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[roundtable] Elevate Your Narrative Strategy 10.23.24 | Otter.ai

[roundtable] Elevate Your Narrative Strategy 10.23.24

Valerie Neumark45min

Valerie Neumark

00:02

All right, so here we go. Welcome everyone to elevate your narrative strategy. We're really excited to be with you today, and I'm so pleased to have Ian here sharing their information and expertise with us. So if you're not familiar with rooted, we'll just do a little bit about rooted first, and then we'll hand it over. So here is a little bit about our mission. We're focused on connecting people and creating communication tools and community experiences for social change. What that really means to us is having places and spaces that are, you know, really centered in our values and helping us be ever more interconnected with one another. We this first line I just like to always read we believe to be good ancestors. We must recognize and honor our interdependence and CO design practices that are anti racist, that is first and foremost at the sort of heart and soul of what rooted is hoping to be a part of in this world together. So we're just very glad you all are here to share in that with us today. I won't read through all of our values, but just as a highlight, anti racism, equitable access to opportunities and resources, partnership through listening and building trust, community led breakthroughs, fearless curiosity, health and healing. So we'll pause for a second and do some introductions. So if you can put into the chat your name, department, role and pronouns, where you're coming from, and if you don't know your land acknowledgement, I'll put the link into the chat for you and then share a story or fairy tale you connected with from your childhood. It can be super brief. And then, if anyone is having accessibility needs and doesn't have access to the chat, please do let us know. Turn on your mic and share aloud. Or if there are any other accessibility needs that you need us to be aware of so that we can accommodate those. So there is the information in the chat, and then Ian and I will do our intros as you're sharing yours.

Ian Madrigal

02:34

Great. Well, I'll introduce myself. My name is Ian madrigal, pronouns are they or he? I'm a communication strategist and facilitator with rooted I also am a practitioner trainer with the Center for story based strategy. The tools we're going to use today do come from the Center for story based strategy. We'll have resources and things at the end for you to learn further if you're interested in that model. And yeah, excited to be here.

Valerie Neumark

03:03

Thank you. My name is Val Neumark. My pronouns are she they. I'm the Director of Strategy here at rooted. I'm also one of the co founders, and I reside on chichenyo alone, a land also known as El Cerrito in the San Francisco East Bay, and I'm just here going to run the background slides. But a little bit more about our full team. We have people all over the country, so you can usually find a rooted person near you or relatively near you, but we're small, a small team. And yeah, just excited to do this work with you today. So before we keep going, we like to always take a pause for our community agreements. It's really important to us to create a space of belonging for everyone who attends our sessions and just you know, anyone who's participating in any meeting that we're doing, it also just helps us take a moment to center ourselves in the space together. So one approach with curiosity, be open to new ways of doing and thinking. Sit with discomfort, expect and accept non closure, engage and be present. Practice mindful listening and please raise your virtual hand to share your thoughts. Try not to multitask it when you're in this meeting with us all together. But if you have something you need to take care of, if you need to have a bio break, or, you know, whatever you need, just take care of yourself and have fun, which is number nine. So, you know, do your best to stay present. But we understand there's lots of things that are going on around us. Be aware of power dynamics. Consider the space you consume and share space. Speak from your experience. Assume best intent and acknowledge the impact of your words on others. Accept restraints as presented. Idea. Yes and share ideas freely and openly, embrace being messy and put aside perfectionism, especially in this space. This is a time where we can sort of let go of some of those restraints and perfectionism that we hold into onto ourselves. This is a place you can really let those things go, and be able to share with your colleagues and and show up really as yourself, what's shared here stays here, what's learned here leaves here. Be willing to slow down, notice and name what is coming up in the room. That's an especially important one. In this kind of work, there'll be times of discomfort, and just notice them and and allow them to be. And then last thing, anything else that anyone would like to share.

