We've spent this season talking about narrative change. How dominant narratives shape our mental models, culture, and consequently, systems. How dominant narratives determine who belongs while locking certain families out. But here's the question I’d like to start with as we enter our second narrative arc of building better narratives in this season: Do stories really work? As Jess Moyer would remind us, “Narratives are made up of lots of different stories. So narratives are patterns in stories. And when we tell stories, we are sometimes intentionally, but often unintentionally, reinforcing particular narratives, or in other cases, contesting particular narratives by the kinds of stories that we tell and the ways that we tell those stories.” So, can telling a different story about an overloaded parent actually change a caseworker's behavior? Can a personal story shift a legislator's vote? Can storytelling, something that feels soft, artistic, almost naïve, create the kind of measurable, systemic change we need? Today, we're getting into the mechanics. The neuroscience. The evidence. Because if we're asking people to change how they communicate, to challenge narratives they've held their entire lives, we need to show them why it matters. Not just philosophically, but measurably. This is Episode 7: Do Stories Really Work?
Today's episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Guests:
00:14–02:10 – Luke Waldo
Luke opens the second narrative arc of the season with its central question: Do stories actually work? He frames the stakes: if we're asking people to challenge narratives they've held their entire lives, we need to show that storytelling produces measurable, systemic change, not just emotional resonance. Today's episode gets into the mechanics: the neuroscience, the evidence, and the real-world results.
02:10–05:52 – Megan McGee and Dr. Uri Hasson
Megan introduces the research of Dr. Uri Hasson at Princeton on neural coupling: what happens inside listeners' brains when someone tells a story. In his study, a graduate student named Lauren told an unscripted 15-minute story about her high school prom (two suitors, a fistfight, a car accident) while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve other participants were then scanned while listening to a recording of the same story.
The finding: all listeners showed remarkably similar brain activity to each other, and their brain patterns closely mirrored Lauren's, even though she was speaking and they were listening. More strikingly, some listeners' brain waves preceded Lauren's words, meaning they were actively predicting what she would say next. The more closely a listener's brain synchronized with Lauren's, the more accurately they could summarize the story afterward.
05:52–10:59 – Megan McGee and Dr. Paul Zak
Megan turns to Dr. Paul Zak’s research on the hormonal mechanics of storytelling. Zak's team showed participants two versions of the same video: a father describing his experience spending time with his young son, Ben, who has terminal brain cancer, and a control version of the same father and son without any mention of illness. In the emotionally engaged version, blood samples revealed two key hormones:
Together, Zak found, these two hormones drive prosocial behavior: people who experienced both were more likely to take action after watching the video. Cortisol creates attention; oxytocin creates motivation. Stories that combine conflict and connection move people not just emotionally, but behaviorally.
10:59–14:05 – Luke Waldo and Jessica Moyer
Luke transitions to practice: how does this science translate into strategy for narrative change? Jess Moyer shares a FrameWorks project on concentrated urban poverty and neighborhood revitalization. The key discovery: the most productive frame was not poverty at all. Shifting the focus from the problem (poverty) to the solution (revitalization) changed everything: who the story was about, what the tension was, and what the resolution could look like. The community became the protagonist. Disinvestment became the conflict. Collective action became the resolution.
Luke draws out the neuroscience connection: starting with deficit activates cortisol without a pathway to oxytocin. You get alarm, but not connection. Starting with possibility gives listeners a protagonist to root for and a conflict that feels solvable.
14:05–19:08 – Luke Waldo and Tarik Moody
Tarik Moody faced a parallel challenge in creating By Every Measure, a podcast series about systemic racism in Milwaukee. His goal was to educate without inducing shame or guilt, understanding that listeners who feel blamed will disengage. His methodology: pair historical harm with contemporary solutions. Show the damage the systems caused, then show the people working to repair it. Cortisol for attention, oxytocin for hope.
The response confirmed the approach: listeners thanked him, organizations requested follow-up sessions, and years later people still ask whether another season is coming. Tarik's design goal, that listeners leave feeling hopeful rather than "doomed," translated into lasting engagement.
