Avrell Stokes got the idea for founding a nonprofit to lift up the stories of the poor more than a dozen years ago during road trips through Mississippi.
While he was working in a hospital administrative job, Stokes spent his off hours documenting the poverty he encountered using the camera on his iPhone. Driven to tell a broader group of people about the hardships faced by people in the region where he grew up, he posted the videos on YouTube.
Several years later, he received a message out of the blue from a student thanking him for his posts. Her social-science class at Harvard University had used them in its coursework.
For Stokes, the message from the Ivy Leaguer confirmed his belief that stories have the potential to advance social change and prompted him to co-found BeGreat Together, a Kansas City, Mo., nonprofit. This month BeGreat Together will air the first in a series of videos, called DocuCourse, that are meant to both document the work of social change makers and provide movement leaders nationwide with lessons on how they can make a difference in their towns.
When he created BeGreat Together, Stokes didn’t think he would attract much foundation support. Too often foundations insist on backing projects that rely on statistical measures and conform to strategies hatched by people Stokes says are out of touch.
“Foundations spend a lot more money on intellectualizing versus listening,” he says. “Funders need to invest exponentially more in storytelling and narrative change. Storytelling should be what we lead with, and the data should support the story.”
But Stokes did find some foundations willing to provide grant money. The videos in the series were supported by a $150,000 grant from the Convergence Partnership, a group of foundations that provide grants to nonprofits that tell stories about racial justice and health equity and a separate $300,000 grant from one of its members, the Health Forward Foundation. The videos will cover a range of issues, including the use of art in advocacy, the impact the bail system has on mothers who have been arrested, and the role of forgiveness in the lives of people returning to their communities after prison sentences.
The Convergence Partnership, founded in 2007, includes national and state-level grant makers such as the California Endowment, Chicago Community Trust, Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, , Foundation for Louisiana, Kansas Health Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. This year, the partnership has a $2.5 million budget.
Today it released a new study documenting what it has learned and how others can make a difference in supporting what proponents call “narrative change.”
Chief among the findings:
- Grant makers are split on how to approach narrative funding with some believing in a “top-down” approach, in which grant maker decide what kind of shift they want to make and then work to get that message across in the media and among movement networks, and “bottom up” foundations that work to strengthen grassroots media organizations and arts nonprofits led by people of color.
- Foundation leaders would like to see more coordination on narrative change efforts both within their own organization and among other grant makers.
- Foundations interested in supporting narrative change have to be ready to make grants over the long haul; the work is slow.
- Rather than focus primarily on finding effective stories, many grant makers are shifting to focus on finding audiences for those stories to maximize impact.
Convergence’s work is among several efforts grant makers have been supporting with more dollars in recent years as they try to figure how to shift attitudes of the public.
Foundations typically support efforts to make policy changes at the local or national level by helping people learn more about what’s behind social problems and to persuade them to advocate for policies that make a difference, especially to people who lack political clout and influence.
Changing societal narratives goes a step beyond that and instead aims to get people to rethink the basic stories that define their worldview.
Among the other efforts: In 2017 a group of grant makers, including the Nathan Cummings, Ford, General Services, JPB, and W.K. Kellogg foundations and Unbound Philanthropy, combined to start the Pop Culture Collaborative. The fund has made or committed to $20 million in grants since then and is focused on shifting attitudes about people of color, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and Indigenous people, especially those who are women, queer, transgender, or disabled.
Last year, the Compton, Ford, and Skoll foundations together committed $30 million for the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling, an effort that targets countries with a large share of low-income people.
Foundations backing such work point to the gradual acceptance and legalization of gay marriage as a prime example of what it takes to change laws and policies.
Nonprofits, foundations, and others realized many years ago that their work would not succeed unless they made sure Americans thought about the challenges facing friends and relatives because same-sex marriage was illegal. Foundations paid for research and lawsuits, paving the way for ballot measures and court challenges. Just as important, they supported efforts to change the way many people think about the issue by focusing on equality and the way gay marriage bans denied people their basic human rights .
Left vs. Right
Left-leaning foundations have embraced supporting narrative change more readily than conservative or moderate grant makers, according to Matthew Peterson, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. Liberal foundations will spend money promoting stories that matter to them “without thinking twice,” he says, while conservative foundations tend to focus largely on a grant’s return on investment.
