Thank you so much for joining us. We are routed collaborative communications and today's session is going to focus on elevating your narrative strategy. All right, and if you are requesting access, no worries that will be granted shortly. So rooted is an organization that is headquartered here in California. However, we are fully remote. So we have team members all over the place. But we'd like it to be known that we're an organization that leads with our values. So what exactly are these values? We embrace anti racism, equitable access to opportunities and resources, partnership through listening and building trust, community led breakthroughs, fearless curiosity, and most importantly, help and heal.
All right, so as we are about to be started, please feel free to drop your name department role pronouns, the land that you inhabit. And we're speaking of course, the land acknowledgments, your current or previous challenges as far as their storytelling and then any accessibility needs that you would like to share. So kindly drop those into the chat so that we can know who's all in the space. And we will proceed and we have people still coming in. So we're going to take our time here at this slide, just drop your name department role pronouns, the land you inhabit. If you don't know we do have a link so that you could find out and any accessibility needs that we would need to be aware of so that we can ensure that everyone is able to enjoy this experience.
All right. Shelly, thank you so much for coming.
Also, if anyone has any issues accessing the chat, please turn on your mic now and let us know.
Valentina. Hello, Maureen. Thank you, Shelly. Marie. I actually just sent you a request on LinkedIn. Jenna, Cindy, love to see you.
Well,
yeah. Briella Amanda. Hello. Hello, Brenda. Hello, hello. So many people from different areas representing different aspects of this work. So good to see you. Hello, Curtis. Thank you for joining us. Shout out to Boston. Oh, in the house. All right. We're gonna keep it moving. So please, if you haven't done so you can continue to drop your name. Brittany. Thank you for coming Eugenia. Yeah, Melinda. All right. So who are your co facilitators for today? I will begin my name is sia Magadan i Yu Shi aka pro pronouns. I am rutan's director of community engagement and fundraising. For those who may have any visual impairments I am a dark skin I like to say dark chocolate complected woman with black and brown hair. I generally have blonde highlights on the front, dark brown eyes. Today I'm wearing a dark blue shirt. And on my left, it's rude. It's unofficial intern Arturo who attends many of our meetings and will be sitting in on today's session. I will now pass it over to Ian.
Everyone. My name is Ian Madrigal. I'm a communication strategist here with routed as well as campaign consultant on my own. And my pronouns are they and he, either one works. I am on Piscataway land up in Baltimore, Maryland. And I'm excited to dig in to all this with you today. We have a lot of good stuff to cover.
Hi, everyone. I'm losing my voice. But my name is Val. My pronouns are she they? And read it's Director of Strategy. And I reside on Chinua Aloni land here in the San Francisco East Bay. And I'll mostly be oz behind the curtain today. So back to you. So yeah. Oh,
thank you. And I forgot my land acknowledgement. I am in Sacramento on this amount of land. Thank you.
All right. So before we begin our sessions, whether they be working with clients, partners, or anyone, we always like to start with our community agreements which allow us to create a space of belonging, and also to just get us prepared for what we're about to embark upon. So we invite you to approach with curiosity be open to new ways of doing and thinking. We invite you to sit with discomfort, expect and accept non closure. As much as you can engage and be present. We know some much is happening in our virtual spaces. Many of us are caregiving, or we're sharing space. Whatever the situation may be as mustard you can try to be as present as possible. If you have a question or would like to share, drop it into the chat. You can also use your emojis at the bottom of the screen to share your sentiments which I do often. Be aware of power dynamics and consider the space you consume. Be willing to share space, we ask that you speak from your experience, assume best intent and acknowledge the impact of your words on others, except restraints as they are presented. We invite you to ideate and embrace being messy. Now if I have any Type A's in the room, as hard as it may be, I'm going to ask you to put aside your perfectionism for this little bit of time today, and I promise you, it will be worth it. The next set of agreements we'd like to call Vegas slash Sesame Street. What's shared here stays here. But what's learned here is free to leave. Be willing to slow down notice and name what is coming up in the room. Most importantly, take care of yourself and have fun, we do have breaks built in. We also have some ice stretch breaks so that you can look away from your screen to rest. But if at anytime you need to take care of yourself by a break or whatever, feel free to come off camera or just mute yourself and take care of your business. If there are any other agreements that you feel we have omitted or that you would like to add, kindly drop them into the chat and we will add them to subsequent sessions.
