Last episode, we explored the science and art of how stories really work, how they activate our brains differently than data alone, how they create emotional resonance that moves us to action, and how the strategic craft of storytelling can shift hearts, minds, and ultimately, change systems. But here's the question that's been lingering for me throughout this season: We're not the first people to face entrenched, harmful narratives. We're not the first to ask how culture changes, how minds shift, how systems bend toward justice. So what can we learn from those who came before us? From the abolitionists who reframed enslavement as a moral crisis? From the labor organizers who shifted "individual failure" to "collective exploitation"? From the civil rights movement that transformed "separate but equal" into a demand for dignity and belonging? What lessons have our elders left us about how narrative power actually works in the messy, sustained work of social change? Today, we welcome Rinku Sen, executive director of the Narrative Initiative and social justice strategist who has spent the last several years in the archives, studying these questions. Rinku and I will explore: How modern narrative change efforts can honor the strategies and lessons learned from the social justice movements of the past; What it means to build narratives that don't just shift policy, but fundamentally change culture and power dynamics? And in our current moment of deep polarization and information saturation, how we move beyond broadcast messaging to the relationship-building that actually changes hearts and minds? Welcome to Episode 8: Hearing Our Elders to Build Better Narratives Today
Today's episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Guest:
00:14–04:00 – Luke Waldo
Building on Episode 7's exploration of storytelling science, Luke opens with a longer view: we are not the first people to face entrenched, harmful narratives. What can we learn from abolitionists who reframed enslavement as a moral crisis? From labor organizers who shifted "individual failure" to "collective exploitation"? From the civil rights movement that transformed "separate but equal" into a demand for dignity? Today's conversation turns to history as a teacher, and to Rinku Sen as its guide.
04:00–06:43 – Rinku Sen
Rinku grounds her work in a lesson from her first organizing mentor, Gary Delgado: to make real change, you need three things, organized people, organized money, and organized ideas. Narrative strategy is where we organize our ideas. It lifts up values, names causes, and imagines possibilities. She frames the Narrative Initiative's use of the word "narrative" precisely: not just stories, but a worldview, a perspective, the moral of the story. Social movements are the means through which everyone contributes to that moral, and narrative is how marginalized people speak for themselves and enable others to see them clearly.
08:06–13:25 – Luke Waldo & Rinku Sen: Shattered Families
Rinku distinguishes between strategic communications (targeted messages built around a specific policy goal, typically with a 6-12 month timeline) and the longer work of narrative change (shifting the underlying values and mental models that make certain solutions feel possible or impossible). Shattered Families was strategic communications: a 2011 investigative report from Race Forward and Colorlines that quantified how many children in the U.S. child welfare system had a parent who had been deported, a population effectively invisible in immigration debates.
14:27–21:25 – Luke Waldo & Rinku Sen: Drop the I-Word
The Drop the I-Word campaign targeted the dehumanizing use of "illegal immigrant" and "illegals" in journalism. The primary target was the Associated Press, whose style guide sets usage standards for thousands of outlets worldwide. The campaign's main story intervention was first-person "I am" narratives from undocumented immigrants themselves, elevating everyday voices into a debate previously dominated by lawyers, politicians, and law enforcement. In 2013, the AP changed its style guide, and thousands of outlets changed their language overnight.
21:25–25:28 – Rinku Sen: Four Things Movements Do
Drawing on her study of historical social justice movements, Rinku identifies four things every effective movement has done with its narrative power:
Her concrete example: the decades-long shift on domestic violence.
26:28–35:22 – Luke Waldo & Rinku Sen: Lessons for Today's Polarized Landscape
Rinku draws four lessons from historical movements for today's information-saturated environment:
35:22–42:08 – Luke Waldo & Rinku Sen: Framing as Issue Development
Rinku describes framing as a process of finding the right entry point for an audience depending on how far they are from your way of thinking. She draws on the concept of issue development from organizing: carving out a specific, winnable piece of a large problem, building a constituency around it, and proposing a concrete change. Frames need to feel organic. If "poverty is not the same as neglect" isn't landing, you try different angles, iterate, and move on.