Ian Madrigal

05:51

Well, first of all, I realized I forgot to say anything about where I am. I'm on unceded Piscataway territory in Baltimore, Maryland, for all of my East Coast folks. Though I'm originally from California, and I wish I could afford to be back there with you all. I also just wanted to call out some of the stories that I'm seeing pop up in the chat. I'm the Wizard of Oz, literal stories about fairies from an English grandmother. A lot of magical kind of themes, Hansel and Gretel, someone who kind of regrets connecting with Harry Potter. More, Wizard of Oz, Rumpelstiltskin, Charlotte's Web, some really good ones in here to kind of get our juices flowing for an activity we're going to be doing toward the end. So today's agenda, we just went through the welcome context and community agreements. First, we're going to do kind of 15 minutes of presentation digging into some of these tools that we're going to talk about today, including the elements of story and the Drama Triangle. We'll have about 30 minutes of small group work and discussion. Then we'll have 15 minutes using another tool called fairy tales. We'll have some time there to kind of reflect on our own about how we might use this in our work. And then we'll have 10 minutes of a full group, sharing discussion and then closing the next steps. So hopefully it'll be nice and tight and engaging for everyone. But you know, feel free also pop up in the chat, come off mute and say anything if you need me to slow down, if you have any questions, we'll also hopefully leave some time for discussion and questions after I go through each section. So the objectives today, if we want to go to the next slide, we want to explore characters and power dynamics underlying your narratives. We want to practice radical imagination and storytelling for your long, long term vision. We'll get into what that means a little bit further, but the first thing I want to do is review the elements of story. This is something that we dig into pretty deeply at the Center for story based strategy. But I think a lot of us will be familiar generally with what it is, and we can go on to the next slide, so or sorry, the slide after that. So the elements of story you might remember this from high school English, we're thinking about conflict characters, imagery and foreshadowing. And then this last one is something that's more, you know, CSS concept called underlying assumptions. We look on the next slide, I'll go a little bit deeper into what each of these is but just kind of doing a general overview here. Conflict, of course, frames the problem, which often sets the scope of solutions. We think of it as what is deemed possible, or politically realistic. Characters in our stories tend to determine who matters, who's impacted, who has agency in the story. We also think about it determining who is legitimate, the accepted messengers or experts. Imagery, of course, we think about it as Show, don't tell. We want to use words and descriptions that will create imagery in people's minds that tends to have a longer impact than our words themselves. So this can reflect and validate specific experiences. This might be something like visibility of groups that are historically invisible eyes or marginalized. And we also think of imagery as the power of repetition and normalization through the senses. Foreshadowing. Of course, is kind of suggesting what might come after our story. It determines what is inevitable, and it can be used positively or negatively to cultivate hope or fear. Generally, we are trying to cultivate. Hope and generally, our opposition, or mainstream story is cultivating fear. And then lastly, the underlying assumptions are basically, what do we need people to believe in order to believe that the rest of your story is true? So if we think about it, you know, what context does someone need to have to understand your story? What things, what assumptions Did they already need to agree with? So, you know, you can think a lot about maybe, what happens at a Trump rally. There are a lot of underlying assumptions that Trump is using there that most of us in this group, I imagine, would not believe, and so therefore the rest of his story won't make sense to us. But similarly, we can imagine that folks who do go to Trump