All right, so our agenda for today we are starting with our welcome and community agreements setting the context. Next, we're going to move into our exploration and discussion where our director, Ian will take us on a wonderful journey through the process of elevating narrative strategy. And then we'll go to our closing and next steps. So our objectives for today are to explore root causes and related assumptions underlying your narrative. We're also going to practice radical imagination and storytelling that goes beyond equity narratives.
All right, so I'm excited to dig into this with all of you. Hopefully, some of you might have attended some of our narrative strategy sessions in the past, we'll be building a little bit on that. But if you haven't, I'm gonna go over a little bit of the background. So we're speaking the same language, know the kind of tools that we're going to be using today. But the biggest tool that we're gonna be focused on is called the fourth box. And I want to know that the fourth box tool comes from the Center for story based strategy. This is a movement training organization that I've worked with for several years, and will include links to additional CSS trainings and resources at the end of the session, so that you can explore more of their work. First, I want to do a quick preview of some of the elements of story as broken down by the Center for story based strategy. So there's lots of information on the slide, but I just want to go through some of this language. So the way that we talk about narrative power of CSS is through these five elements of story, am I bring you back to your high school or college English classes. But we're thinking in stories about conflict, characters, imagery, foreshadowing, and then the one you might be less familiar with is underlying assumptions. So just to go through them real quick conflict, of course, is how we frame the problem, which often then sets the scope of what the solutions could be. We also think about how conflict is framed by thinking about what is deemed possible or politically realistic. With characters, the people that we choose to include in our story, and to highlight in our story, we're determining who matters who's impacted, who has agency. Another tool that we often use in CSS is called the Drama Triangle. This is the paradigm of a victim of villain, a hero, right? That's often used in western storytelling. And by positioning people in these roles, we're determining, again, all these things, who matters, who's impacted, who has agency who's responsible. And it's also thinking about who's legitimate, who are the accepted messengers or experts. So that's kind of how we think about characters functioning through the CSS model. Imagery, we at CSS really encourage people to show not tell as much as humanly possible. By doing that, it's respecting and validating specific experiences. We have the power of repetition and normalization through the census. So this is kind of the power of visibility right, including different people and perspectives and your story. Use will help. People who relate to that feel less alone will help people who maybe don't relate to that, learn to expand their horizons and build more empathy for the communities that we're advocating for. With foreshadowing, we think about what is inevitable, right? When we're thinking about what might come at the end of our story, or some danger, some threat or some possibility, we are using these positive and negative cues to cultivate either hope or fear. And so we want to make sure that we are doing that intentionally in our stories, and not defaulting to any, you know, fears that we might be trained to hold. But I want to spend a little bit more time on underlying assumptions, because this is the big one that we're going to use today. And this is prevailing values. These are the assumptions that are underlying the narrative. Basically, how I like to think of it is what you need to believe for the story to be true. So these are the things that are unspoken in the narrative, you can imagine, with, say, a lot of right wing talking points, we are often assuming a very conservative western values underneath a lot of these things. We are often, for example, operating from a place of scarcity, right scarcity would be an underlying assumption under capitalism, under white supremacy under most of the oppressive forces in the world, the idea that there's not enough. And what we like to do with underlying assumptions in the CSS framework is to call them out. So that we know that, you know, if we can question those underlying assumptions, the rest of the story often falls apart. And again, underlying assumptions determine what acceptable norms or values moral behaviors are deemed Okay, in our society. So we often use underlying assumptions to question our opponents narratives, to figure out what is lying underneath them, and then get at that. So we're not necessarily getting caught up in debates about statistics, we're actually getting underneath to the values. And then similarly, when we're building our stories, we want to make sure that the assumptions underlying our messages are things we actually believe in, versus again, kind of the default assumptions of our society that might not actually be in line with what we believe in our core. So that's, that's a lot to start this with. We'll get deeper into all these things. And we'll make it make sense in the framework. But I just want to start there and pause for a second to see if any folks have big questions, especially around the underlying assumptions, or if all that's making sense. So this is our first look away cue we try to do this every 20 minutes or so encourage folks to look 20 feet away from their screen for 20 seconds. So we'll start that now. All right. Let's get into the fourth box. So we're gonna start with this little video that kind of explains some of the basic concepts. You're probably you might have seen this framing before, comparing equality to equity. But this is going to be a helpful framework for us to start our discussion. It's important to distinguish between equality and equity. equality means everyone gets the same thing. Equity means each student gets what he or she needs to succeed. All right, so we can go to the next slide. And this is a framework for us to start thinking about these ideas. But basically, we're not talking about this idea itself. We are looking at the underlying assumption in the story, right? So in this case, we're talking about people hitting pina coladas, right. And getting boxes to be able to reach the pianos. So we want to think about in a very basic way, what are the underlying assumptions? I think one of the assumptions in this very simple story is that we want to hit the pin Jada's the pin Jada's are worth hitting right. Another assumption, we're not bringing the pin Jada's down, right. We're bringing people up to meet them. So that's again, a choice that has been made in the story and how it's being told. And it might not feel significant in this scenario, but we'll be applying it in ways that that make those choices. Very important and crucial in our storytelling. Is there anything else that folks can think of that you need to believe in order for this story to be true?
