Explore recommendations.
Call it culture.
Start by inviting your community or audience to reflect on how they see and experience civic culture. By understanding how they perceive the culture they’re a part of, you help them see themselves as powerful in strengthening it. Co-create stronger narratives by rooting them in the existing stories and beliefs a community holds.
Show that culture is a solution to the fissures America is facing. Research from the Frameworks Institute found that, Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the state of our country and think things should change — but aren’t sure what that change should look like. Help Americans see how culture is upstream of politics and envision what a stronger civic culture in their place might feel and look like.
Fill the gap between politics and arts & culture. These two areas of focus are common, but often there’s nothing in between. In your storytelling infrastructure, introduce a series or a category that focuses squarely on civic culture in order to narrate and weave together these efforts. Explore the seven strategies for strengthening civic culture as a framework for story development.
Bring culture close to home.
Start with familiar language, and deconstruct civic terms quickly. Understand what terms and ideas resonate with your audience, and then start with familiar stories and metaphors that connect them with culture. Avoid isolated jargon, use specific civic terms with purpose, and draw clear connections to more familiar and activating ideas. Explore the Civic Language Perceptions Project for recommendations.
Scale down culture to be relatable and center examples. Culture can feel nebulous, but talking about place-based activities, norms, and habits brings things into focus. Tell stories about people who are using cultural strategies to strengthen how Americans relate to one another. Use specific, granular examples that your audience relates to. Use examples, examples, examples!
Show how things add up. What can feel like small community efforts are the stars that make up a greater constellation. Culture is the aggregate of many small decisions and actions, but it becomes powerful when the sum of that aggregate is known and felt. Connect the dots — use the language of your community to make meaning out of the small pieces.
Need some inspiration? Read a few spotlights of civic culture catalysts →
Choose complexity.
Listen better. Use techniques like looping to listen more deeper and make sure you understand the full context — and sometimes the unspoken nuance. This builds trust and leads to more complex and insightful stories.
Embrace complexity, amplify contradictions, and widen the lens. Avoid oversimplifying two sides into stereotypes that don’t reflect the true nuance of perspectives people have. A strong civic culture depends on Americans having the ability to stay in a place of complexity and nuance. Explore the full Complicating the Narratives framework.
“A pluralistic society needs storytelling strategies that don’t flatten people to one dimensional or reduce our perspectives to these oversimplified binaries all the time. Complicating the Narratives is really helping to change civic culture within the journalism field by giving journalists tools to help us tell more accurate, nuanced stories about ourselves and about America’s complex society.”
— Shia Levitt, public radio reporter & trainer of Complicating the Narratives
Dig deeper. Go beyond the surface of political perspectives to explore peoples’ motivations and underlying experiences that shape their views. Culture is derived from our values, and when we uncover shared values, we strengthen our sense of shared culture.
Be willing to challenge. Help people be honest about the role they play in creating the conditions for our civic culture to thrive. Many Americans think that the problem is other people — we have to tell stories and spread narratives that help people to see themselves as part of what has been challenging (with empathy not with blame) so they can begin to shift towards solutions.
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