Peterson sees liberal foundations as part of a broader complex he calls “woke capital” that includes financial institutions, companies, politicians, and universities that promote stories through the media about society, whether they have to do with race, sexual identity, or the environment. Those stories, he says, are reinforced when they reach people who want to signal to their peers that they are virtuous.
But Peterson, who co-founded venture firm New Founding, says it is possible that narrative change supporters on the left will lose their audience.
“Not everyone gets on board with these things,” he says. “Populist resistance is strengthened when they see that there is this shadow network of foundations that’s funding all this stuff.”
Health Care and Policing
Convergence commissioned interviews and surveys of about three dozen foundations, grant maker networks, and consultants who work with nonprofits because the practice is relatively new, and not much is clear about the scope of the grant making or the ways foundations support it, says Rinku Sen, executive director of nonprofit consulting group the Narrative Initiative and the study’s co-author.
Sen defines narratives as themes and ideas that are embedded in collections of stories. The report, Sen says, looks into the approaches foundations take to “saturate” society with those themes so they are “repeated, elevated, and made ubiquitous.”
Public attitudes on health-care policy and racial justice, two subjects that are the main focus of the Convergence Partnership, are not directly mentioned in the report, Sen says narrative shifts on those issues have occurred but are far from complete.
For instance, Sen says, foundations played a role in helping change public attitudes on health policy that caused hospital administrators to shift from focusing on running tests and performing procedures to looking at factors outside of the examination room. In the past decade, as more foundations made grants to spread the word that societal factors can cause a person’s health to deteriorate, more health-care professionals turned their attention to a broader range of things that can influence health, such as school attendance, whether patients had a home, or whether they were constantly under threat of violence.
Sen says it is still unclear whether racial-justice nonprofits succeeded in helping create a narrative shift since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. While the “defund the police” movement did not result in huge nationwide policy changes on policing, and in fact invited a forceful backlash, Sen says that the dominant narrative that police are there to “protect and serve” is now greeted with widespread skepticism.
“It’s only been two years, which in narrative terms is like a blink of an eye,” she says. “Changing the foundational ideas on which society runs — the timelines are in decades.”
The Kresge Foundation has provided $7.5 million in grants to the Convergence Partnership since it was founded. While the Detroit-based foundation does not have a separate narrative-change program, the practice shows up in several of its efforts, including its health-care grant making and its efforts to change the image of the city of Detroit, says Chris Kabel, a senior fellow at Kresge.
Kabel hopes that the report prompts more foundations to include grants that explicitly promote work to shift narratives. But he acknowledges that foundations are hesitant because of the long-term nature of the work.
“When was the last time you saw a foundation make a 20-year grant?” he says.
Building Grassroots Movements
To focus on the longer term, the Convergence Partnership report suggests that foundations do more to incorporate the stories of grassroots leaders and what it takes to build a successful movement.
Narrative strategies that only focus on mass media by, for instance, getting opinion pieces published in newspapers, or mass culture, in which Hollywood studios create storylines that promote a certain view, can change attitudes, Sen says. But, she says, any policy victories generated by those efforts could be short-lived if the narratives don’t spring from mass movements.
Some of the efforts to influence the mass media and mass culture can feel more tangible to foundations because the grants will result in, for instance, a book, a newspaper series, or a film. Those things are important, Sen says, but change won’t happen until grassroots social movements push new ideas. Such movements are more effective, she says, but it takes grant makers to fuel such work rather than “turning the narrative power over to the owner of Netflix, for example.”
“In an ecosystem where all the investment goes to mass media and mass culture, the people are simply receptacles. They are only audience and not creators and producers,” she says. “Movements need investments that allow them to fulfill their narrative potential best that they can, and that potential is enormous.”
Avrell Stokes agrees. He is convinced that foundations will only provide more grant money to grassroots leaders of color like himself if grant makers listen more intently to the stories being told by neighborhood leaders.
“People invest where their values are,” he says. “And our values are shaped by what we know, what we believe, and what we hear over time. If we are going to transform communities, transform the way we operate, and increase how much we invest in communities, we have to really consider narrative and listen to the stories from those communities.”