Philanthropy Has Taken a Big Interest in Narrative Change Strategies. Is It Paying Off?

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Narrative is everywhere, shaping and coloring just about every aspect of our lives. Most of us get a taste of it every time we switch on the television, glance at our phones, go out for groceries, you name it. But according to a recently released report, attempting to influence the narratives criss-crossing American life is a relatively new philanthropic strategy, and one that a lot of funders are eager to get in on.

“Narrative change” only really began to take shape as a discrete field for grantmaking around 2008. That was when foundations already backing culture change work, mostly centered on the arts, really started homing in on narrative as a philanthropic lever.

In the time since, numerous funders have sought to engage with narrative, drawing on a growing network of “expert practitioners” and trying out multiple approaches. In recent years, IP has reported on narrative change philanthropy in any number of fields — including climate change, mental health, immigration, aging and more — and the report reaffirmed this widespread interest. “Across the board, from funders to practitioners, there is an eagerness to better understand this field. We were told this explicitly by almost every person we spoke to,” wrote principal authors Mik Moore and Rinku Sen.

To respond to that demand, the report, titled simply “Funding Narrative Change,” draws on interviews with foundations and funder collaboratives, a survey and a literature review. It was commissioned by the Convergence Partnership, a funder collaborative that includes such foundation-world luminaries as the Kresge Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The California Endowment, the Chicago Community Trust and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, among others.

As one might expect from an assessment of a funding field this new, one still dominated by a lot of trial and error, the report raises as many questions as it answers. But its findings and recommendations are worth paying attention to as philanthropy increasingly accepts that it’s operating in a realm of contested values, one where narrative plays a key role in determining whether and how people act.

A few key takeaways

Long based out of the progressive think tank PolicyLink and now housed at NEO Philanthropy, the Convergence Partnership and its funder members began looking at culture and narrative change as a way to further its mission, which is to “transform policies, practices and systems to advance racial justice and health equity.” In 2018, the partnership hired Narrative Arts and Moore + Associates to help it develop a narrative strategy, and this report is an outgrowth of that work. Its two principal authors hail from Moore + Associates and the Narrative Initiative, a separate organization from Narrative Arts.

To assemble the report, the team interviewed staff at over 20 foundations and funder collaboratives, surveyed “leading intermediary practitioners,” and conducted a literature review. The report’s findings, some of which resemble questions more than answers, do include several definitive statements about the narrative change field.

One finding, for instance, highlights the centrality of expert practitioners in this space. “While different foundations and funder tables often have different narrative change strategies, almost all are investing in experts,” Moore and Sen wrote. As the field matures, they went on, some grantees involved in advocacy and organizing are hiring in-house experts on narrative. Still, the heavy presence of outside consultants is one likely reason that funders tend to approach narrative in a wide variety of ways — because the people they consult are themselves recommending so many different approaches.

Another takeaway: Changing narratives is a long-term proposition. “When we asked funders how long they expected it to take to shift a narrative, most said between 10 and 20 years. A few described it as a ‘generational’ effort,” Moore and Sen wrote. Some interviewees also expressed frustration with funders’ hesitation to commit to such lengthy timeframes. Despite that, the report also describes a widespread desire among funders for more understanding about how to fund narrative change, and for more alignment between narrative change practitioners, both between organizations and within them.

Funders and their grantees are also thinking more strategically about audience these days, the authors wrote, moving away from a “content first, audience last” approach. “There is a lot of interest in reaching ‘persuadable’ audiences, since narrative shift requires an audience that is receptive to a different narrative. Interviewees told us that not all audiences are worth our collective time.”

Narrative and mass movements

Noting that there is still a lack of agreement on what narrative change even is, let alone how to fund it, the report breaks down funder approaches into three overarching categories. There’s funding for mass media, which includes journalism, nonfiction, documentary work and analysis. Then there’s funding for mass culture, which encompasses pop culture and entertainment. Finally, there’s backing for narrative change through mass movements, which the report equates to “community narrative power-building” — that is, “the effort to equip everyday people with the tools to make and act on narrative decisions.”

The majority of narrative change funding to date has been channeled through mass media and mass culture, the authors report. Narrative change funding as it relates to mass movements, though something funders have expressed interest in, has yet to attract as much philanthropic investment. As its principal recommendation, the report suggests that narrative change practitioners and funders place more emphasis on mass movements, while also expanding support for all three categories of work.

In light of the last several years, an emphasis on how mass movements play into narrative change seems particularly important. As we’ve discussed time and again, philanthropic support for a form of “community narrative power building” — specifically, support for the Movement for Black Lives and other related movement infrastructure — undergirded the immense groundswell of racial justice solidarity that followed George Floyd’s murder. The after-effects of those events (and the backlash against them) are still reverberating in the realms of mass media and mass culture, and across the philanthrosphere.

As we recently explored, however, philanthropy is applying the lessons of 2020 in an often haphazard and sporadic way, and is less than fully comfortable with the notion of ceding significant power to the grassroots.

Similar tensions arose time and again as the Convergence Partnership team sought to understand narrative change funding. On one hand, top-down narrative strategies, though difficult to measure, have achieved some notable successes. The report cites the “race/class narrative” (“discuss race overtly, frame racism as a tool to divide and thus harm us all, and connect unity to racial justice and economic prosperity”) as one that funders have found internally useful and easy to export, including by backing mass media like non-fiction. The concept of “social determinants of health” is another narrative the report cites as having benefited from top-down promotion by funders.

At the same time, there was also much ambivalence among those interviewed about dictating from the top down, and relying on a “certain kind of expertise” from more privileged practitioners who’ve made a study of narrative but haven’t necessarily worked to empower storytellers on the ground and source narratives from the community.

In other words, philanthropy has caught on to the potential in narrative change, but many in the field remain uneasy with how that power might be wielded.

A question of values

So have these narrative change efforts been paying off? The report doesn’t put forward a definitive answer, instead often falling back on that old go-to: It’s too early to tell. There is some justification for that — explicit efforts to fund narrative change are still quite new, especially among these mostly progressive grantmakers.

However, as the report defines it, narrative change funding isn’t really all that new to the philanthrosphere. Consider the authors’ definition of a narrative strategy: “a long-term effort to raise certain values and diminish others in ways that engage diverse types of narrators and audiences, and that are not bound by short-term communications needs.”

By that definition, one could argue that funders in the other camp — conservative funders — have been backing similar work for decades. Note that what’s at stake here are “values,” not something less controversial, more immediate and more easily measured like “impact.” Narrative change in this sense is a deeply political project.

The progressive funders backing narrative change today tend to be the most clear-headed about the fact that their brand of philanthropy is inherently oppositional work. That’s something that conservative funders of narrative change (though they don’t use the term) have long recognized, deploying long-term, focused funding to “raise certain values and diminish others.”

In the long haul, funders’ enthusiasm for narrative change is probably a good thing, reflecting a more candid acknowledgement of the social sector’s role as an arbiter of values in a divided, quarrelsome society. For progressive funders, though, this report makes it clear that the challenges facing narrative work run parallel to those facing progressive philanthropy writ large — determining what qualifies as “expertise,” shifting to a long-term outlook, getting wide-ranging priorities and strategies in sync, and navigating between the need to channel community voices and pursue top-down goals.