One other thing I would add is, you know, we're framing equity is everyone gets what they need to succeed. So in this little world, we have hitting up in yadda success, another choice. But now let's look at another video that's related and Frank's things pretty differently.
Think we need the audio on this one, it might not even have audio. But the framing here right in in relation to the piano is very different. And so I like this as a tool to kind of think about when we change our relationship to an object, how we treat the object often changes to. So when we're challenging these assumptions in our stories, again, hitting up in Yatta is a good thing. Success means that enough in yada, then our actions often change as well. And so again, in these examples, it's a little bit innocuous and silly. But in our actual stories, changing some of our most basic assumptions that we take for granted can be super powerful. And so story based strategy in this way, is really a practice that helps us assess and shift our audience's assumptions and relationships to the issue. So we're gonna get a little bit deeper. Now, you may also be familiar with this image here. Again, this is from the Center for story based strategy, this image went really viral back when it was first made. And again, it's another example of equality versus equity. So the story here, folks are trying to watch a game of baseball, they're all on a box of similar height, but all the people are different heights. And so the tallest person gets a great view, the middle person gets, you know, just a little bit over the fence, and then the shorter person still can't see the game at all. And so the vision of equity in the scenario would be the taller person not needing a box, and then the shorter person getting an extra box. But again, we have assumptions built in here. Right? So we're gonna play around with these a little bit. But one of the biggest assumptions that I see here is the fence. Right? Why does the fence need to be there? Who put the fence there? Why is it something again, we're trying to see over versus tear down? And then why are these people on even this side of the fence? Why aren't they in the crowd? Why don't they get a seat at the stadium? There's a lot of things that we can question about the story and then start to envision different ways to tell it. So what we did at CSS is we added another box. And I see a comment in the chat presupposes the person Oh, here, we can go back, we're getting a little head on the slides, I see a comment in the chat, that presupposes that the person constructing the box has been paid well, using sustainable practices. Right. If we're talking about equity, we also need to talk about how we get there. So we started off with this equality and equity framework. And then we added another box to the story. And this was taking down the fence. And we named this liberation, you can maybe argue with if this is actually liberation, given all the other nuances to this potential story. But again, it was challenging the central assumption that the fence needed to be there, and that there needed to be anything blocking these folks from observing the game. So this is one way to kind of challenge those underlying assumptions and get us to a different idea. And the idea really grew from here. So we can go to the next slide now. And this is where the fourth box itself came to be. Because the easiest part was to get the boxes, right. So give people boxes, so they could see the same level, slightly more complex part was to take down the fence. But then we started to think like, can we think even bigger than that? Can we challenge more underlying assumptions? Can we imagine different features that are a little bit more radical? And so that was the fourth box tool been born? It's a tool of radical imagination. And we think about how we can intervene to change the story in ways that aren't necessarily obvious to us. And so we put out this Traffic with the fourth box just being blank and saying your idea here and invited people to imagine with us what else we could look at. So we kind of crowd sourced ideas, and we got a few interesting ones in response, we can go to the next slide. them some of the ideas that we got, were this one inclusion, instead of watching the game, they get to participate in the game. Again, now, instead of challenging the assumption of the fence for challenging, who gets to be on the field, who gets to be included, then this the time that the fourth box was coming out was 2016. So you can imagine that conversations in our communities were starting to shift. And we got this submission that was less imagining a radical future and more realistically, assessing what's happening now, right, we don't actually have equality, we don't actually have equity, we certainly don't have liberation. And so what did the reality actually look like? And so for this one, you can see, reality showed that the people at the bottom are actually much, much lower. And the people at the top were several boxes up hoarding wealth hoarding resources, that they certainly don't need, while the people in the middle, we're still kind of there, maybe, but struggling. So then we started to think a little bit about the order of the boxes, you know, does it make sense for this one to come at the end, shouldn't maybe be positioned elsewhere. And we just started to play with this that the great thing about the fourth box tool is that there really are no rules, it's a framework to challenge our assumptions, and to play around with visions for the future. So we started playing with it. And we thought about box zero, what came before, right, if we're seeing this fence as this big underlying assumption, one underlying assumption is that the fence was always there, right? So we added box zero to this framework as a way to think about what was there before our current conditions. And then with the fourth boxes, what could come after? So we reordered using these examples. And go to the next slide. And we thought about this, chronologically, maybe we're starting from Box zero, this is our reality on the left. And then, you know, maybe we're advocating