She also insists that long-term narrative work still requires real-time action. Shattered Families introduced families as new characters into a debate previously owned by lawyers and politicians, and that opened the door to the next campaign. Short-term benchmarks still matter, even in work measured in years.
42:08–52:02 – Luke Waldo & Rinku Sen: Food, Art, and Cultural Expression
Rinku argues that food and art are not soft additions to organizing work; they are essential. Food engages all the senses, sustains life, and prolongs it, both physically and socially. Art makes the ingenuity and creativity of human beings visible to each other. Shared experiences of laughter, wonder, and pleasure embed themselves in our bodies and make isolation and hate harder to tolerate.
52:02–59:01 – Luke Waldo & Rinku Sen: The Great Unfriending and What Comes Next
Rinku identifies what she calls the "great unfriending" after 2016 as one of the defining narrative challenges of the current moment: the mass withdrawal of people from cross-partisan relationships, a reflex of isolation that directly weakens movements built on love, collectivity, and freedom. She sees a countertrend emerging since the pandemic: the reentry of mutual aid, community art, and community building as central practices of social action, not afterthoughts.
Her practical recommendations: find opportunities to eat together with people unlike you (noting the U.S. semi-quincentennial in 2026 will create many such occasions), pay attention to organizations like More Perfect Union that build power through journalism and labor organizing, and treat the absence of yard signs in your neighborhood not as apathy, but as an invitation to knock on the door.
She closes with a parting instruction: pay attention to the stories in your own life. Keep your ears open.
59:01–1:02:05 – Luke Waldo
Luke synthesizes Rinku's four lessons from historical movements and her challenge to the current moment: isolation doesn't help movements built around love, collectivity, and freedom. Our greatest resource is conversation between people, and we must activate it thoughtfully, rigorously, and joyfully. He previews Episode 9: a turn toward culture, art, music, and food with Tarik Moody, Emerald Mills Williams, Shary Tran, and Megan McGee, exploring how shared creative experience builds the relationships that make narrative change possible.
Closing Credits
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Luke Waldo 00:14
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.
Last episode, we explored the science and art of how stories really work, how they activate our brains differently than data alone, how they create emotional resonance that moves us to action, and how the strategic craft of storytelling can shift hearts, minds, and ultimately, change systems.
But here's the question that's been lingering for me throughout this season: We're not the first people to face entrenched, harmful narratives. We're not the first to ask how culture changes, how minds shift, how systems bend toward justice.
So what can we learn from those who came before us? From the abolitionists who reframed enslavement as a moral crisis? From the labor organizers who shifted "individual failure" to "collective exploitation"? From the civil rights movement that transformed "separate but equal" into a demand for dignity and belonging?
What lessons have our elders left us about how narrative power actually works in the messy, sustained work of social change?
Today, we welcome Rinku Sen, executive director of the Narrative Initiative and social justice strategist who has spent the last several years in the archives, studying these questions.
Rinku and I will explore:
How modern narrative change efforts can honor the strategies and lessons learned from the social justice movements of the past;
What it means to build narratives that don't just shift policy, but fundamentally change culture and power dynamics?
And in our current moment of deep polarization and information saturation, how we move beyond broadcast messaging to the relationship-building that actually changes hearts and minds?
Welcome to Episode 8: Hearing Our Elders to Build Better Narratives Today
Rinku Sen is a writer and social justice strategist. She is formerly the Executive Director of Race Forward and was Publisher of their award-winning news site Colorlines. Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes of recent years, including Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets changing their practice. She was also the architect of the Shattered Families report, which identified the number of kids in foster care whose parents had been deported.
Her books Stir it Up and The Accidental American theorize a model of community organizing that integrates a political analysis of race, gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other systems. As a consultant, Rinku has worked on narrative and political strategy with numerous organizations and foundations, including PolicyLink, and the ACLU. She has a long history of board service in non-profits and foundations; she currently serves on the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is the board chair of Hedgebrook, the women's writing residency.
In her current role leading Narrative Initiative, she is building a vision of true multiracial, pluralistic democracy, and helping organizers across movements learn how to saturate every story with their ideas.