rallies might look at our stories and just not be able to connect with them, because we're talking to our own groups, our own audiences, and not necessarily thinking about what assumptions they come in with, so not saying that you have to communicate directly to any of these groups. That's part of our audience targeting. We communicate with who we decide to but if you are trying to communicate to the mainstream, or if you are ever targeting your opposition, underlying assumptions is a really good thing to think through to make sure that the rest of your story will connect. So that's just something to keep in the background. We're going to be talking about stories a lot today, so I just want you to think about how stories are made and what are important elements. But the tool that we're going to dig into right now is called the Drama Triangle. Some of you may also be a little bit familiar with what this is. You know, there's also a psychological concept of triangulation that's not unrelated here, but the Drama Triangle we go to the next slide. It's essentially how characters in the story are cast or shown. So this is based on Western storytelling structure. These are archetypes that tend to be embedded in most of our stories. It's a way to understand power relationship and framing. It's not necessarily what we believe to be true and not necessarily the model that we want to use, but I think it's an important tool to look at the stories that exist in our culture already. So the traditional three sides of the Drama Triangle are heroes, victims and villains. The hero is typically the one who takes action that aligns with our values or the values of the storyteller. The victim, generally is who is being impacted or who is being targeted by the villain, and the villain is the person who's responsible for that impact. So you can imagine how a lot of stories would fit pretty neatly into this. Some of them might have more difficulty fitting into this. A lot of times, what we tend to do in movement culture, nonprofit culture, is to maybe not name a specific villain and instead talk about more of an abstract concept. So that's part of what we want to do in this exercise, is get a little bit more concrete and think about how we want to structure our Drama Triangle, and how we might also want to invert it and play with it to come to an outcome that more reflects our values. So playing with the Drama Triangle can help us practice framing and reframe the story. So I'm going to go through a little example of the Drama Triangle. I'm going to assume that most folks here are somewhat familiar with the Lion King. This is the image from the movie poster. You can see even how the characters are drawn here. You can kind of put the Drama Triangle over and get an idea of who they are. So here, I would say generally, The Lion King himself is considered to be the hero of the story. The Female lions and the children of the lions are tend to be the victims here, and then scarring and the hyenas are seen as the villains. But what if I told you that the story Disney told us isn't the full story? What if, instead of the story that we've all seen in the film, what if there's a story about how a lion named Mufasa from a very young age demonstrated feminine behavior. He sat with the female lions and groomed and made crafts. He started to feel like maybe he wasn't male or female. His father, who was the king at the time, was disappointed this was supposed to be his successor, the king, but he was not manly. He didn't portray the ideals of leadership that his father had, so they had a fight. One day, his father scratched him, left a scar across his face, and said, I take your name. He took his first born son's name, Mufasa, and gave it to his second born this. Sia, now known as ska was disowned by their family. He left Pride Rock and joined the hyenas. From living with the hyenas, he learned that just two generations ago, Pride Rock was hyena territory. Skaar was accepted by this community and understood the ways in which the hyenas had grown to care for Pride Rock in more sustainable and just ways. And so scar pledged his commitment to return stewardship of pride, rock to to the hyenas. From that story, right? We would flip this Drama Triangle, and Skaar would be the hero s and the hyenas,

