Cultivating the Conditions: Philanthropy’s Role in Fortifying the Infrastructure for Narrative Power
Mandy Van Deven
“If organizing moves at the speed of trust, then the infrastructure is what allows us to stay on the same track together and move in collective formation. Our opposition has been building this infrastructure for decades, and we have to think equally long-term.”
In the battle of ideas, whoever commands the narrative about the future wins.
Global justice movements are being outmaneuvered by ill-intentioned contenders for the future who are better-resourced and highly practiced at maintaining a narrative environment that reinforces inequities and stands in the way of change. But what if philanthropy committed to resourcing narrative work that would enable us to manifest our highest aspirations? Funders can play an important role in closing the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be, but it will require us to engage in shared learning, experimentation, and funding the narrative infrastructure that is needed for global justice movements to win.
It doesn’t take a sports aficionado to know that it is impossible for a team to win if it’s primarily playing defense, but it is easy to see how that would be the team’s best strategy when the odds are stacked against them. In the contest for narrative power, social justice movements around the globe are expending enormous effort to make advances toward our goal of a more just future—but they are doing so on an unequal playing field while facing jeers from the bleachers, enduring flare-ups of old injuries, and being outmaneuvered by opponents that are not just better-resourced and highly practiced, but also designed the game.
To extend the metaphor further, the team we need to beat doesn’t just have star players; it has popular coaches, offensive strategists, talent scouts, team coordinators, physical therapists, logistics assistants, and many more who are working behind the scenes to keep the team on their A-game. They also have cheerleaders and a vocal fan base who proudly display team regalia to demonstrate their enthusiasm and enlist new devotees. And they have billionaire owners and investors who have stayed the course for decades to bankroll training camps, new stadiums, and whatever else their team may need to succeed—even when they don’t win every game or are having a bad season.
When the pandemic hit, movement leaders immediately saw the opportunity to shift from defense to offense. As the world entered a period of multisystem failure—from healthcare to schools to supply chains—long-entrenched narratives of personal responsibility, safety, deservedness, meritocracy, and neoliberalism destabilized quickly. The unraveling of those myths was soon followed by the unraveling of the myth of a racially equitable society as White people were forced to confront the ways political, social, and legal systems rooted in white supremacy allow police officers and vigilantes to murder Black and Brown people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery with impunity. When entrenched narratives were exposed as false, people from Boston to Berlin to Beijing were compelled to question their deeply held beliefs—and many of our team’s players jumped at the potential to change the game entirely.
When We Work Together, There Is Enough
In March 2020, the narrative power-building organization ReFrame held a call that I attended, which enabled more than 200 organizers, strategic communicators, and narrative strategists to share how they were each mobilizing their respective bases using values-based messages that were cross-movement, proactive, and affecting. This transdisciplinary group exchanged ideas on how they could collectively promote narratives of interconnection, reciprocity, care, pluralism, and solidarity. Some of these messages included:
“The pandemic has shown that our well-being is tied to one another. We keep us safe. Protecting our most vulnerable benefits us all. Good governance prioritizes people over profits. Systems failures are human-made, and we can prevent them. Now is the time to unite across our differences. When we work together, there is enough for all of us.”
The call participants knew they would have to act quickly to seek the support of technologists to expand their digital organizing tools and security capacities since movement work would shift primarily online for some time. They needed partnerships with journalists to document and share the stories of what was happening in their communities because it was largely absent from national news coverage and politicians’ press briefings. They needed the imagination of artists and culture makers, who can be purveyors of hope and joy amid incredible loss and grief, to share a vision of an irresistible future where we all have what we need to thrive. They needed philanthropy to fund these and many other things that would secure the narrative infrastructure that is necessary to claim narrative power and take advantage of this once-in-a-generation opportunity.
The trouble is that infrastructure cannot be built in a day. Even though some social justice funders took bold steps by releasing funds immediately and without restriction, it was a case of too little, too late. Until that point, most had designed grantmaking strategies and practices focused on winning one game at a time. They funded projects to train only our most popular players on the opponents’ rulebook and preferred plays but neglected to support our team’s capacity to design its own plays, pay players’ salaries, or acquire equipment and practice space. They put funds into peripheral industries that compete with, eclipse, run interference on, and sometimes drive our team off the field completely. And investment was withheld from our team’s star players, keeping them on the bench, even though they’d proven that they can win in the face of certain defeat.
Narrative Organizing to Uphold Democracy
“The infrastructure has been heavily influenced by public relations and product marketing, and there are problematic power dynamics embedded in those ways of working. For example, messaging research was designed to extract information from audiences to manipulate them. We need practices where the insights are gained and used in ways that reflect our values.”
