Let This Radicalize You

Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling. If their role in your story feels like “doom appreciator,” most people will recoil, retreat to their own smaller story, and keep the focus there.

When a fact or set of facts prompts people to change course, it’s usually because someone or something has interrupted the narrative they knew and told a story that feels more true—one worth making changes over.

In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed1

If spitting horrifying facts at people changed minds and built movements, we would have overthrown the capitalist system long ago, because the facts have always been on our side.

It would be easy, in fact, to dismiss everyone who acts against the collective good as “selfish” or “bad.” But would such characterizations help us alter the terrain? As organizers, we must always pose the question, “Why is this happening?”

Powerful actors must keep us convinced that it’s the people around us—everyday folks whose struggles overlap with our own—who pose the greatest threat to our safety, well-being, and happiness. It is the grandest illusion ever created: in a world where corporations and governments worldwide are poised to annihilate most life on Earth, we are made to

the idea of an important conversation that helped bring me home.

Shana McDavis-Conway, the codirector of the Center for Story-Based Strategy, about how to build a different kind of political messaging. Story-based strategy, a participatory approach that links movement building with an analysis of narrative power, positions storytelling at the center of social change.

not every action, speech, or conversation about climate should be an apocalyptic snapshot, for the same reason that not every protest against police brutality should be a die-in.