Ian Madrigal

15:38

mu FASA, and eventually the Lion King himself would be the villains and or sorry, and then height hyenas would be the victims here. And I did mention the hyenas could also be the heroes, and that's another concept we'll get into in a little bit. The heroes and the victims can be overlapping groups, and sometimes for us, I think that can lend to a much more empowering story, rather than someone coming in as an outside savior, right? So if we go to the next slide, you can see the the different angles here from the two different stories, Disney story, and then our new story. And you can see how in shifting a character's place, you'll also shift their power relationships and the story that's being told. This, obviously, is just one example. Can be further complicated. Might be fun to think through, maybe how the stories and fairy tales you grew up with could be shifted in that same way, and over the course of your work in telling stories, we can be strategic with this and think about how we want to frame it. And especially, what I tend to recommend is thinking about where is your audience in this story? We usually want them to be somewhere in the Drama Triangle, so you're incorporating them and showing them that they matter in the stories we tell. Often, we're going to position our audience as the victims, the people that are being hurt in this scenario. But again, there's a lot of power if we can bring those that are being hurt and targeted also into the hero role, they can play a clear role in their own saving. You know, that's how we can empower our folks to get more involved in our organizing and resistance. So let's look at another example, more real world example. If we think about police brutality, Black Lives Matter movement, we can think about the status quo narrative around policing, right? Police are seen as the heroes, children, community, law abiding people are seen as the victims, and then villains might be gangs, criminals, and you know, without saying it, often black people seen here as the villains. If we challenge that narrative, what a different Drama Triangle might look like is the heroes are the Black Lives Matter activists, the victims are the children community and black people and the villains here are the police. By framing Black Lives Matter, activists as our heroes, we can also invite the folks that are in the victim group to join our activists and make a difference for themselves. So again, Drama Triangle is a bit of a problematic concept. You know, we don't necessarily always want to think about heroes, villains and victims in that such a clear cut way. We might also want to, you know, complicate who the villains are, even if they are someone that we are currently opposed to. Is there a potential of bringing them, also giving them a path to becoming a hero instead of being the villain, right? So ultimately, this might be a kind of trope that we want to bring want to break down, but because it is so prevalent in our culture, it's really important to think about how we frame our stories around it. So again, you know, these are kind of the underlying assumptions that people can connect to and make sense of our story. So that is kind of the broad overview. I want you to get a chance to play with this a little bit. So we're going to break into small groups and discuss the trauma Drama Triangle. Oh, sorry, I forgot I had this animation here. Oh, also, take a second to look away, to spare our eyes, and then I'll get into the small group project. So if you want to look away 20 feet, we do this every 20 minutes. For about 20 seconds, all right, we'll do that throughout. Just give our eyes a little bit of a break, since we're all at our computers all day. Okay, so while we're doing this exercise, I want you to keep in mind the elements of story. You can come back to the slide if you need to reference it. Think about, you know, making your narrative more like maybe a traditional story than we might do in our professional work. On the next slide, I have more kind of direction for this activity. We're going to break you into groups of three who's going to be self facilitated. We'll give you about 20 minutes. And I want each person in the group, you can maybe give each other, you know, six minutes at a time for each person. But I want you to think about, what is the Drama Triangle that currently exists in either the mainstream or your opposition's narrative? So who are the heroes, the villains, the victims? And then think a little bit about, what should your Drama Triangle look like? What would you like it to look like? Do you want to use the same characters? Are there characters that are being ignored or left out from the mainstream narrative? Do you want to shift their roles? Do you even want to have all of these different characters in there? And again, one of the big things that I see often is a missing villain or an abstract villain. You know might be, for example, in the policing, it might be the villain is mass incarceration. But okay, who in in your activist space can actually take action on that, right? So maybe it's a specific council person, maybe it's a specific representative. We want to make sure our villains are people or clear kind of characters in themselves, because that tends to be more compelling. So think about those things. And yeah, I would say about six minutes a person. You can talk about it as a group and kind of brainstorm together and get a rough idea of where you might want to go.

Valerie Neumark

21:22

Welcome back everyone. Just before we do our share out, let's do a quick look away, since we've been looking at our screens again for a bit, anything that could be close to 20 feet away, if you have a window that's even better, do a little stretch in whatever way feels comfortable and accessible to you.

Ian Madrigal

21:48

All right, back to you. Ian, all right, let's have a little share out and discussion. First, I guess I want to see if anyone has any questions that came up or any big challenges that I can kind of help answer. So, yeah, what, what came up in those groups? How did using the Drama Triangle feel?

Speaker 1

22:13

I'll share one question that we have is, what to do when each of the roles on the triangle maybe isn't so clear. So who you're thinking might be the hero. There are others that would say, No, we're for the thing, or who you're calling the victim. It's like, we're for the thing and the hero say, anyway, you know what I'm saying? What

Ian Madrigal

22:34

if? What if it's not clear cut? And some, some folks might say we're not victims here. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's part of the importance of bringing people that are in the victims group into the heroes group, giving them a path in your story to get there, you know. And it can be simple as like, Yes, you are a group that's being targeted in what we're talking about. And you can change this reality by joining our campaign, or whatever it might be, I think it's often really good if there's overlap in the villain or in the victims and heroes section, if other categories are a little unclear, I think it's good to make them clear. Like I said, I think having a clear villain, whether it's like one specific person or, you know, a group of people is a lot better than having a villain that's like a concept or something more abstract. But I think if you're not sure who's your hero and who's your victim, that can be very powerful. Yeah, I see a hand with Ariel.