The narrative infrastructure that already exists among social justice movements contributed to organizers being able to move the needle on the demand to “defund the police” and “invest in community-led solutions” following the 2020 racial justice uprisings. As Radical Communicators Network founder and narrative scholar Shanelle Matthews explained at the Narrative Power Summit in October 2022, organizers have been building the momentum for this demand at the local and state levels for decades—from calls to end the school-to-prison pipeline to community-led efforts such as diversion programs that demonstrate what it looks like to divest from police and invest in root-cause remedies, such as healthcare and housing. These victories were bolstered by the organizing work taking place within philanthropy that more than doubled investments in racial equity ($2.12 billion to $5.15 billion) and nearly tripled investments in racial justice ($331 million to $926 million) from 2011 to 2018. When funders and movement leaders work together to expand the quantity and quality of resources that movements need, they also expand what it is possible to achieve.
Yet, just four years later, many funders that once stepped up to the plate have already retreated to the cheap seats, repeating the same boom-and-bust mistake that creates instability in movements and has long kept narrative infrastructure weak. Just like physical infrastructure such as roads and electricity grids, narrative infrastructure needs ongoing maintenance, and movements cannot sustain this work when the financial resources wane. In 2024, we will experience a year where the information landscape will be dominated by a record-breaking number of elections of heads of state—including in the United States, India, Russia, Mexico, and the United Kingdom—and the European Parliament, which is a vital time for funders to not only maintain but expand resources that aim to fortify narrative tools and organizing strategies that contribute to upholding democracy globally.
Narrative Infrastructure and Power Building
“As a philanthropic sector, the evolution that we need to make right now is one toward embodying this truth that we have abundant resources for building a more just and sustainable future. And I say ‘embody’ because this is not a spectator sport. We don’t get to be on the outside anymore; we have to be in the game. We need to do this work from a place that says: there is enough.”
A fundamental part of narrative infrastructure and power building is movements having uninterrupted access to high-quality resources over a time horizon that spans decades (and even generations)—and social justice philanthropy’s current design is not fit for purpose. Yet, having worked at the intersection of narrative and philanthropy for nearly a decade, I know that many funders are eager to improve their grantmaking, correct past missteps, and move resources to build and maintain narrative infrastructure. They also know that they cannot do it alone, nor should they. Funders will need to work with their peers and their grantees to find the approaches that ensure our team has what it needs to perform well throughout the entire season, with reserves on hand to keep the momentum going when the team makes it to the championship series. By working together, we can manifest a world where philanthropy’s investments allow for the creation of not just one but many All-Star teams that operate in a distributed yet deeply connected way, one where the seasoned players guide and mentor the rookies and where coaches are co-designing new plays that can secure irreversible victories.
With or without philanthropy, global justice movements will hold the line and push forward with tenacity in the face of enormous transnational challenges—including growing authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism, criminalization of dissent, restrictions on civil and human rights, and the erosion of democracy. But philanthropy plays an important role in resourcing what our movements need to get ready and stay ready. Gaps in the funding landscape and ineffective philanthropic practices have placed the burden on movement leaders to apply their grit and ingenuity to securing resources rather than to narrative power-building. The narrative field is composed of a multiplicity of practitioners that include organizers, narrative strategists, communications professionals, journalists, researchers, scholars, and technologists—though these categories are not mutually exclusive—and it needs flexible, sustained resources to develop a common identity and shared purpose, principles, and priorities as it emerges, expands, and evolves. A funding ecosystem that is defined by scarcity provokes competition, hoarding, and division among grant seekers, which is itself a barrier to the creation of narrative infrastructure.
Philanthropic fragmentation perpetuates the very narratives it seeks to change (e.g., individualism, competition, scarcity), and by creating a space to collectively explore and engage in more purpose-driven ways of thinking and being, funders can disrupt this self-defeating dynamic and begin to move ourselves and the sector in a more effective direction. It starts by bringing people together who are ready to try a different way, learn by doing, and support each other on the journey—which is precisely what some narrative funders are doing. We can move closer to where we need to be by forming a community of practice to fortify the infrastructure for narrative power and practicing the future we desire (and deserve) today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mandy Van Deven is the founder of Both/And Solutions, a global consulting collective that provides strategy advice to wealth stewards, enables organizational and field learning, and designs philanthropic initiatives to advance gender, racial, economic, and climate justice. She serves on the boards of Puentes and Thousand Currents, and co-leads a community of practice for narrative funders.