Welcome Rinku, thank you for joining us today. It's wonderful having you on the podcast.
Rinku Sen 04:00
Thank you for inviting me. Luke, really thrilled to be with you.
Luke Waldo 04:05
So Rinku, as we heard in your introduction, your journey from organizer to writer and publisher to social justice advocate and leader has involved narrative change as a strategy. So take us back to the beginning and share why you have found narrative and particularly the challenging of dominant narratives so essential to your experience.
Rinku Sen 04:26
Well, my mentor in organizing when I first started out at 20 years old or so. His name is Gary Delgado, and he told me that in order to win, in order to make real change, you have to have three things, organized people, organized money and organized ideas. So narrative strategy is the place where we organize our ideas, where we lift up values that we want to have shape the society, where we point to the causes of the way things are, where we imagine possibilities; and the way we use narrative, the word itself at Narrative Initiative, is to lift up the role of a perspective, a world view, a way you see the things that happen around you and to you. In like first grade teaching terms, I think of it as the moral of the story.
So our job is not just to tell beautiful stories, but to tell beautiful stories about the set of ideas we actually want to move forward. And social movements, social justice movements, those are the means through which everybody gets to contribute to those stories, to that perspective, to that narrative and way of thinking about the world. And it's also a really significant way that movements characterize people. Who is in the way of solutions here? Who is working really hard to take care of themselves and their families? Who is exploiting that hardship, you know, for their own gain? So the characterizations, particularly of poor people, of women, of children, of black and brown people, of disabled people, narrative is how we speak for ourselves and how we enable other people to see us for ourselves.
Luke Waldo 06:43
When I when I first learned of your work and started to explore your career and the impacts of your work, I was really drawn to not only the narrative change strategies that have been employed, but also the impacts, the real, practical impacts, that they've had, right? So this, this season of our podcast is, is certain, certainly focused heavily on, what is narrative change, right? How do you develop real narrative change strategies and employ them? And also, how does narrative change lead to changes in hearts and minds, that lead to behavior change, that lead to practice change, policy change, and so on. And so that's a lot of what we're going to explore today.
And I wanted to start with the two campaigns that were mentioned in your introduction, Drop the I Word and Shattered Families in particular. I'm really curious about how you kind of imagine the relationship between narrative change and social justice movements that, again, hope to shift mental models, culture and ultimately, history. And if you can then kind of break those apart and share how you designed those campaigns, implemented them, and how you saw it shift how people thought and behaved.
Rinku Sen 08:06
I would love to do that. 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.
So with Shattered Families, I'm going to talk about that first and before, before I go into these examples, I want to say that Shattered Families is a great example of Strategic Communications, which is the set of messages and stories and data that you put forth in order to create a specific policy change. Strategic Communications is what we do when we have demands that we want systems and power brokers and public officials to meet, and there, they usually have a fairly short timeline to them, six months to a year is very common. And because in strategic comms, we don't have a ton of time to saturate the society with our big idea, we have to work with the values that are already really at play. Narrative change gives you a broader set of tactics to use and a longer runway to deal with values.
So 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, actual people, parents, children, loved ones. And we wanted to see some legislative and regulatory change come out of that report and but ultimately, we wanted to see a huge drop in parental deportations. That's where we thought this piece of work of investigative journalism could actually take us. 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 because you're in another country, it's very, very difficult to get your kids and reunify your family. So out of that report, we got direct reflection on it from President Obama…
President Obama Address 11:03
My fellow Americans, tonight, I'd like to talk with you about immigration…
Rinku Sen 11:07
…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,
President Obama Address 11:29
…if you've been in America for more than five years, if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents, if you register, pass a criminal background check and you're willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you'll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation.
Rinku Sen 11:48
One of the big problems in these situations is that the family courts would consider a deported parent essentially unfit and had in many cases, the reunification would happen in the country to which the parent had been deported. So judges would say, Oh, I'm not deporting. I'm not essentially deporting an American citizen, this child, to an inadequate country, a dangerous country, whatever stereotypes they might have about Mexico or India or Jamaica.