Speaker 2

23:38

Yeah, I think it is. There's sort of two sides of it. For me. On the one hand, is really helpful for mapping out how to message an issue. And I think like being able to explicit, explicitly name villains, explicitly name who they're harming and how they're doing it and what their motivations are, you know, are all parts of telling a compelling, convincing narrative that moves people towards justice. And on the other hand, and I think you were sort of alluding to this earlier, it creates sort of a flattening of the narrative, right? Like these things are not always clear cut. Yes, there are people who are obviously villains, and there are, you know, groups of people we were talking about, like medical providers in our group, who are often put in the position where they think they have to turn people in for getting an abortion, are those people villains, or are they also, in some ways, victims, because they are being criminalized by a system that made abortions illegal, like that. They didn't create that system, and they're not necessarily agreeing with that system either, and so I think that's both important to be able to map it out and necessary to deepen our understanding of what does this actually mean when we're trying to message this to our communities? Yeah,

Ian Madrigal

24:55

I think you're totally right. But also in your example that you gave, I think. Shows the power of naming a specific villain. Because I wouldn't name the doctors as the villains in the scenario, right? I think you're right to think about them as the victims. And depending on, you know, who your audience is, if you're, say, an organization that organizes doctors, you could also give them a chance to become the hero by, you know, following whatever you're suggesting that they do. But I think in stories like that, obviously there are generally minor villains who have to kind of carry out, you know, the will of the government or the media, whatever group might be on the opposition here. But I wouldn't focus on the smaller villains. I would think about who is really in control here, right? Like, that's the whole idea who can pull the strings, and it might be someone who's not at all in the mainstream narrative, right? Might be like a Focus on the Family type group behind the scenes that most people don't know about. You have to think about, who do you want to be your villain? And I think you're totally right. Like, you don't generally want the everyday people or the conflicted people to be your villain, and I think also if you are, you know, aiming at doctors, there's empowerment in making them heroes. There's also empowerment at naming them as victims. Because I imagine a lot of people don't necessarily see them that way and are seeing them as the villain. So I totally agree that it, you know, it's a tricky tool. We're actually thinking about overhauling it at CSS. But I think you know, making sure you know which character you want to go and generally which box can really be powerful in how you frame it. So great. Any other questions?

Ian Madrigal

26:40

Nadia,

Speaker 3

26:44

hi everyone. Yeah, just thinking about what everyone's sort of grappling with and mulling over is that we, on the left, we can kind of see the nuances, and we see the flow of how people can move through the roles and what we want want our characters to be, what roles we want them to be. And then knowing that the powers that be, the media, the dominant narratives, are casting us in these roles, right? So they're much more black and white. So, you know, like the example you said earlier. Ian, you know, they will put us in those roles. And so if we just have that strategy in mind of, how do we counter create those counter narratives for those roles, and that we actually see the nuances, we see the gray, or is we see that the folks have multiple and complex experiences to contribute to this narrative.

Ian Madrigal

27:47

Yeah, thanks. Yeah. By the way, Nadia has a big, long and deep history with the Center for story based strategy as well. So thanks for contributing that. Yeah, I think usually, you know, the traditional, more leftist way of viewing things is challenging the narrative of anything that's like people versus people, right? Where we're not really thinking about fighting our neighbors, even if they are harming us. We want to think about what is pushing those people to cause us harm, right? What are the bigger power dynamics at play? And I think that's really where the power comes in, because often those characters are left out right, like the right wing billionaires who are funding everything might not actually be talked about in our story. So how can we bring those folks in and think about a villain that's going to be really activating for everyone? I'm best known for doing stunts where I dress up as the monopoly man and embarrass CEOs in front of Congress, right? And what's interesting is my aunt, who's a hardcore Glenn Beck, you know, super conservative person, loves monopoly man, because she also sees, like, big banks and finance as her enemy, right? It's like, what are the villains that we can name that will actually unite, even potentially, our opposition with us. Think that's part of the power of the Drama Triangle, too. I think we have time for one more if anyone wants to share something they learned or found interesting or had found challenging in the exercise.

