We are all influencers

Building welcoming culture, one story at a time

Reporting from the The Global Gathering for Sponsorship this week, where I have been talking about how we change the narrative around people on the move using the shared humanity worldview.

Please forward this newsletter to anyone who might be interested, in coming weeks we will look at humour, the role of companies in narrative change, election messaging, narrative communications strategy and what activists can learn from sports science. And if someone just forwarded this to you, subscribe now so that you don’t miss the next one.

Refugee leadership in narrative change

I want to start by sharing some words delivered in another panel by Shaza Alrihawi, Co-founder of Global Refugee-led Network, who talked about the importance of “developing approaches that maximize refugee agency”. Here is what she said on narrative: 

“These are the stories of refugees, stories that often go untold, overshadowed by the noise of political debates and the rhetoric of fear. But today, I urge you to listen, to truly listen, to the voices of those who have been silenced for far too long.

“It is not enough to simply acknowledge the existence of refugees; we must take action. We must ensure that their perspectives are not only heard but valued. We must recognize their resilience, their strength, and their unwavering determination to rebuild their lives.

“Delivering narrative change is also a key priority. It is essential to challenge the negative narratives and stereotypes surrounding refugees, and instead highlight their resilience, contributions, and potential. By promoting positive narratives, we can create a more inclusive and welcoming environment for refugees.

“Creating local narratives on community sponsorship is key to fostering grassroots support and engagement. By showcasing success stories and the positive impact of community sponsorship, we can encourage more communities to get involved and support refugees in their integration journey.”

More about Shaza’s work here and her writing here. See also the Refugee Participation Pledge, to which hope-based communications will soon become a signatory.

The mindset shift we need to build welcoming cultures

Now back to me ;) and a few points on narrative strategy for migration, and why migration activists need to “be the narrative” in order to make kindness, community, care and welcome more salient in these conversations, and make the idea of movement, openness and diversity common sense. You can read the full talk here.

It was very important for me to attend this event because in workshops around the world, when people draw an image that shows what it looks like to act on their values, they constantly draw people sitting together around a dinner table - hosts and newcomers as equals, both fulfilled and changed by the encounter.

A worksheet from a hope-based workshop.

Stories of community sponsorship can be for migration work what equal marriage was for LGBT rights, what George Lakoff calls a strategic initiative, something that has added importance beyond its direct impact because it changes how people think about an issue.

Stories of sponsorship are stories of solidarity and shared humanity. And we need to make those stories more salient not just for the human rights of people on the move, but for the future of human rights and humanity itself.

Too make this happen we need more activists and supporters to tell those stories, and share them. We need a mindset shift where we see the strategic imperative of elevating examples of the change we want to see.

Quick summary of the brain stuff behind this

1. We have predictive brains - we need to see things to support them.

2. We learn behaviour from each other - we need to hear ideas and see actions to repeat them.

3. We think in categories. When you activate a negative one you reinforce it. We need to activate the categories and frames that work for us.

There are three things we can all do to work on narrative. These are the three pillars of narrative communications strategy.

1. The message - what do we want the narrative to be?

How do we all do what Shaza says without falling into good immigrant or white saviour traps? We have to be very clear what narratives we want instead. We are very good at putting labels on the narratives we do not want, but right now we are missing appealing labels for those that WE DO WANT. But if we don’t name them, its less likely that people will actually use them.

Use our worldview to set the terms of the debate

We have to find the value and way of thinking that makes people more likely to welcome others when it is the dominant narrative. Those are most likely to be the values that drive us in our work, and those of people who have lived experience, so the hope-based approach is focused on articulating them so that we can use them, rather than drawing on unhelpful narratives that currently dominate.

I have been trying to figure out what the human rights narrative should be. Based on hundreds of workshops with activists all over the world, I believe it is centered on the idea of shared humanity.

For example, Ben Mason-Sucher shared More in Common’s research consistently shows audiences in host countries value new arrivals learning their language. That could be a very good immigrant story. But if we put it in the context of humanity’s amazing capacity to constantly learn new ways of speaking to each other, it becomes a story of shared humanity, that moving and learning new ways of being is part of what makes us all human.