19:08–22:07 – Luke Waldo and Megan McGee
Megan addresses the critical gap between understanding the science and actually gathering the stories: trust. The people whose stories most need to be heard are often the least likely to share them, because they have been burned before, haven't been heard, or simply don't have time.
She describes a program Ex Fabula ran with the Health Griots, Black male prostate cancer survivors trained to tell their stories to encourage other men to get screened. The lesson: organizations often assume a short workshop will produce confident storytellers. What it actually requires is sustained trust-building, practice, and respect for each person's choice about what to share and when. Forcing someone to tell a vulnerable story at a conference is not elevating a voice; it's extracting one.
22:07–25:49 – Luke Waldo and Rinku Sen
Rinku Sen identifies the foundational principle beneath all narrative change work: relationship. You cannot recruit, influence, or even reach people with whom you have no relationship. No amount of carefully crafted messaging overcomes the absence of genuine connection. She warns against "broadcast-first" strategies, waiting for a "words that work" memo and then repeating those words, because they are speaker-first, not audience-first.
She also names a critical trap: every rebuttal repeats the lie. Fact-checking alone keeps the conversation inside the opposing frame, reinforcing the very narrative you are trying to displace. The alternative is building relationships that create conditions where new stories can land.
25:49–29:47 – Luke Waldo and Rinku Sen
Rinku shares the most concrete evidence in the episode that stories produce systemic change. The project Shattered Families, a strategic communications effort from Race Forward and its news site Colorlines, set out to shift the immigration narrative from law enforcement to family impact. The 2011 report quantified how many children were likely in the child welfare system with their parents in other countries. President Obama responded directly to reporters' questions about the report, pledging new regulations at HHS, ICE, and Border Patrol. A follow-up study found that half of the 400,000 people deported the previous year were parents. The year after the report's release, total deportations fell from 400,000 to 200,000. In California, the report directly drove legislation requiring child welfare departments to actively work with foreign embassies to reunify separated families.
29:47–32:03 – Luke Waldo
Luke synthesizes the episode's answer to its opening question: Do stories really work? Yes. They synchronize brains. They activate cortisol and oxytocin. They reunify families, shift policy, and cut deportations in half. But only when paired with the right strategy: data with dignity, urgency with trust-building, and the willingness to go slow to go fast.
He closes with three principles: start with deficit and you get shame; start with possibility and you get power; start with relationship and you get change. He previews Episode 8: a deeper conversation with Rinku Sen on the history of narrative change in social justice movements.
Closing Credits
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Luke Waldo00:14
Welcome to season 4 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how stories and narratives shape what we believe and how we act, and how we might tell different stories that change the narrative so that all children and families can thrive.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
We've spent this season talking about narrative change. How dominant narratives shape our mental models, culture, and consequently, systems. How dominant narratives determine who belongs while locking certain families out.
But here's the question I’d like to start with as we enter our second narrative arc of building better narratives in this season: Do stories really work?
As Jess Moyer would remind us, “Narratives are made up of lots of different stories. So narratives are patterns in stories. And when we tell stories, we are sometimes intentionally, but often unintentionally, reinforcing particular narratives, or in other cases, contesting particular narratives by the kinds of stories that we tell and the ways that we tell those stories.”
So, can telling a different story about an overloaded parent actually change a caseworker's behavior? Can a personal story shift a legislator's vote? Can storytelling, something that feels soft, artistic, almost naïve, create the kind of measurable, systemic change we need?
Megan McGee 01:59
When we say people are on the same wavelength. That's totally what we meant. We were like, storytelling connects people. That's not me just being crunchy. That is actual science.
Luke Waldo 02:10
This is Episode 7: Do Stories Really Work?
Today, we're getting into the mechanics. The neuroscience. The evidence. Because if we're asking people to change how they communicate, to challenge narratives they've held their entire lives, we need to show them why it matters.
Not just philosophically, but measurably.