Speaker 4

29:22

Yeah. Hi, thank you for this exercise. Is new to me, and, um, great group. Got a lot of help in there. So I have a question about kind of, can maybe word is like the personification aspect, because, uh, I thought I heard you say before we went into the broke breakout, to like it should be a a person, um, it sounds like we also could be a system.

Ian Madrigal

29:55

Yeah, it could be, yeah, we try to make it as concrete as possible. To make for a more compelling story, you know? So for instance, with the example where I'm dressing up as monopoly man and kind of acting like the villain, right? Like I'm kind of embodying capitalism, and you could name like a specific big bank, you could name a specific CEO or a member of Congress, that could be your villain. But I think there's also power in thinking, okay, how can we turn this abstract concept into a character in our story? So monopoly man might be one way of doing that, or naming more specific folks in those kind of groups that I mentioned. But yeah, I think usually if you can actually make your villain or any other character like actual people, it can resonate a little bit more. I think sometimes we get too caught up in the nuance and the abstract concepts, it can kind of lose people. Thank you. Cool. Oh yeah. Jeff Bezos, that's a great one too. I love working with all the billionaires, alright, so I want to move us into our next activity. Since we only have about a half hour left, this one I've previewed a little bit. It's called fairy tales. It's a pretty quick one, and I hope, pretty easy to understand. So obviously, we're all kind of familiar with fairy tales growing up, and they tend to be structured, you know, starting with once upon a time, ending with and they lived, and they all lived happily ever after, right? So we're going to think about applying that kind of storytelling concept to the stories we tell in our work. So if we go to the next slide, all right, Sia, if we go to the next slide, this activity is pretty straightforward. We want to start off a story with once upon a time, end it within the all of happily ever after, and in between, we're going to try to just do four sentences that get us from the beginning of our story to the end. And the real important part of this is we're not thinking about, you know, telling a fairy tale about one specific campaign. We're working on how we kind of get to a victory, right? This is more of our long, long term vision that I was talking about earlier. We want to think about the future that you hope to create once you've accomplished your major victory. We want to think about the new reality we're trying to build, you know, 10, 2050, years down the line. So if you accomplish this, this huge goal, if you accomplish all of your organization's huge goal, what will the future then look like? That will lead to everyone living happily ever after? So we'll go into an example of this to make it a little bit more concrete. I also just want to share in the chat the best example that I've seen, but it's too long to share now, is there was a video that came out with AOC about five years ago, where she's talking about the future, after the green New Deal. And I think that video is probably the most powerful example I've ever seen. She talks about all the massive societal change that will come from this. And it's kind of her talking as an elder Senator, you know, in her like, 60s or 70s, reflecting on all that has happened. So that's a good example, maybe to review later, or look at for a minute or two if you get stuck. But here's an example from one of the folks we've worked with in at CSS that was working on a creating a new organization called the parable of the sour cooperative. So she wrote, once upon a time, there were unsung black heroines every decade all over the rural south who were determined to combat racial oppression in their lives. These mostly poor, working class black mothers and their children attended university dads in frontiers, University Without Walls and people's movement assemblies, they knew they had to collaborate with different forces to win small victories, so they joined national social justice movements. They continued to fight injustice, raising the next freedom fighters to combat systemic oppressions. These Wakanda women were eventually known as the dirt or the holy ground, and they all lived happily ever after. So that's kind of an example of what we're doing. We want four sentences that really kind of describe what your organization is doing, and then the world that you're creating from there. And I want you to really dream here. This isn't something right that you're going to send out to funders or donors or donors or anything like that. This is really just an exercise for you to get kind of reacquainted with what you're really fighting for, and think about the future that you want to create for your children, grandchildren, nibbling all that kind of stuff, and hopefully then bring those ideas into your work, maybe in a more professionalized way. But this is our way to kind of do it playfully. So for this one, we're just going to do a solo reflection. So we'll just have folks, you know, turn off their video and audio and do this on their own. We do have participant slides, so you can fill in one, if that's helpful to you, I'll share them over here. So. Yeah, but yeah, there should be plenty for everybody. So if you want to just claim a slide and put your name on it, and then you can fill it out. I have two different opportunities for you to write fairy tales. If you want to try a couple different angles, see which one you like better. But yeah, just let's take about 10 minutes to write out some ideas, and then we'll come back and discuss. Anyone have any questions before we go into solo reflection, we'll start first with our look away exercise. So if you want to look 20 feet away for 20 seconds, but also give folks a minute to get back in the room. All right, I hope that was a useful exercise. I know for me, it can sometimes be kind of hard to get into the fairy tale mindset when you're used to doing very serious writing, but I do think it kind of expands our imaginations and gets us thinking more about the distant future that we want. So let's do a little share out and discussion first. I guess. If anyone had any questions challenges that came up, feel free to share those. If anyone feels like they want to share their actual fairy tale too. We definitely welcome that. So yeah, who has anything to share with the group? Okay, go ahead. Hi.

