Narrative Strategy & Culture Change

Use stories to show how wealth and resources are taken from communities—and who benefits.

Movements already tell powerful stories about exploitation and extraction. Our research shows that leaning into the extraction metaphor can make these stories even stronger, helping show how wealth and resources are pulled from communities across people, places, and generations.

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Make the process visible.
Show the chain: something valuable exists in a community → powerful actors take control of it → wealth flows outward → communities are left with fewer resources.

Extend the metaphor.
Mining, drilling, and fracking offer a vivid model: valuable resources are pulled from a place and carried elsewhere. That same pattern can help explain what happens with labor, land, housing, public resources, and community wealth.

See it in action
Instead of focusing only on a neighborhood losing businesses, jobs, or affordable housing, follow where the money goes: Who owns the property? Who profits as rents rise? Who receives tax breaks? Who profits from the wealth and resources pulled out of a community?

Tell stories that show how race was created and used to justify taking land, exploiting labor, and concentrating wealth and power.

Race is not a natural division between people. It was created and reinforced through laws, policies, institutions, and stories that justified exploitation and dispossession. Our research suggests that stories can make this history visible. Show how race was used to justify taking land, exploiting labor, and concentrating wealth and how these systems continue today.

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Show why race was made.
Don’t only show racial inequality as an outcome. Show how ideas about race were created and used to justify taking land and resources, exploiting people’s labor, and denying people rights and power.

Connect exploitation then and now.
Trace how these systems developed over time and continue to shape who owns land, where investment goes, whose work is valued, and who holds wealth and power today.

Include resistance in the history.
Racial hierarchy has always been challenged. Tell stories of people organizing, resisting, building alternatives, and fighting to change the systems created to exploit and divide them.

See it in action
Stories about neighborhood segregation often focus on the inequality we see today without explaining how it was created. Instead, tell a story that shows how race and racist ideas were used to justify taking land, restricting where people could live, and limiting who could build wealth. Follow the people who challenged those systems, organized for change, and fought to create something different.

Center communities as people who understand what is happening and make choices about what to do. Show them organizing, creating, and building power—not simply experiencing injustice.

Stories about injustice can unintentionally turn communities into victims while giving corporations, policymakers, or institutions all the agency. Cultural strategy can redistribute agency within the story itself.

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Show communities making consequential choices.
People do more than experience a problem. Show them analyzing it, disagreeing about it, organizing around it, and acting on it.

Show collective protagonists.
Not every story needs a singular hero. A tenant union, neighborhood, group of workers, or coalition can be the actor that drives change.

Keep complexity.
Communities don’t need to be idealized to have agency. Conflict, humor, uncertainty, disagreement, and imperfect people can make collective action feel more human and believable.

See it in action
Instead of ending with workers struggling to get by, continue the story: workers compare experiences, see how their employer profits from low wages, organize their coworkers, and fight for better pay and working conditions.

Show how joy, care, creativity, and belonging bring people together and build the relationships that make collective action possible.

Our research supports framing joy as a source of community power. Joy is not separate from the struggle for liberation. It can bring people together, strengthen relationships, and build the trust and solidarity that make collective action possible. Stories can show how communities create, celebrate, and care for one another—and how those connections become a source of power in the fight for change.

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Show joy bringing people together.
Relationships, traditions, music, food, public spaces, humor, and celebration create connections that communities can draw on when they organize and fight for change.

Show what people are building and protecting.
Show the relationships, places, traditions, and ways of being together that people value and want to strengthen.

Connect joy to collective action.
Show how gathering, creating, celebrating, and caring for one another can build trust, solidarity, and a sense of shared purpose.

See it in action
A story about a neighborhood school could show families gathering for performances, sporting events, celebrations, and community meals. When the school faces cuts, those relationships become the foundation for parents, students, educators, and neighbors to organize and fight together.

Tell stories that show people coming together to fight the systems and powerful interests shaping their lives and building the power to change them.

Our research suggests that the language of fighting for power is stronger than the language of finding or giving people a voice. Tell stories about people recognizing a shared problem, organizing together, confronting powerful interests, and building the collective power to fight and win.

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Show what they’re up against.
Make the conflict clear. Who holds power? Who benefits from keeping things as they are? What institutions or systems are people fighting to change?

Show power being built.
Let audiences see how individual actions become collective strength and how that strength creates pressure and shifts what is possible.

Show how people win.
Stories of resistance matter, but so do stories of victory. Show organized people changing policies, institutions, and who has the power to make decisions.

See it in action
Instead of a story about one worker fighting for better pay, tell the story of workers realizing they are facing the same conditions. They talk with coworkers, organize across their workplace, grow their numbers, confront the company, and fight together for better wages and working conditions.

Use narrative to make structural change imaginable.
One of narrative’s distinctive powers is its ability to let people temporarily inhabit a world that does not yet exist. Stories can move beyond telling audiences that another future is possible and help them see, hear, and feel what living in it might actually be like.

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Make the future specific.
What does housing look like? Who owns businesses? How are public spaces used? Who makes decisions? Where do children play? What does work feel like?

Show systems working differently.
A different future isn’t only today’s world with nicer people in it. Imagine different rules, institutions, ownership structures, and distributions of power.

Show the path, too.
Utopia can feel distant if audiences never see how we get there. Connect transformed conditions to organizing, policy choices, collective struggle, and victories along the way.

See it in action
Don’t simply end a story with residents successfully stopping a development. Take us five years forward. What did they build instead? Who controls the land now? What became possible because power changed hands.