Megan McGee is the co-founder and executive director of Ex Fabula, a Milwaukee nonprofit that has spent 15 years proving that storytelling builds community.
Ex-Fabula Speaker
Hello, everyone.
Luke Waldo
But when she started this work, she needed to understand why it was so powerful.
So she went looking for the science.
Megan McGee 02:53
So I started, I started reading, started getting my hands on different research. And one really interesting piece of research comes from Dr. Uri Hasson.
Uri Hasson 03:02
I'm a professor at Princeton University.
Megan McGee 03:05
…and he looked into neural coupling…
Uri Hasson 03:07
…and how my memory is going to affect other people, that, in return, going to affect my accents in this future.
Megan McGee 03:15
Now, you know, I'm a literature person, so here's how I like to describe this research. He had a bunch of grad students, and he had one of them, a woman named Lauren, tell a story, like a kind of an unrehearsed, 15-minute story about going to prom. This was just a topic she picked, but her high school prom story was super dramatic. There were two suitors, a fistfight and a car accident.
Uri Hasson 03:40
Okay, so how can we study this process in the lab?
Megan McGee 03:43
And he had her tell this story while inside an MRI brain scan machine. Then there were 12 other participants in this study who were scanned while listening to a recording of Lauren's super dramatic, bizarre story. All the listeners, they had really similar brain activity. And then they also noticed that Lauren and the listeners had similar brain activity, even though she was telling and the others were listening. So, when they look at the MRI, they did see some time delays, and most of the delays would match the flow of information. So Lauren's words would then cause the listeners brainwaves.
Uri Hassan 04:20
The response is going up and down, but they are very similar across people, the responses become locked.
Megan McGee 04:27
They had listeners write summaries of the story, and the researchers looked to see how complete and accurate these stories were. They found the more that the listener's brainwave matched up with Lauren's, the more incomplete and accurate the summary of their story was.
Uri Hassan 04:42
It's really a wireless coupling, and my task as a speaker is to make your brain similar to mine.
Luke Waldo 04:50
Let that sink in for a second. When Lauren tells her story, the listeners' brains don't just hear it. They synchronize with it. They light up in the same patterns. They predict what's coming next. They remember it together.
Megan McGee 05:05
There was one thing that really surprised me, though, when I was reading this research initially. They found some brain regions where the listeners’ brainwaves came just before Lauren's words. This is because listeners were actively predicting what she was going to say, say.
Uri Hasson 05:25
And then also, if you got me now, you can predict better, because you started to learn me, for example, you start to learn my heavy accent, right? So you start to have a model of me as a speaker. And by doing that now, you can predict better what I'm going to say.
Megan McGee 05:42
And Dr. Hasson says that the ability to predict speech can be tied to how well people understand each other. When we say people are on the same wavelength, that's totally what we meant. We were like…
Luke Waldo 05:52
Literally on the same wavelength. This is why stories don't just inform us. They sync us up. We predict together, we understand together, we remember together. But here's the critical part.
Megan McGee 06:06
Just in case you're like, wait a second, how do we know they're reacting to the story? They also somehow got someone to tell a story in Russian, a language that none of the people understood. And there, you know, there was no correlation. There was not that same processing. So it's all about understanding,
Luke Waldo 06:29
Understanding. Cultural context. Shared experience. When Megan says it's all about understanding, she's not just talking about comprehension. She's talking about connection, the story has to land in a place the listener recognizes, even if they've never lived that exact experience.
Which brings us to the second piece of the science. Neural coupling explains synchronization. But what about action? What makes a story not just memorable, but motivating? That's where Dr. Paul Zak comes in.
Megan McGee 07:05
Who is a neuro economist. I did not even know that was a thing. He and his team have done a lot of research where they've been showing people different storytelling videos and seeing what their reactions are in the brain. So just to describe two videos that he does. He has one where there's a father talking about his son.
Dr. Paul Zak 07:27
Ben is two and a half years old, and Ben has brain cancer, and Ben's really happy. He's happy because he's been through two rounds of chemo and radiation, and he feels good. For once, he doesn't feel yucky.