Speaker 5

36:20

I'm Julie. I'm from the UC Berkeley labor Center, and I'm not sharing about directly about this exercise, so I hope, but, but sure, about 10 years ago, when I was working with healthcare workers, frontline healthcare workers, and they were working in teams that we're trying to do some process improvement. And, you know, for patients, we were really working with them to try and teach them how to tell their own stories. And we built this really cool tool where it produced an animated Flash movie. And since Flash is no longer supported, I don't think it's on the web anymore, but basically they filled out a form in the back and and we gave them similar prompts to tell a fairy tale Once upon a time, this team and then that populated a little animated and they could pick a little animated movie, which was a it was a journey. So we had them do a journey. And they could pick their vehicle. They could pick whether it was a clinic or a hospital, whether it was an urban or a rural setting. And, you know, then the text that they put in would just sort of as this little animated vehicle went down its journey, would tell their story of their little project that they had done as a team. And it was really fun. I found that it was possibly a little bit challenging that we weren't that people needed us to be in the room with them to help them learn how to tell stories that we've made some assumptions about how people would fill this out, and whether they really you know that the prompts would be enough, but it was a very, very fun way to work with workers, to get them to tell their own stories and share their own stories. So the idea of a fairy tale, or the idea of a journey, and then having it actually spit out like a little once upon a time, story or journey is a fun pool. If you're working with grassroots folks or so, that's just something I wanted to share that I like this as a, you know, as a tool for, for getting people to tell their own stories, you know, yeah,

Ian Madrigal

38:44

thanks for sharing that. Yeah. I mean, we should make this more high tech. I also just like the idea of, you know, having a little video they can then share on social media. Like, I could definitely see that kind of taking off. Awesome. Elizabeth, um, I

Speaker 6

39:03

was interested. I don't know if Val remembers, but Rudyard actually built something for us where we we had a sort of tell us your story, form that then posted to social media. And one of the prompts that we use, we work in sexual and reproductive health. So the prompt was, birth control is important to me, or birth control matters was the hashtag that we were trying to get started. It's still floating around our website somewhere, but it's been a minute since we promoted it. But we similarly, had a lot of got a lot of good feedback when we gave people a bit of a prompt and help them to sort of just sort of get get things started. I found this very interesting, very empowering. I don't have a job where I'm directly communicating. I'm more of a back end person. But I was kind of reading through what I wrote, like, oh yeah, I do. Kind of feel moved by the mission, which is a fun experience. Yeah,

Ian Madrigal

40:06

yeah. I like this one because it's not necessarily external facing. You know, maybe this will influence our public facing narratives. Maybe it won't, but I think it's just really good for us to kind of think about why we're here and what where our hope lies for it, which in this era feels all the more important. Dion, I see your hand.