So 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. 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 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 13:25
Thank you for for sharing that example. It was one that really struck me as we started our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative, which is really the inspiration for the Overloaded podcast that we are on right now, we found real power in the language around family separation that really resonated for a lot of people. And there was a, I think, a rallying cry that came from unusual partners, right people that maybe traditionally wouldn't see eye to eye politically, or, you know, didn't necessarily work together across social issues. And I think a lot of that obviously comes out of the really powerful and transformational work that that you did with with Shattered Families. So I appreciate that frame. So let's now shift to Drop the I Word and the work that was done there and how you again, developed, designed and implemented that campaign.
Rinku Sen 14:27
There's a chapter in the book Liberation Stories, which came out this year, that covers a lot of detail about that campaign. Chapter that Roberto Lovato, who was our senior advisor on the campaign, and I wrote. Our goal with Drop the I Word was to disrupt the dehumanization of undocumented immigrants and all the people who could be mistaken for the same or are attached to undocumented immigrants. And we thought that journalism was the terrain in which we could reveal the bias embedded and carried out by the use of that phrase, of the phrase illegal immigrant, and of illegals as a noun, and so bias and inaccuracy were the professional tools we took to journalism to fight this dehumanization.
And those words had been really, really weaponized by anti-immigrant organizations Numbers USA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform based on a Words that Work memo that pollster and communications researcher Frank Luntz had written in 2004, which said Americans actually are not that concerned about immigration, but they are concerned about law and order, and they are particularly concerned about terrorism following the events of September 11. So your best bet if you want to limit immigration is to make it all about, here we go again, law enforcement and really, really hammer home those two words in particular.
So we targeted the Associated Press, because the AP’s style guide sets the usage for 1000s, if not close to a million outlets around the entire world. So if the Associated Press changed their practice, that would create a domino effect, we knew. So we chose a target. This is pretty classic organizing campaign stuff, but the goal here was not public policy, it was private policy. The Associated Press is as part of civil society, and it was to change the characterization of immigrants.
So we are our big story intervention was to have people write stories about who they were, who they actually are, I am stories. One of my favorites of those was from a fourth grader who made a video about the campaign for a social studies assignment, and let us put it up on that website, United for the Dream in Charlotte, a youth organization of undocumented teenagers, challenged the Charlotte Observer again and again through that campaign. And in 2013, The Associated Press, under pressure from readers, from journalists, including Jose Antonio Vargas, who had come out as undocumented in a big cover story in The New York Times Magazine, all of those things came together to lead to that change.
Media Clip 18:09
We turn now to a major news story about how the news is reported. The Associated Press has announced that it has dropped the phrase illegal immigrant from its style book. The influential AP Style Book is the definitive guide for reporters and editors, both within the news cooperative and beyond.
Rinku Sen 18:26
And then everything changed at once. All those 1000s of outlets the next day had different language. And I remember right after that victory, a veteran talking to a veteran, Asian American veteran whose mother was in deportation proceedings, and who said, we're just so proud of having with you made this happen. It just makes such a huge difference in my family's life as we, as we fight this fight.
Luke Waldo 18:59
So there's, there's so much there, Rinku that I find both fascinating and really practical. You named, named a few things as kind of classic organizing techniques and so on. But I don't know that all of our listeners have a deep understanding of classic organizing techniques, so I appreciate you kind of walking through those. But you know, from the beginning, you talking about how, how the targeted campaign to link immigration to law and order, right, that these things, again, aren't accidental. Well, the counter narrative, therefore can't be accidental, right?
And so you talk about these, okay, one, let's pick a target. As you pointed out, this kind of classic organizing technique, but understanding that if we're going to tip the dominoes, let's start with the biggest domino. In this case, it's the AP. I think those are really powerful takeaways for our listeners to be like, Okay, if we really want to make a change, we need to identify the opportunities to have greater influence, right? And and so that that story, I think, is, is really powerful. And then, of course, finishing it with the real human impacts of this very dedicated and targeted campaign. So thank you. Thank you very much for sharing that.