Build a new intrinsic vocabulary

We need to build a new intrinsic values-based vocabulary for our work, built around concepts like love, kindness, caring - the kind of values that underpin welcoming others. We need to create new concepts that we can inject with meaning. For example, the concept of Dreamers in the United States has been a powerful way of talking about undocumented migrants. We need similar language for talking about people who host newcomers - something more inspiring than “sponsors”. (suggestions welcome!)

Language activists use to describe their intrinsic motivation, their moral case for wanting to have welcoming societies.

How to build narrative power of people on the move

Another thing important about messaging is who is in the room when we come up with messaging. Shaza’s talk reminded me of a great case study is the rebranding process of the former American Refugee Committee, which became Alight, because they made the refugees* they worked with part of the process and they wanted to focus more on the feeling of arrival and rebuilding, not just their trauma and suffering.

[see the full talk text for some advice on vulnerability and dealing with failure. I’m going to write more about avoiding good immigrant narratives another time, but in the meantime see this guide to seeing narratives as mosaics of many different kinds of story - meaning no one story has to do it all, and be representative of an entire group’s experience.]

*I will use the term refugees here for brevity even though it is a word we should avoid in our messaging, as it limits the person’s story to one aspect of their life (which was another thing those people rebranding Alight wanted to tackle.

2. What’s the story?

We change the narrative by telling stories that bring our values to life, and making those stories with our actions. The other side want us to be afraid of people who are different from us. We have to share content that activates our shared humanity.

We need greater storyelling muscle. Not just content creation but also distribution.

We need to make sure those stories are seen, heard, and shared so that they become salient. We have to produce the words, images, stories, content that bring our narrative to life. And then we have to make sure it spreads and engages. Nobody is going to do that for us. Not the media, not political parties. We are social change, its up to us to make that change happen.

In El Salvador we worked with a feminist news organization to get stories told that build the narrative of civil society as community to counter attacks. Nobody else was telling those stories. We need solution journalism but for social change values.

We need similar initiatives to talk about the welcoming communities. A solutions journalism version of social change communications. But it does not submit to what elite news editors define as newsworthy, it is about using public relations strategies to make the stories we want to spread engaging. Mandy Van Deven calls this movement journalism.

3. Storytelling as activism

The most important thing said on the panel was Shabnam Safa saying that we need to bring sponsorship into the 21st century.

It made me think:

• 20th century activism was about trying to influence WHAT people were thinking about : raising awareness - holding stunts or large protests to draw attention to what was happening.

• 21st century activism is about telling and creating (with our actions) stories to change HOW people think.

What we need to do is organize ourselves, the people with lived experience and our supporters to all be the narrative.

We have to mobilize and organize the people who most strongly share or values to talk our talk. To use the words and images based on those radical ideas.

This is, for example, WhatsApp groups where we encourage each other to engage with a post that is on-narrative or where we ask our communities to point their phones at any stories of positive social contact.

Two weeks ago we covered Puentes, who are building narrative power with facebook graphics and WhatsApp stickers. But that content is putting out a new way of talking about family and faith that is diverse and tolerant.

From audience to actor

People have been who is the messenger for stories of welcome? The answer is: All of us, all of the time.

We live in the era of the micro-influencer. Any individual can build narrative power using their phone and a social media account. All of us in our movement need to learn to be micro-influencers to spread our narrative.

This means nobody is every just a messenger or an audience, the roles of talking and listening are flattened. We can all be actors up on the stage. Which is why activists can no longer be a neutral actor making judgements from the sidelines. To be remembered we have create social media moments that connect what Walter Lippmann calls “the world outside” to the “pictures in our heads”.

We have to be able to take sides. In the recesses of our being we must step out of the audience on to the stage, and wrestle as the hero for the victory of good over evil. We must breathe into the allegory the breath of our life.” - Walter Lippmann, Public Relations (1922)

Organising our base to be the narrative

We need to encourage, empower and elevate our supporters to be influencers in their communities and their countries. Some training helps, but above all it is about having the courage and the imagination to talk about our deep moral values.

We need to encourage them to talk about intrinsic, compassionate values by doing so ourselves. After that, they will find the words, images and stories themselves.