to get us over to the fourth box on the right. And I think, again, you can think of this as like, okay, we can either get at things piecemeal, we can go through equality, to equity to liberation, or we can start arguing for conclusion, inclusion from the beginning. But this framework still felt kind of incomplete. Because again, we're not thinking about why the fence was there in the first place. So our own assumptions started to shift. And we played around again, if we want to go to the next slide. And we thought that maybe this wasn't the right order. So if you want to click this slide, we wanted to challenge the idea that the fence was always there, and the fence needed to be there, that the fence itself was neutral. And also the idea that progress happens, you know, chronologically over time, that we're naturally bending the arc toward justice, right? In a lot of areas, there might have been something like liberation, or at least like the fence not been there. And then it was constructed after and so by moving that over, and really thinking about how these issues came to be. We we started thinking about things differently. So we really use this to think about the root cause of the issues that we're we're fighting against. We're questioning our assumptions about what equality and equity and liberation look like. And really, at the ultimate, the ultimate piece of the fourth box is challenging. What what is behind are equity centered narratives. I think the tool was really built at a time where equity was the buzzword of the moment. But again, even though it was an improvement on equality, it was still missing a lot of structural framing of these problems. And so that's why I love to use it as a tool. Now. I do feel like since 2016, when the fourth box came out, our movements have really become much more structurally analytical, right? We're looking at the root cause of our problems much more than we did before. And we're also starting to see the the interconnectedness between different issues, I think, in a way that we weren't doing 10 years ago. So That's kind of the basic introduction to the Ford Fox, we're gonna play around with it a little bit. I'm also going to talk you through it a little bit more before we get to our solo reflection time. But I want to pause there for a second to just see if there are any questions about what I've gone through. So far, anything that I can help clarify, because I know, we did this in about 15 minutes. And that's pretty quick for a lot of a lot of complex material.
All right, are folks feeling pretty good about the tool, I'll talk you through how we're going to actually use it in this session today. But see, I'm wondering if you can share an example, I'm actually going to do that next. So first, I want to introduce the exercise we're going to do, we're going to do some solo reflection and brainstorming time for about 20 minutes after this presentation. And then we're going to come together as a group and share what we started to think about any questions that came up and kind of think through the tool a little bit more together. But the prompts that I want to give you will stay on this slide for a little bit, I'm going to go through a few things. But the prompts that I want to give you to start thinking through are what is the fence in the issue that you're working on? So what is the main barrier that you are trying to break down? Which of these boxes, if any, represent the work that you're currently doing? Or the campaign that you're currently working on? And then the biggest question of the day is, what would the fourth box look like after the fence was removed? And what would you need to get there. And so that is the invitation into the radical imagination, it might not be UBI, the framing that you want to take to your supervisor or your board to get approved, but it's at your core, what is the value driven future that you are working toward, it might not be for another generation, or two or three. But what is the ultimate vision that you are trying to achieve? Because that's always where we want to ground our language in our campaigns and our stories is to build that hopeful future that we want to get to. So with this, with this tool, I'll give you a few examples. So it feels a little bit more concrete. Since I've worked with a lot of people on this tool, one example I will give you is a fellow that I was working with on a campaign was trying to move police funding to go to community resources. And so he identified the fence as the limitations of the city budget, right, there was only so much money, and some of it had to go to the police some of it had to go elsewhere. And in this case, the police were taking up I think, you know, more than 50% of the city budget. So that was the fence that he was looking to tear down. He identified box number two, equity as what the campaign had already achieved. They had been successful at reallocating 5% of the city budget away from police and into the community. But it still was kind of these piecemeal reforms right, he wanted to move toward liberation and maybe even beyond to the fourth box. Box three, he identified as his current campaign, which was to fully fund these community resources take a much bigger chunk out of the police budget. But then he identified the fourth box the vision that he ultimately was wanting to build to, as being defunding the police taxing the rich making it so that there were, you know, an abundance of resources in the city so that they weren't even having to have these budget fights every year that there was just plenty to go around. Another person I worked with, she was doing an environmental justice campaign in Newark, New Jersey. Specifically, the campaign she was working on at that moment was to take trash incinerators where they just burn this trash right out of the category of environmentally friendly waste disposal in New Jersey incinerators had been put in the category of I forget the exact wording but basically like sustainable green energy practices, right. And her goal is to simply get them taken out of that category, so that people who are funding incineration, at least can