So I want us to continue to explore this, because I think each example that you've provided really gives us more to think about and more learning opportunities. And so I would love for us to continue to kind of explore this history of this relationship between narrative change and social justice movements, because I know, as we've talked, you've really dedicated the last couple of years of your life to dive deeply into some of the more transformational social justice movements in this country and I think across the world at this point, and trying to understand what narrative change efforts kind of led to some of these very significant historical movements breaking through, right?
But how did narrative change serve as a critical strategy to empower social justice movements to ultimately change society? And I'll just follow that with kind of how, and this might be part of your answer. But how do stories create a sense of belonging and inclusion and break through some of these harmful, very dominant historical narratives?
Rinku Sen 21:25
Yeah, this is such an interesting question, Luke. I find myself really just fascinated and wishing I was a historian and could spend all of my time reading archives. I am thinking there are four things that all of the movements I've studied have done with their narrative power.
The first thing is they recruited a constituency. They recruited people into movement who would do things, who would take action, who would talk to other people, who would boycott products, who would smuggle, literally smuggle people into freedom. So they would identify who had stakes and create some kind of shared identity among those people, and the stories had to enable that. They had to be activating and recruiting stories.
The second thing they did is polarized choices. There simply is not a way around this that you know, we cannot meet polarizing narratives with entirely non-polarizing narratives, because we are making choices about people's lives based on our values, and if unification is the only goal, we can easily unify around some very limited, horrible choices that have terrible consequences for people. So movements use their narrative power to polarize the correct set of choices. We’re about enslavement, or we’re about freedom? We’re about just you or we’re about all of us looking out for each other.
So the third thing they do is change the characters. They change who belongs in the story, what roles they play, who the protagonist is, who the villain is. So they use stories to recast people.
And then finally, they redistribute discursive power, which is about who gets attention, who gets to read and write, who gets to speak, where, who gets to listen. So they they redistribute the spaces and the tools through which stories are shared, and use that power throughout, often from generation to generation.
Media Clip 24:06
Today, the National Woman's party lobbies for the 26th amendment to guarantee women equal rights under the law. That amendment would make women people in a legal sense, for the first time.
Rinku Sen 24:20
I'll just give you a super quick example around domestic violence. So up until the 1970s the way that battering or wife beating was thought of was under a theme of a man's home is his castle. It was private and it was patriarchal. Whatever happens in that home is up to the man, and over time, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, feminists change that to women have rights, and we're watching. So they took what was a private terrain of the man's home, and they made it public. They moved it out into the public, and they made it feminist. So you went from private and patriarchal to public and feminist through protests, legislative demands, consciousness raising, groups, shelters, journalism, art, all of that, every tool available to create a shift in the way people understand violence against women.
Luke Waldo 25:28
So thank you again for really breaking it down into these kind of four key lessons learned right that have kind of crossed over these many different kind of historical movements that have that have led to real transformational change for, oftentimes, a very marginalized or oppressed group of people. We have no shortage today of polarization, and I thought that was particularly striking, right, that one of the kind of core takeaways here is that polarization and polarizing our message is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a really critical thing, and so I would, I would love to hear and not just that, because that's one of the four points that you made. But how do you see the lessons learned from from those historical examples informing today's narrative change efforts, obviously, in this deeply polarized and also information saturated society?
Rinku Sen 26:28
Yeah, I think 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 and make decisions.
And if we 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. So people who really rely on logic and rational thinking and who imagine ourselves as rational beings, which is a bit overblown, we tend to think that it's all a debate, it's all argumentation. Arguments are part of narrative, but not all of it, and so all of that leads us to poor use of the narrative real estate we do have, the resources we do have, the time we get the social media posts that run dinner table conversation.
We focus too much on the problem, because we think people need to be convinced of the problem. We use too much jargon, and we talk about policy instead of people. So my lessons from movements are you, you have to be about the solution and hope. You have to talk like people talk the people you want to make into a constituency. You have to talk like they talk. And always it's the people first and the policy second.
Luke Waldo 29:46
That was so valuable for me, personally, you know, in this, in this very, again, polarized very oftentimes feeling like very high stakes, right moment in our history, in our politics, in kind of our social environments and so on, I find myself having these, oftentimes, again, high stakes conversations, even in oftentimes with people that I'm very close with, people I grew up with, people within my family. So the relationships are there. But to your point, there are ways that I approach those conversations, oftentimes defensively, oftentimes, as you've pointed out, where I'm, where I'm working from their frame, right, the frame that I'm trying to disprove or undermine or overcome.
