Submitted by: Center for Health Progress | Presented in Spanish and English

We will share how Center for Health Progress (CHP) applies narrative strategy in our organizing model, centering storytelling across campaigns and partnering with researchers to sharpen narratives. The first presenter will discuss the harmful, dominant narratives many of us have internalized about health care (e.g., “bad choices cause bad health”) and lead the group in conversation about why challenging this rhetoric—and articulating alternative narratives that emphasize solidarity—is essential to collective power-building. The second presenter will walk through the applied practice of these ideas, sharing how CHP has advanced counter-narratives about the system’s harmful practices (e.g., billing and debt collection) in CHP’s “Care not Courts” campaign and working with the media to do so. Finally, a researcher partnering with CHP will discuss a participatory research project that uses survey research to test the effectiveness of different narrative elements to shift public beliefs, values and attitudes about collective action.

Presenters: 

•  Marissa Hallo, Senior Communications Organizer, Center for Health Progress
•  Jasmine Sandate, Member Leader, Center for Health Progress
•  Yusra Murad, PhD Student, University of Minnesota School of Public Health

Objectives:

• Identify dominant narratives about the health system that are obstacles to health justice and discuss how to build, socialize and advance alternative narratives through organizing.
• Transform abstract ideas about narratives into concrete, tangible and solutions-focused strategies that can be applied in campaign planning, leadership development and media engagement to seed new narratives in public discourse.
• Brainstorm how partnerships with community-based organizations and/or academic researchers can generate capacity-building tools to sharpen narrative strategy and identify approaches researchers use to evaluate and test messages for communications practices.