pat themselves on the back for it. So she identified her fence that she was fighting against as the entrenchment of incineration in New Jersey. incinerators had been in every county going back, you know, decades and then also the political influence that the incineration industry had over city council's and county but Words and things like that. She identified her current campaign as probably box one, you know, it was a reform. But it was even a more basic reform of just trying to get it out of this category versus actually taking on incineration, which might have looked more like equity in box number two. But ultimately, she knew that her campaign was really looking at building a world of zero waste, right? So this might have been box number three, where there was no incinerator influence there maybe weren't even any incinerators at all, because there wasn't any trash. That was her ultimate message. And that was a lot of the framing that she was trying to build into even her more moderate campaigns. But then when challenged to think about what a fourth box could look like, she thought, not just about zero waste, but that the communities that were in the incinerator neighborhoods that were at the frontline of environmental pollution, would be leading the way. So instead of everything could have been equal, there'll be no waste, the people that were harmed most the environmental justice communities would be at the front. And that was her vision for what a fourth box in a better future would look like. So that's kind of the exercise we're gonna be doing today, I'm going to invite you to spend about 2025 minutes reflecting by yourselves on your campaigns, answering these questions about the fence that have the issue that you're working on the box here that represents where you're at in your campaign, or the current thing that you're working on. And then think beyond even maybe a, you know, future that you've envisioned already, and really try to go even further, what's not just the fence not being there. But what's even more radical than that? What kind of future could that look like? And the way that we'll use that, when we come back together, is, you know, talking about how we can build that radical future into our messaging. Now, even again, if it's not the thing that is the current priority, the current campaign that we're working on, how do we lead with those values and paint that vision in the future for the people that we're trying to bring into our work? So any questions about that prompt, or any of those examples I can help with? Where we get to some solo time?
All right,
well, then I say, Let's go until the top of the hour, you can come back at two o'clock here on the East Coast, 11am on the West Coast. And just right. Before we do that, we'll go to the next slide. And we'll do another 2020 20 Look away. And then you'll have 20 minutes to brainstorm all right. And before we fully dive in, I want to talk about a question I got in the chat at the beginning of the exercise, I think might be helpful to other folks. Stacy, feel free to chime in if you'd like. But Stacy was telling me about the campaign that they're working on. Where the fence is essentially, you know, the California Legislative system and regulatory system. So these big things that their campaign isn't necessarily trying to dismantle or radically change. But it's still this big block to a lot of the work. And Stacy was saying that they're having a lot of trouble just kind of prompting supporters to continue calling and things like that when it feels like the the roadblocks are so much bigger than what they're necessarily tackling in this campaign. And so the the advice I gave, I imagine a lot of folks are thinking of that of like, yes, it's great to imagine this radical future. But that's not what I'm able to work on right now. Or even necessarily what my organization has the power to do. And so what I shared with them was, I think this framing can help. Think about ways to bring your supporters into other spaces of imagination, like maybe you still need them to call the representatives. Probably all of us need folks to be doing that kind of fundamental work that isn't always inspiring. But I think the fourth box can be a good tool, not only for us to think about how we want to engage with our supporters, but also ways to engage them. We can help we can use the fourth box tool with our supporters, right, we can invite them to envision this better future with us. And instead of always asking them to call the representatives or to donate money or any other ways that we might typically engage with our folks. We can also set up community gatherings, events, discussions Kreative actions are stunts together, that might not get us the immediate term win, but will help inspire people urge them to think about the future that we want to build together and really, I think, feel more invested in our campaigns in the long term. And in general, the Center for storing based strategy uses these radical imagination tools, so that we aren't always just thinking about what is the next immediate step toward reform. But what is this larger thing that we are building toward? And how can we dream a little bit bigger, which I think that actually does often inspire near term actions. One thing we had hoped to get into today, but just didn't have enough time for multiple tools was a points of intervention tool that CSS has, which is really thinking about creative actions that go outside of the box to get our messages across. And I think that that is kind of what I'm getting at here. If we're reframing our narrative using a fourth box, then that can kind of inspire us to do things that are a little bit outside of our normal wheelhouse, that can both shift the story in the public consciousness as well as among our organization and our supporters. So I hope that that helps clarify a little bit for people but I want to just open it up and see what people took away. From this time, anything you struggled with any conclusions you came to, if you want to share what your fences what your fourth boxes. Yeah, anything you found either useful or hard about this tool.