And again, to your point, I, you know, I live and breathe this work, and this space, a lot of policy work and so on. And so my language, as you pointed out, is oftentimes not approachable for a lot of people that I'm trying to persuade or convince or move. And so those insights, I think will be really helpful. If they're helpful for me, I know that they'll be helpful for other people listening to this, this conversation.
So I want to, I want to kind of riff off that a bit, because, leading up to our conversation, you had shared recent research article from the University of California Berkeley that suggests that appeals to the historical kind of civil rights frame right which you know many people, of course, in this country, elevate as like the platinum example of social movements, right? But that that frame at times can actually backfire, making present day hardship seem less significant by comparison. So as a strategist committed to learning from the past, how do you advise organizers, advocates, people listening today, to navigate the power and the potential peril of invoking historical frames?
Rinku Sen 31:52
Yeah, the easiest way I can put this, and the way I've been thinking about it for myself, as a person trying to make change now, not 1955, is that you have to do your own work. You have to do the work of figuring out what the values are of your movement. Which values are key to turning, to making room for the kinds of solutions that are right for today, and that we that you want to be seeing established. And that there is kind of an ease and reflex in adopting civil rights as our mothership, our narrative mothership, that can actually make us kind of lazy about doing everything we need to do.
We need to figure out what the questions are that we are calling. We need to help people see themselves in in community. And we have challenges to community that weren't challenges in 1955, screens being the biggest, I think. And we have people with their own stories and experiences and hard work to do so, part of the problem with invoking historic movements, which I'm not going to say, never do it, but think about why, why you're doing it, and what you're looking to convey.
The problem is that, you know, even if we are real students of history, we're still subject to the ways what American culture does to history. So it creates one out of many heroic organizer, heroic leader stories. It creates a reverence for the role of celebrities, rather than the role of everyday people whose names we’ll never know. It sees movements as a series of big events, instead of all these little meetings and actions and boycotts.
So when we put a movement on a pedestal, I see this happening a little bit with marriage equality today. Everybody's like, how do we do what marriage, what people did to win marriage equality? It's hard to resist because we admire, but we also flatten and we, you know, we, we capitalize, we, we turn these stories into stories of capitalism, or we, capitalism, turn them into bastardizations of the actual story, and the work is hard and it's daily and and it is creative, so you can't really borrow it from somebody else. You can be inspired, you can learn, but you have to create your own.
Luke Waldo 35:22
I want to go I want to get kind of in the minutia a little bit one more time with some of the examples that you've already shared. So in your experience, particularly with campaigns like Drop the I Word, where you created a targeted reframe, is there a distinction that you see between a successful, specific reframing effort like changing illegal to undocumented or immigrant, and the broader use of a historical frame like civil rights and what specific features make a frame successful in shifting mental models today, especially again, in this very information saturated environment?
Rinku Sen 36:03
So I think that when you're thinking about how to frame a campaign or a long term effort, something you know you're going to have to be after for a long time, like getting rid of neglect as a reason for separating families, for example. If you know that you're up against several 100 Years of conditioning to see neglect in a certain way, then what you're going to be doing at any given point in your effort is thinking about what problem you're naming, how audiences that you want to activate are seeing that problem now and what you need to shift in their emotion plus evidence basket to move them toward your policy solutions and your goals.
So you know, you don't want to be landscaping constantly and never trying it to actually intervene. But I think if something very significant has happened in your field, that's a time that you want to think about framing and what might make sense to people now that didn't a month ago or vice versa. You know something we were saying three months ago might not make sense to people now, because a new framework has entered, or it's become too dangerous to use our old frameworks, or, you know, something significant has happened.