Megan McGee 07:40
And as we watch the son play, the father talks about how hard it is for him to enjoy his time with his son knowing that his son is dying.
Dr. Paul Zak 07:50
And he says, you know, it's very difficult to play with Ben, because Ben thinks everything is wonderful, but I know something that Ben doesn't, that Ben's dying.
Megan McGee 08:01
And just one quote from, from what the father says. There are no words to describe how it feels to know your time is limited…
Dr. Paul Zak 08:07
…and yet Ben is so happy. He's so beautiful.
Megan McGee 08:11
I look at his face, I see him smiling and running around and playing like a normal kid. So for now, I'm gonna put my smile on too and keep on going with that boy until he takes his last breath.
Dr. Paul Zak 08:23
That it's an amazing thing to know how little time one has left.
Megan McGee 08:29
The second video shows the same father and son, the son playing, but there's no mention of cancer or death. The boy is bald from chemotherapy. They look at animals. This version is used as a control story, just to see what the brain does when any video is being watched, because we don't want just the images to be the factor that's causing the reaction.
In the first video, people were paying far more attention. In the second video, the control, people stopped kind of paying attention part way through. And in the first video, the one where people are more engaged, the researchers took some blood samples, and they found that there were two hormones at play.
Luke Waldo 09:08
Two hormones, and if you understand how they work together, you understand why some stories move us to tears and then to action, and why others just don't.
Megan McGee 09:18
Now, shall I, shall I see if you can guess what any of those hormones might be?
Luke Waldo
High levels of cortisol?
Megan McGee
Exactly. And that they measured high levels of cortisol in response to the story's conflict. And that can be like an internal conflict, like the dad's feelings about, like, Oh, I'm trying to be happy with my son, but I'm like, I feel awful. Like I I know what's coming. So whenever you create tension in a story, that builds the attention of the listener, and then the second hormone, the love hormone, oxytocin, okay. You know, when does oxytocin come into play in life? Parent-child bonding, romantic love, like any anything where we feel trusted and safe, we have that strong connection.
Luke Waldo 10:07
Cortisol and oxytocin. Tension and trust. Conflict and connection. That's the formula. That's why stories stick when data doesn't.
Megan McGee 10:18
Put these two things together. And basically, if you tell a story that has characters and conflict and emotion, then listeners are going to be understanding what's going on, remembering the content. And even Dr. Paul Zak does some research where he looks into people are more likely to take action. So you want to talk about trying to get people to change their behavior or actually do something or get off the couch, like, stories are a tool for all that. How can we leverage these stories to help humans better understand complex problems and then take action?
Luke Waldo 10:59
Stories are a tool for getting people off the couch. Not abstract, not theoretical, neurological.
Okay. We've got the science. Neural coupling. Cortisol and oxytocin. Synchronization and action.
But how does that translate into practice? How do we actually use this science to change narratives about overloaded families, child welfare, poverty, neglect?
This is where Jess Moyer from FrameWorks Institute and Tarik Moody from Radio Milwaukee come in. Because they've done exactly this, taken the science of storytelling and turned it into strategy for narrative change.
Let's start with Jess.
Jessica Moyer 11:45
We were wanting to reframe poverty, talk about poverty, and sort of change the public discourse on poverty and build understanding about root causes of poverty, needed interventions to poverty. We were specifically looking at concentrated urban poverty in the case of this project. But the big picture shift that where we ended up was realizing that we didn't actually want to tell a story about poverty at all. We didn't want poverty to be the focus of the conversation.
And a much more, much more productive focus was on the solution, the solution, or a set of solutions to poverty, which was, in this case, neighborhood revitalization. And it became an effort to talk about how lots of different communities and lots of different locations across the US are working to revitalize their communities, to kind of bring investments to places where that have experienced disinvestment and under investment for years or even decades.
Luke Waldo 12:51
Notice what Jess is doing here.
She's applying the science. She's creating a story where the community is the protagonist—not the problem. The conflict isn't "poor people making bad choices." The conflict is disinvestment.
