Story-based Activism

Brandon Williams Craig pointed me to a book coming out: Re-imagining Change, on story-based activism -- a strategy for movement-based activism.

My introduction to story-based activism happened at the Story-Field conference at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Denver, CO. I can't remember exactly how it went down, but there was Tom Atlee, Peggy Holman, Dana Lynne Andersen, ...

I remember David Korten writing in Getting to the 21st Century, I think it was Chapter 10, where he wrote about the levels of activism.

Level 1: OMG, there's a disaster, let's go help those people.

Over time, though, you realize -- "We're pulling babies out of the river, but there are people upstream pushing them in."

Level 2: Community development.

Rather than giving a person fish, you are now someone who is teaching people to fish.

Level 3: Community-Government-Corporation cross-development.

Realizing that the problems stem from a complex web of interconnected issues, and that it really requires mass cooperation to really make effective change, you work on forging exactly that.

Level 4: ???

Level 4 is something that David Korten was trying to see for a while (if I remember the story right,) and he eventually figured out what it was: Movement-based politics.

When there's a mass social movement towards accomplishing something, whether it be a literacy movement or putting a man on the moon, it generally gets done.

You're not working at the level of intentional "visible" things; Rather, you're working here on the background, on the general framing, on the "low-frequency dialog." How does one do that?

Well, that's what much of the storyfield conference was about, its connected with the George Lakoff world of framing, and it's what the book that Brandon Williams Craig is referencing is about how to specifically conduct.

If you click on the ideas part of the page, (and perhaps on story based strategy in particular,) you'll get a sense for how this plane of activism is conducted.

Additional reference: Dream: Re-Awakening Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. -- I keep pushing this book here, and I will continue to do so: I really do want to see more imagination, fantasy, spectacle, and beauty in our political efforts. Reawakening the social imagination, the utopian impulse, is really important to me; I always liked the quote on the cover of the Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology: "Basically, if you’re not a utopianist, you’re a schmuck."