And you can feel free to come off mute if you'd like or pop something in the chat.
I would say for me when it came to the fourth, the third and fourth box is that it's important to take into consideration like, based on like the person's position in the organization, like what does that look like for them? Because it could look different for me as the communications coordinator in comparison to, for example, like our garden educators who are actually teaching the students and interacting with the students. So liberation or equity could look different for them in comparison to me, and also that it's, I think it's cool to know that it can evolve. So, you know, for example, like our organization was founded by a white person, who, you know, has this goal to encourage students from low income communities, like students of color to eat healthier, and have this like healthier lifestyle. But then as time progresses, and we have different folks taking these roles, that could look different. So for example, like one of our garden, educators found it more important to not only teach the students how to eat healthy, but to cheat, like to have vegetables that represent their culture. And that was something that wasn't really thought about before. So I think it's kind of like cool to know that equity and liberation can evolve in different ways. It could look, it could look differently as time progresses.
Yeah, yeah, you're totally spot on. I think that's what I find most useful about. The fourth box is when we opened it up to people in our community, all these different ideas came in. And it really was, you know, all these different perspectives that we wouldn't necessarily have conservative because people are bringing their own assumptions and their own visions and their own life experiences into it. So I think everyone's fourth box can be different. And then we can kind of come back and compare and think through the ways that they challenge similar assumptions or different ones. And it's a really iterative process that doesn't, you know, have any right answer for anyone. Go ahead, Cindy.
Thank you, Ian, I appreciate it. Can I run my situation by you real quick, and just get your feedback, like how you know, all right, so I'm in historic preservation. So in the future that we see preservation works for everyone. Right? So historic place is older, not just historic, but older. Existing places are just part of everyday life. And they're keeping them around as the default. Right. There's so many parts to this that are you know, I tried to pick really get really specific so my goal was the easier designation of non architectural places. So vernacular places that were you know that disinvested communities don't have architectural gyms, right. So the place is the corner store the school also churches to places that, that they consider important, make it easier to designate those places so that they get access to financial incentives like tax credits and building codes and things like that, right? The existing process is a huge hurdle. Like the time the skills, the expense in preparing the nomination, the designation of criteria are based on architecture and focus on physical integrity, like what does it look like? Has it been changed? Well, then it can't, you know, and then this white supremacist reliance on the written word, so like oral histories aren't considered very, like real, like whatever valid. So the current box is clearly maybe like one half, it's not even to the one yet. But there is the same process for everyone, no matter who you are. A lot of cities around the country have or are working toward box to what they they have more flexible standards for other types of resources, places. And then the underlying assumptions were we need the same standards everywhere the criteria correctly assess significance. And the commissioners are the experts. So there's this, you know, group of usually white people who make the decisions, right, or recommendations to the city council. So the fourth box when the fence has gone, the communities in the Commission are flipped. The communities have worked together to come up with a new process of and criteria for recognizing different places, different types of places in different ways. They decide what to recognize and how. And then the commissioners exist solely to give communities what they need, as defined communities. They're there to serve. The communities are up here, they're there. They're here to serve with their expertise. They're not there to decide. Yeah. So feedback. Yeah,
no, I think that's exactly what we're getting at here. Yeah, I think I mean, first of all, just you talked us through the problem really well, as someone who was, has never really studied preservation on a community level. So I think that's great. But no, I think your assumptions were very correct. And I think that your vision for what you're building is exactly challenging those assumptions. You know, I also think it's a scenario where I'm sure, people coming from different perspectives could come up with different ways that that could look like but that one definitely makes a lot of sense to me. And I think often, when we're thinking about power structures, how they exist. Now, how we get to the fourth box is often turning them exactly on their head, you know. And I think that's where, you know, both equality and equity can fall short, because it's trying to put everyone on a level playing field, not actually understanding the reality, right, where someone is already in the ground, and someone is up here. So yeah, I think that's great. Great.
