Storytelling and Social Change: A Strategy Guide for Organizers, Artists & Advocates

Storytelling and Social Change: A Strategy Guide

The guide below is for organizers, organizations, activists, artists, storytellers, social entrepreneurs, and anyone else who wants to create positive social change.

The guide is bookended by an introduction and an afterword. In between, you’ll find thirty-two short chapters divided into four color-coded sections. The strategy section is about how to use storytelling to best effect in service of your cause. The storytelling section offers ideas on how to tell a good story. The methods section covers some techniques in storytelling. And the structure section looks at practical questions of how to incorporate storytelling into your everyday work. Following these sections is a series of case studies of foundation and nonprofit partners from the first edition of the guide.

To download a PDF of the guide, click here.

Introduction

Are stories any match for tough social problems?

Introduction

Why Stories?

Why tell stories for social change?

Strategy

How do we develop a storytelling strategy?

Strategy

Research

How do we do research to support our storytelling?

Strategy

Audiences

How do we reach new audiences?

Strategy

Pop Culture

How can we piggyback on pop culture?

Strategy

Vision

How do we balance short and long-term storytelling?

Strategy

Location

Where can we tell stories?

Strategy

Action

How do we make our stories actionable?

Strategy

Personal and Political

How do we combine the personal and the political?

Strategy

Good Stories

What makes for a good story?

Storytelling

Engagement

How do we keep audiences involved in the story?

Storytelling

Boring Topics

How do we tell compelling stories about boring topics?

Storytelling

Numbers

How do we combine stories and statistics?

Storytelling

Forms

What are some of the forms of storytelling we can use?

Storytelling

Story Types

Whose and what kinds of stories can we tell?

Storytelling

Interviews

How can we elicit good stories from an interview?

Storytelling

Uses of Story

How is storytelling used for social change?

Methods

Theatre of the Oppressed

What is Theatre of the Oppressed and how can we use it?

Methods

Marshall Ganz, leads organizing workshop.

Public Narrative

What is Public Narrative and how can we use it?

Methods

Fiction

How can we use fiction in our work?

Methods

Humor

How and why can we use humor?

Methods

History

How can we use history?

Methods

The Future

How do we tell stories about the future we want to see?

Methods

Habits

How do we make storytelling a more regular part of our work?

Structure

Constituent Stories

How can we gather stories from constituents?

Structure

Story Banks

What is a story-bank and how can we build one?

Structure

What Is a Story Circle? Definition, Examples, and Community Use

What Is a Story Circle? How Narrative Arts Uses Story Circles in Community Life For more than 30 years, Narrative Arts has used story circles as a core practice in community storytelling, cultural work, media-making, and public life. A story circle is a facilitated group storytelling process in which people respond to a shared prompt [...]

Structure