And the solution? Collective action.
That reframe, from poverty to revitalization, changes who the story is about, what the tension is, and what the resolution looks like.
And critically, it changes whofeels responsible for fixing it.
Jessica Moyer 13:21
So we were talking about all the same things in both cases. In the case of setting out to talk about poverty versus ending up talking about neighborhood revitalization, we were talking about the same challenges fundamentally through throughout that process. We were talking about the same types of interventions. We were talking about the exact same communities and neighborhoods and locations, but it was all about where we started the conversation, and where we put the the focus, where we put the emphasis. And it was just like you say, moving from a focus on the problem towards a focus on the solution, which shifted everything about what was possible to bring into the conversation at all.
Luke Waldo 14:05
Where you start the story determines where it can go.
If you start with deficit, "these families are struggling”, you activate cortisol without giving people a pathway to oxytocin. You get attention, maybe even alarm, but not connection. Not action.
But if you start with possibility, "this community is building something", you give people a protagonist they can root for, a conflict that feels solvable, and a resolution they can be part of.
That's the art meeting the science.
Tarik Moody, Director of Innovation and Strategy, aka The Architect who at Radio Milwaukee has cultivated a community-focused broadcast experience, faced a similar challenge when he set out to create By Every Measure, a podcast series about systemic racism in Milwaukee.
Tarik Moody 14:56
156 billion. Try to visualize how big that number is. If you could live for 156 billion minutes, you would live until you were 296,804 years old.
Luke Waldo15:08
How do you tell a story about centuries of harm without making people shut down? How do you create the cortisol, the tension, without losing the audience before you get to the oxytocin, the connection?
Tarik had a methodology.
Tarik Moody 15:22
I realized a lot of people didn't really understand systemic racism, so that was kind of the foundation of the podcast. We wanted to analyze all the different systems in Milwaukee that have affected African Americans, housing, education, all that.
So that's kind of how it started. It was kind of like, let's use this opportunity to really explain systemic racism through the lens of the history of Milwaukee and systems of banking, economics. It became like a 101 for people. Because I feel like people throw that word around without really understanding it.
Luke Waldo
Education. But not lecture.
Context. But not blame.
Tarik Moody
I don't want a podcast where, you know, non-black people felt like, awful, like, I feel bad. That was not the goal, right? Because it's systemic, not an individual's cause. It's just been in, you know? So we wanted a podcast where it's educational. Didn't make you feel bad, least personally bad, but like, maybe made you angry. What can I do about it, kind of situation. So that's kind of the planning process. It's like, how do we construct this in a way that's not like, make people feel guilty and be angry, and, you know, even though I was angry about the systems and they like, just, you know, but I wanted to make sure it's, it's, it's, it's approachable, and the people tune out like, Oh, they're blaming me, right?
Luke Waldo 17:02
How do we structure this so people don't tune out?"
That's the question every narrative change practitioner has to answer.
And Tarik's answer was brilliant: Pair the history with contemporary solutions.
Show the harm. Then show the humans working to fix it.
Cortisol, then oxytocin.
Tension, then hope.
Tarik Moody 17:24
We tried to make it more of a historical thing with personal stories than like a whole 'This is so dark'. They didn't want to go away feeling awful.
You want to feel like you're coming away that there are people doing something. And hopefully those people, whether we talked about, you know, it's been a while, like whoever we talked to, maybe someone's listening, wants to help out, wants to get engaged, or they want to share the story of somebody who's trying to do something.
Maybe someone that might inspire someone else to pick up the mantle and do something else.
That's what's kind of the goal, right? I mean, is to, I just don't want people to walk away just going, 'Damn, we're doomed,’ right?
Luke Waldo 18:13
"I just don't want people to walk away going, 'Damn, we're doomed.'"
This is education without shame.
This is how you honor the science, cortisol for attention, oxytocin for connection, while honoring the audience's dignity.
And the result?