Now what, like I'm doing messaging for local governments like right now. Right? Yeah. Some of whom are perfectly happy where they are some of whom are already working to the box for so then how does that translate into messaging? I mean, not specifically, but like, yeah, word that I can use, like this afternoon.
Right? Yeah, yeah. And I think that that's kind of what Stacey was getting at, as well as like, okay, I can see the vision that might exist. But we're not our organization is on a practical level, not to be able to get us there. And so how do we use this? And I think there are a lot of different ways, I think one is making sure, you know, since we've identified the underlying assumptions that we specifically want to challenge, we want to look at our current messaging and make sure that we're not actually reinforcing that lesson a particular way, you know, because for the short term, when it might be good to, you know, talk to the commission, and kind of, you know, praise them for their authority. But then if you're thinking long term, actually, that's not really how we want the commission to think about themselves how we want to think about the commission, you can evaluate your messaging to kind of take out those underlying assumptions. And again, even if you're not currently running a campaign to tear down the commission, and have the communities lead the way, I think we can use language that naturally leads us there and talks about, you know, how the community should be the ultimate decider. Even if we're not actually saying right now, we're supporting a referendum that would completely change the system, you know. But yeah, and then I think the other way that it can come out, which I think is a lot of fun is, you know, thinking through community events that you can hold that, again, might not be actually changing the game, but maybe it would be inviting communities like, Okay, if it were up to you, which of these places would be you know, even if they don't meet the criteria right now, which of these places would be the historical things and you can even try out different ways of having that, you know, like, you can have a community vote, you can have presentations, you can have like a silent ballot kind of situation and try different ways that you can iterate and then eventually bring that to the commission as a model, right? So there's a lot of different ways that tools can be used.
Great. Thank you so much. And sorry about the typing. Sorry, that was wild.
All right. Any other questions or thoughts or any ideas that you came up with the you want to share?
I know we got at least one or two more.
And again, feel free to share your struggles. If it was difficult. It wasn't also a lot of time, honestly, when I usually work through this tool, we spend hours on it. So this was both like, you know, sending you to the deep end, especially if you're not familiar with CSS tools at all. Or if you didn't attend previous narrative roundtables, and also like, one of our most complex tools, so we usually wait till the very end. So don't feel nervous at all if if you have any questions or have having trouble with it.
Yeah, Maya.
So I was thinking about a lot of our work that I'm doing right now. And this is like a new position for me. So I'm still trying to even understand the problems that we're working on. But I'm working at a nonprofit, and we're focused on like remedying harms committed by the World Bank. But a lot of that involves like working with the World Bank to try and get their money to remedy the harms. And I just the World Bank is like an inherently like colonial institution, there's not really any way to get around that. And so I guess, a challenge I was running into and thinking about these questions, were as much as I am passionate about the work that I'm doing. When you're up against like, such a major global, like imperialist institution, it doesn't really leave like, it's kind of hard to imagine, like what it would be like to not even have that there when it is so, so incredibly powerful. But I don't know. So I guess like, many, many, many generations down the line, I would hope that, you know, we aren't relying on like a singular flow of money from the global north to the global South, and that people in those countries can decide what type of development they need, rather than having like this major institution, where countries in the Global North have like so much just proportionate power and deciding like, what needs to happen in the world. So it was interesting and hopeful. I think I definitely, probably equity focused right now. And I hope one day I can better imagine what liberation looks like. But it's really tough when going up against something like that.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, most of the things that many of us are taking on ultimately are huge and entrenched and rooted in the worst forces in the world. But I think that's, again, the fun of the tools that even if your organization might not be able to be really public about this kind of messaging, it helps us remember, okay, why am I meeting the world today, because this is my ultimate vision. And I think similarly, if especially if you're organizing folks around this, that vision is going to be much more motivated than the kind of like, piecemeal bureaucratic stuff that we know might be necessary to build vision. But, you know, we want to sell them on the future that we want to build. Valentina.