I think frames have to make sense to people. They have to feel kind of organic. If you find that to say poverty is not the same as neglect is not like landing with who you need to see it that way, then you're going to try a lot of different ways. And you know, all of our problems are big and organizing. There's a process called issue development, where you look at the giant problem and you try to carve out issues from it. Issues are where you can propose a change and build a constituency that might have enough power to win it. So you you carve out a section of the problem that you think you can speak to or organize around, and you build your, that becomes your frame, your entry into engaging people on that problem. So framing is a similar process where really you're looking for the appropriate entry point, depending on how far your audience is from your way of thinking at the moment.
Luke Waldo 39:08
Yeah, that that that framing is particularly moving and inspiring, because we, as you pointed out, right we In this season have had a very deep dive conversation with Prudence Beidler Carr from the American Bar Association, talking about, right, this now very long, well established history, right, where our laws and our policies have essentially conflated, as you pointed out, not only poverty and neglect, but really a certain type of poverty, a racialized poverty, in many cases, right? And as you point out that the reframe is going to take time if we're talking about something that was really established in our kind of legal history in the early 1960s and here we are in 19 or in 2025, that that untangling does not happen in the matter of months.
But as you pointed out, right, what I think is really challenging in this work, and why we're exploring it so deeply in this season, is that I think we too often because of lack of capacity or bandwidth, or, you know, for that matter, kind of professional support, we land on one thing that we think is going to work, and we put all our eggs in that basket, right? And I really appreciate that perspective that you need to come at it from a lot of different angles, right, and try things and see what lands, and see where there's power building, where in other cases, it falls flat, and move on right, and iterate. So it's, it's, it's, that's really helpful.
Rinku Sen 40:43
I do want to say one other practical thing. So just because this is long term work, this narrative strategy business, it doesn't mean that we just can, like, sit around and think about it. We have to actually do things now in the moment. So the the tying the short term choices to the long term goal, benchmarks still really matter in this work, as it would in any other. So I think with Shattered Families and Drop the I Word, we thought, well, Shattered Families can introduce families, a new set of characters and daily reality and a lot of new narrators, everyday narrators, into a debate that was entirely between like law enforcement and lawyers and politicians at that point. So then, after you've done that, let families enter the story. What can you do then, after that? What would that change and having a constituency prepared to stand up for that, what's the next idea you might be able to take on the following year, two years from now? So, so we do it is we do still need to think in in time, in real time, and work in real time.
Luke Waldo 42:08
You've talked a lot about the importance of relationships, connection and finding groups with whom we can build power and influence through these targeted campaigns. I'm curious how you can use cultural expression such as food and art as facilitators of narrative change?
Rinku Sen 42:28
Well, most people I know like tasty things and pretty things and food and art take you into the not just the tasty and the pretty, as in a great experience, but the word experience is kind of key. I think food and art are two of the things that sustain life, right? You can't, you can't do life without food and art also prolongs our lives. Making art prolongs our lives, and engaging with art prolongs our lives. And certainly the social activity that food and art can often anchor, that social activity prolongs our lives.
So I think people are attracted to food and art and in community settings as well as alone, because deep down, our bodies know these things are going to prolong my life and make it happier, even if we're not consciously making a decision about that. And I think that they reveal, they let us experience the mind-blowing innovation and creativity and ingenuity of ourselves and other human beings, and they give us a chance to get our bodies active.
So if you experience communion, you know not just through thinking about it, but being, having the physical experience of it. If you laugh together with people in a group, because good jokes, or you, you know, watch fireworks and go ooh together, those experiences embed themselves in our bodies, and they make isolation and hate harder to tolerate.
Luke Waldo 44:31
Yeah, I mean, when I met you, you have a very, very similar, at least kind of, if you don't mind me sharing, kind of childhood and immigration story to my wife, who is also an Indian woman, came to the US at a very early age, right? And, you know, in our conversation and my, you know, my learning more about you, right? You're kind of immigration, you know, assimilation, right, finding your identity stories have a lot of overlap and and a lot of that courses through this kind of, you know, I've heard you tell your story about food and taking food to school, and, you know, I've heard those stories many, many times with, you know, from, from my wife, and so I'm just really fascinated to hear more about how that has really informed in many ways your career, and how you put yourself in into your work. So I don't know if there's anything in particular that you would love to share about your own kind of personal journey with cultural expression, kind of in this narrative change work that that you think would resonate with our audience.