Tarik Moody 18:24
When we put it out, I remember getting a lot of comments on Facebook saying, Thank you. You know, this is great. I remember Greater Milwaukee Foundation wanted us to do a Zoom with them, and even recently, a few months ago, like, are you going to do another season? Right? People bring it up, right? Because I think, I think people felt, I hope people felt that it was not only educational, informative and engaging, but hopefully, it felt hopeful. You know that there are people who care.
Luke Waldo 19:08
People felt hopeful.
Not because Tarik lied about the harm.
But because he paired the harm with the possibility of repair.
So far, we've talked about the science, neural coupling, cortisol, oxytocin. We've talked about the strategy, reframing, pairing problems with solutions, education without shame.
But there's a critical piece we haven't addressed yet.
The people whose stories we most need to hear, the families navigating overload, the parents in the child welfare system, the communities experiencing systemic harm, those are the people who have the most reason not to trust us.
Megan McGee has spent 15 years navigating this tension. And she's learned something crucial.
Megan McGee 20:00
So the challenge can often be that it is not easy to get those stories, and there's a host of reasons why. One will be, the people who you want to hear from, they don't necessarily trust they don't necessarily trust others. They say, how are you going to use my story? Or even, I don't have time to come and tell a story. Or, you know, if there are people that have had bad experiences where they feel in the past that they haven't been heard, they can have some good motivation to not share.
So some things that we have done, we had, we did one really great program where we partnered with some Health Griots. These are black men who are survivors of prostate cancer, and the goal was to work with them, to help them craft stories about their experiences, and then they were going to use these stories to help other men learn about you know, why is it so important to go get screened, even though it's not the fun thing. How can you know what to expect so people can be less afraid?
Now, one of the challenges there, sometimes organizations think you're going to take a couple people, you're going to give them a storytelling workshop, and then they're just going to be great storytellers and totally confident right away. They overlook the need for practice time and trust building and even the idea that being truly vulnerable can be scary.
Luke Waldo 21:22
This is where the rubber meets the road. You can understand all the neuroscience in the world. You can craft the perfect narrative frame. But if you don't have trust, you don't have a story worth telling.
Megan McGee 21:32
You have to go slow to go fast. We brought that group of men together with some story coaches for a number of sessions, and even at the end of three or four 90-minute sessions, you know, some people had gained some more confidence and were maybe more comfortable telling. But was everybody ready to tell in public? Not necessarily, and we got to respect that choice. Thinking about trauma-informed care, we have to give the participants choice and not have our own institutional ideas of we need to tell this story at a conference. That's a lot to ask, and can even be exploitive.
Luke Waldo 22:07
"Go slow to go fast."
This is the tension in all narrative change work. We want impact now. We want the story that will shift the legislator's vote, the donor's check, the public's understanding.
But trust can't be rushed. Vulnerability can't be mandated. Real storytelling takes time.
And if we're not willing to invest that time, we risk extracting stories instead of elevating voices.
Which brings us to Rinku Sen. Rinku is an Indian-American author, activist, political strategist and the executive director of Narrative Initiative.
Rinku Sen 22:47
The first lesson I see that's important for us is that you cannot recruit or even influence people with whom you do not have a relationship. You must have a relationship in order to be in any kind of conversation, and it doesn't matter if you're Oprah or your grandma, like no one is listening to either one without feeling like there's a relationship here and this person cares about me in some way. And because the relationship is key and people are complicated, there are no magic words. There's no, I think in our work at Narrative Initiative, we try to help people make decisions. Look at their situation, look at their context, look at their organization, look at their narrators and if our practice is to wait for a words that work memo from quote, unquote our side and then just repeat those words, that's not gonna do it, we're not going to win because there isn't enough relationship building in that strategy. It's all broadcast. Let me tell you what I think. It's all speaker first and not audience first.
So that's why we can be facing all this propaganda and lying and myth busting, and fact checking is not leading to what we consider to be rational decision making. It's because one, the people who need to be convinced don't think we care about them at all, and we don't have a relationship with them. And two, every rebuttal repeats the lie.
Luke Waldo 24:47
Every rebuttal repeats the lie.