Hi, Valentina, she her I do work in an environmental justice. And my UN's kind of inspired me to speak because, you know, I've done Activism Against the World Bank and all these things, but right now, I'm doing a lot of work in just transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. And so to me, sort of the like boxes. At first, I was thinking the fourth box is the just transition, but then I was like, No, a transition is in and of itself, the movement through those things, right. So then what is the fourth box? It's not the transition itself. It's, it's this beautiful world that we all will be able to live in where, you know, some people aren't suffering the consequences, currently of, you know, climate chaos and things that we're all going to face eventually if we don't change our ways. But But yeah, so I was just thinking about like the movement transition and these kinds of things. And so the world that we imagine is a void a world void. have, in the end, it is capitalism. And I'm thinking about the World Bank. And it's sort of like is that like the ultimate goal there too. Because, you know, the World Bank comes and goes, but what what, you know, I imagine, like what it represents, like that void would be filled, right? So if it's not the World Bank, or the IMF or whoever, like that void would be filled, because of the systems and the structures that we create, which were you were talking about Maya? So I don't know really where I'm going with that. But I think, you know, it is I feel very inspired for some reason, because I do like processes. And, and, and sometimes thinking about the ultimate goal is like, so difficult, because it's like, well, you know, that's like, very unrealistic, but, but it's sort of like a beacon, you know, to look towards, and then everything else is a transition to get there.
Yeah, and one reason I love to use this tool with folks in the nonprofit campaign space is because I think, you know, so many of us probably got into this work through the fourth box through this vision that we could see of a better world. And then I think often this work makes us go back to box one or box two, maybe box three, if we're working on like a really radical organization. But we're kind of losing that initial inspiration and vision that we had maybe as younger people. And I think it's important, but to keep ourselves going to remember that this is the ultimate goal that we're going toward, and also maybe, you know, maybe we don't have to go through box one, or you can get at least skipped a box two, if not box three. But also, since we know and communications work, we're trying to message to the public who, for the most part, either isn't really engaged in these issues at all, or, you know, might be more idealistic that people that give money to us and stuff, it will be hard to talk them down from Box four to box one or box two. And so by making sure that we are thinking through the ultimate future that we want to build, even if that's leading us to ultimately say, and this is why you should call your representative to do this really small reform, see, steeping ourselves in that language. And that vision can be really helpful and keep both us grounded, and bring our audience into the fight in a more dedicated way. So I hope this is helpful as an intro. Like I said, you know, this is all centered for story based strategy tools, they have a ton of tools available on their website. We'll also include a slide that hugs to some of those resources. Of course, we invite you to do more trainings with us or with CSS or do more communications partnership with us to go deeper into these tools. But I hope that today was going to be useful, dipping your toe into this framework. And I'll hand it off to see it to wrap us up in the next two minutes.
Awesome. All right. Thank you so much. And I hope you all found this to be insightful and helpful. I'm so grateful for your contributions during this time. We have our online resources, the fourth box dei and story based strategy online workshop. So please, and it's available in Spanish and in English.
Did you know that we offer coaching so we at rooted are really excited our ED pillar does work with nonprofits and other sectors as far as leadership, professional development and communications, capacity building support, and we offer it for individuals and organizations. So if you are interested or even just want to chat about what could be definitely feel free to drop me a line sia@routed.com We look forward to hearing from you. And it's also in the chat. All right, our next roundtable happening in May is making sense of website analytics, identifying your metrics, and that will be led by roots own Andrew Goldsworthy and Bob Gourley. So if you are able, feel free to sign up for that, because it's going to be great. I believe there's something major happening with Google in the June and July timeframe. So this is quite timely, make sure that you sign up for that. So we have our survey, feel free to you can click on it in the slide deck, or I believe there's a link in the chat. But we really value your feedback as we continue to provide these sessions for the community. So take your time, we also will be sending it out in our post event email. But if you have a couple of minutes right now, we would love to get your sentiments and just hear from you. We appreciate you and hope to see you again soon. We have our list of events on our website, so please feel free to check it out. We actually have our anniversary celebration coming up on May 11. So if you're in the Oakland area, we would love to meet you it's in person at needles back Dr Jack London Square
thanks everybody really appreciate having you today and thanks for taking on such a challenging tool I hope it was helpful
