth-suicide-prevention hotline. The project now has affiliate sites in a dozen countries.
• The documentary film “Welcome to Shelbyville” looked at an immigrant-welcoming program in small-town Tennessee. A San Francisco organization called Active Voice helped come up with the idea for the project. From the very start, the group sought the opinions and involvement of immigrant programs around the country, so that by the time the film was done, they were ready to use it to rally support for the task of integrating immigrants into life in the United States.
• The community organizer and Harvard professor Marshall Ganz developed a story-sharing method called “Public Narrative,” which was used in the 2008 Obama campaign. Volunteers would get together in groups and tell stories about what drew them to the campaign, how they identified collectively, and the challenges facing the country. Those stories were then used to help them connect personally to voters and build grassroots leadership. The method is now used by civic, student, and activist groups worldwide.

These are outstanding examples, and few other endeavors will be quite so muscular.

But the reasons they succeeded while many others don’t can yield some valuable reminders for storytelling at any scale. We must link personal narratives to political challenges; provide audiences with ways to take action; treat stories as one dimension of a larger effort to create change; and engage people who may be new to a cause or who disagree with us.

At its best, storytelling is an indispensable practice, because social change demands that we learn from and about each other; that we are inspired to action; and that we imagine better futures to work toward. If a little skepticism tempers our storytelling so it’s more wisely done, then all the better.