This is why the science of storytelling matters so much. Because if we're just fact-checking, we're still operating in the other side's frame. We're still activating their story.
But if we build relationships first, if we go slow to go fast, as Megan says, we create the conditions where new stories can actually land.
Where neural coupling can happen.
Where cortisol can give way to oxytocin.
Where people move from "I don't trust you" to "Tell me more."
So we've covered the how. The neural coupling. The cortisol and oxytocin. The need for trust and time and trauma-informed practice.
But here's the question we started with:
Do stories actually work?
Not just theoretically. Not just in the lab.
In the real world. In policy. In systems.
The answer is yes.
And we know that because Rinku Sen has spent her career proving it.
Rinku Sen 25:49
These are the two pieces of work that I might be actually proudest of having accomplished in my life. A few months after Shattered Families came out, I remember thinking I could die today, and I would feel like I had done something. And the something in this case was keeping families together, keeping parents and children together for all of their lives.
News Media 1 26:16
One more now in August, 2010 federal agents stormed the home of Clara and Josefina, two sisters raising their three small children together. The agents handcuffed Clara in front of the kids, then loaded them into separate vehicles.
Rinku Sen 26:38
Shattered Families was a strategic communications project that came out of the nonprofit I ran. That nonprofit is now called Race Forward and our daily news site Colorlines. Our narrative goal was to shift the discussion on immigration from being entirely about law enforcement to being about families, but ultimately, we wanted to see a huge drop in parental deportations.
So we released the report in 2011. We put a number on the range of kids who were likely to be in Child Welfare at any given moment with their parents in in other countries. And so out of that report, we got direct reflection on it from President Obama to a briefing of Latino reporters that he was giving. The reporters asked him, What about this, this report and this dynamic? and he pledged to set up a new set of regulations, which he then did at the Department of Health and Human Services, at ICE and at Border Patrol.
So we followed up that report with a study of who had been among the 400,000 people deported the year before, found that half of them were parents, and the year after our report came out, all deportations went down by half from 400,000 to 200,000. It wasn't an end to mass deportation of the Obama era, but it made a big difference. So that is the strategic communications project that that we took on, that contributed to families entering the immigration chat.
Luke Waldo 28:37
Half.
Not incremental change. Not "raising awareness."
Half.
That's what happens when you pair data with story. When you center families instead of enforcement. When you create the neural coupling between decision-makers and the people their decisions affect.
From report to regulation to legislation.
From story to systems change.
That's not spin. That's not sentiment.
That's narrative change in action.
Rinku Sen 29:00
In California, the report led to a piece of legislation that would require child welfare departments to be in touch with the embassies related to the parents and really take every step they could to reunify those families.
Our greatest resource and our most open platform is conversation between people, and that will always be, in my view, the biggest source of our narrative power. And we should activate it thoughtfully and rigorously and joyfully.
Luke Waldo 29:47
So. Do stories really work? Yes.
They sync our brains. They release cortisol and oxytocin. They move us from attention to connection to action.
They reunify families. They shift policy. They cut deportations in half.
But only when we do the work. Only when we pair the science with the strategy. The data with the dignity. The urgency with the trust-building.
To go slow to go fast. To honor the timing and the humanity of the people whose stories we need to hear.
Where you start the story determines where it can go. If we start with deficit, we get shame. If we start with possibility, we get power. If we start with relationship, we get change.
I'd like to thank Jess Moyer from FrameWorks Institute, Megan McGee from Ex Fabula, Tarik Moody from Radio Milwaukee, and Rinku Sen from Narrative Initiative for sharing not just the science and strategy, but the practice of narrative change.
Join us next episode as we dive deeper into the history of narrative change in social justice movements with Rinku Sen.
You've been listening to Overloaded: Understanding Neglect.
Until then, keep asking: What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently?
If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people. This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Nathan Fink, who is responsible for our technical production. I can't express my gratitude enough to Nathan.
I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children's Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative.
Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families.
I'm Luke Waldo, your host and executive editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.