Speaker 4

40:28

Yes, I just want to thank you for this exercise. And one thing that came up for me is that I'm currently working on my own business and just taking steps. And I've recently met with a coach for my website. And the part I this, oddly enough, I struggle. I am currently, well, I don't like to say struggle. The challenge I've been having working through about me statement, I like to try to affirmative as possible, right? The challenge is like to talk about me, which I feel is important to why I'm even doing what I want to do, but it just kept being not as specific about what my services are and what I can offer, right? But what I find in the narrative, in creating the story is I think I could do both simultaneously, hit both points like insert my story into it, and make valid points of the value of what I have to offer. So I just want to share that so it just fireworks went off for me.

Ian Madrigal

41:40

Absolutely, yeah. And as a as a reader, a consumer, right? Like a story is so much more compelling than you know, a list of all your accomplishments, or a list of all the types of projects you could work on, that kind of stuff. So it's great anyone with the last closing comment, anyone who maybe wants to share a fairy tale, no pressure, then we'll get into our closing.

Speaker 7

42:18

I can share mine. All right, it's not perfect, but here it goes. So once upon a time, there was an army of angry queer badasses all over the country who were determined to fight systemic oppression by uniting with all oppressed peoples. This army led by trans NB queer folks, used strategic narrative bricks and actual bricks sometimes to shift public opinion for a united front that targeted corporate foot soldiers and their capitalistic leaders. The fight was arduous and long, but brick by brick, person by person, the army grew so so large that the corporate capitalist overlords and their servants had no other choice but to flee or surrender soon after the United Front of all newly liberated peoples, developed systems of governing that distributed power and set laws to prohibit any capitalistic interest or power to take hold of the world.

Ian Madrigal

43:13

Wow, and they all lived happily ever after. Yep, that's awesome. What group are you with? Because I want to get involved.

Ian Madrigal

43:27

There's the exact intersection of all my interests. All right, now we'll move into our closing thanks so much for all of the great work today. Obviously, you know, an hour and a half training, we skim the surface of a few different tools, but there's a lot more to dig into, if you like, this kind of framing. The Center for story based strategy has tons of free tools available on their websites, including like games and card decks and lots of ways to work on this in a in a way that I think is a lot more fun and engaging than most. I have a link here to the CSS toolkit. I'll put it in the chat. It includes a lot of these same tools that we've been talking about, and digs a little bit deeper and has a lot of links to other things that that CSS does. So please, if you're interested, go take a look. You can also, you know, hire CSS for trainings. Obviously, you can also work with me or rooted on any of this stuff as well. And then, yeah, I think we have the survey for folks to fill out. If you can start that. Now, we always get more feedback. We ask people to do it while we're still here. So maybe open up that link. And then for a closing activity, we just ask if you can share one thing into the chat that you want to commit to do in your next narrative intervention.

Valerie Neumark

44:56

I also shared the participant list again, and so you can. Contact one another and feel free to edit your information or take yourself off if you prefer, and otherwise, we will be starting up all of our sessions again, probably end of first quarter next year. So again, please fill out the feedback, or we will have a survey coming out in the next couple weeks to hear more from you all about the kind of sessions that will really help you in your work and give you a chance to connect with one another for an hour or so outside of your normal work day. So thank you all so much for coming. We appreciate your time and your attention and contributions. And again, here's our information, and we hope to see you again sometime in the near future. You.

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