We need to lift up any and every voice. There is space on the stage for any voice in harmony with our core values.

Refugee leadership on narrative - from stage to direction

And for refugee leadership, people with lived experience should be directing and writing the script instead of being put on stage by others. As the child of a refugee family, I don’t think it should be on refugees to have to make change happen by reliving their trauma or being good immigrants: it’s on all societies to make themselves more welcoming, and more human. We need to counter dehumanization with rehumanization, but it is the people who are deciding whether or not to open their door to other humans who have to prove their humanity, not the people knocking on the door.

“Refugees” should be able to tell their story without that story needing to fit our advocacy needs. Instead of being the story, refugee leadership should be more “behind the camera” instead of always being the subject. They should creating the narrative and the strategy.

This is what we can accomplish with a mosaic approach the storytelling - seeing that alls sorts of different stories play a part in building up our narratives - narratives that do justice to the complexity of human experience.

Call to action - The Mindset Shift - Civil society’s power is imagination.

The work of people in sponsorship is the narrative we need to elevate.

As I said at the start, anyone can do this. Indeed, it is essential that everyone do it, in whatever way they can. And that starts with mindset.

Civil society can have a big impact by adopting a hopeful mindset that supporters can copy.

Humans all have an in-built negativity bias - we tend to focus on what is going wrong, especially activists! But we have to prompt the people in our movement to tell the stories that show that our change is desirable, that our solutions work.

Civil society groups can encourage people to share different messages. Right now, the lead we give is to talk about what is going wrong. If we encourage people to tell the stories about how sponsorship and openness in general is working.

Hope-based Homework

In everything we do we need to ask ourselves, what narrative am I feeding? Am I reinforcing the old way of thinking, or am I breathing life into something new? Am I contributing to the us vs them worldview, or am I building shared humanity?

Hopey, changey stuff

Am I the last person to learn that the US has created a Welcome Corps?? Another great example of putting the emphasis on welcome (with the suggestion that you don’t need to join the Peace Corps and travel the world to do good, you can do it in your community). And they have provided the latest addition the hope-based playlist.

• This video seems to apply the insight from More in Common research that seeing people learning a language drives support for welcome. How would you manage the narrative pitfalls it comes close to? Perhaps change the part at the beginning to show learning goes both ways?

• Ben also shared forthcoming research showing growing public fear about the future harming support for welcoming policies in Germany. This insight is one of the original ideas behind the hope-based approach: we need people to feel hope and agency over the future in order for them to be open to others.

• Magdalena Pochec from Feminist Fund shared an inspiring anecdote at OBI last week: they developed a new symbol for the word “feminism” in Polish sign language. Symbolic.

• Some words from hope-based friend Véronique Lerch on Gaza: “We have to find our common humanity through messages of hope. There was an article in Jewish Currents right at the beginning of October that was really good and helped me found some words to situate my calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.” Also this from Barack Obama. The Inter-Narratives newsletter has gathered messaging guidance on this:

Newsletter #12

Another substack to follow, H/T Brett Davidson:

The Art and War of Story

• Nice story of a pyramid building in Tirana, Albania built by a dictator and now transformed into an open, fun space for everyone. Notable as Albanian write Ismail Kadare used the building of the Egyptian pyramids as an allegory for his searing critique of authoritarianism, The Pyramid.

Quote of the week

“Every ingredient, however genuinely local it might seem, has behind - and, likely, ahead - of it a trail of travel and transformation. Still, we can’t help but cling to a dream of original provenance.” - Priya Basil, Be My Guest

An explanation of why dinner tables always come up when we try to visualise shared humanity “food really is the simplest way for people anywhere to share with each other. Eating is the one universal, daily activity that underpins human life. However much or little we think about it, food is a force - and when shared its power may be ampilified.”

What’s making us hopeful

• A fun fantasy page-turner from France: the Tour de Garde (Watchtower) series. Great concept, a wife-and-husband team writing two overlapping trilogies set in two medieval cities (one like Siena, one Benelux). In the final books, the heroes build a new city which welcomes refugees from all over the imaginary world, who together build a new, egalitarian society. Nice example of Solarpunk-style popular culture applied to migration. Also a very beautiful book cover!