Rinku Sen 45:34
Well, evoking my immigrant childhood is is key to getting me to talk about things. So I arrived in 1972 to Ellenville, New York, a rural town in the Hudson River Valley. And at the time, there was an aluminum factory in that town where my father worked, and the population was white and Latino, agricultural and me, so I learned to speak English in a two room schoolhouse, and then I was a child of the 70s, you know, with all of the pop culture and everything. So I think, you know, until I was 30, I thought it was, it wouldn't have really occurred to me, until then, to wear Indian clothing to work events, because it wasn't so much that I thought it was wrong or something, although I do remember a friend asking me, why don't you ever wear these things? But it it wasn't like part of how I saw myself being an American.
So as I've gotten older, being able to in my own self, re-embrace all of the aesthetics of my own culture. That's been really fun and and it's been part of growing up, you know, growing up and becoming an adult and sort of managing your identity in ways that that you could sustain. I couldn't sustain like an entirely Western wardrobe for so many reasons, and I've, I think food has just been the way I've bonded with so many people around the world, people who I've had one meal with and never seen again or spoken to again, to people I eat with every week. And there's something about the pleasure of food that there isn't really anything else like it. So food engages literally all of the senses. You can't usually lick a painting, you know, but you can lick your plate clean. And smart organizers, smart narrators, make food pretty central. All of the smart ones I've ever known have made food pretty central to their lives, including their work and community lives.
Luke Waldo 48:21
Yeah, I being born and raised in the Midwest to sixth, seventh generation, you know, white parents and a white family. You know, to be blunt, food was not central to our experience, right? And then I lived out of the country for seven years. I was in Spain and I was in Bolivia, I discovered cultural expression through food in a very different way in that experience, but it really wasn't and interestingly, my experience with my wife, aside from just being able to learn more about her story and her family story through their food, right, and what food meant to kind of bringing people together.
It was interesting that the first time I ever saw the real power of food to your point, kind of the point of our conversation today is like getting people to come together and really tell their stories differently. I ran a group for survivors of domestic violence and their children. And when I inherited the group, I had previously been a facilitator of the group, and then I inherited the group as the coordinator and ran the group in collaboration with my wife, who was like, Look, we can't just, you know, we can't just have moms who have had a really busy day somehow get, you know, on the bus or get here with their two or three kids who have just been through something deeply traumatic, we can't just feed them pizza and subs every week, right? Let's demonstrate to them that we really value them and we value the time that they have to sit with their kids in their very busy lives, you eat something that's worth sitting at the table together around.
So we went to some of the best restaurants that we have here in Milwaukee, and went to the owners and said, Hey, would you be interested in providing, you know, a family meal once every five, six weeks? Or, you know, two times a group, right? And they were down. And it was remarkable how the energy in that room shifted. It went from we're going to show up, kids are going to scarf down a piece of pizza, and then they're going to bounce off the walls until we break out into groups. Now it was suddenly first and foremost, like, this is amazing. Thank you for showing us that you care, right? That you've brought together this, this amazing meal. And, my goodness, my kids like want to sit and talk about their day with me now, because they want seconds. They're really enjoying it, right? And there's just, for me, it was the it wasn't just okay, I mean, one for me, it was really important for me to tell the people that were coming and spending their evening with us, that we valued them, and that was clear through that expression of food, but it was also like their behavior literally changed because of feeling valued, feeling seen, and having that opportunity to kind of share with with their families and and with one another, right and come across.
So a story kind of off, off topic at some level. But it was, it was really, it was really quite powerful. So alright, so I want to kind of finish our conversation today by kind of acknowledging that your innovation in kind of the art and science of narrative change and social justice drives you to push up against new frontiers, and you've confronted them time and time again in your career, I'm sure. What are some examples of this that you celebrate, and what are some lessons learned that you've taken away that you could share with our audience today?
Rinku Sen 52:02
Well, I think in the modern era, there's a whole narrative around politics, morality and relationship that really requires the attention of thoughtful people. I think the post 2016, the great unfriending, what is now known as the great unfriending, the kind of rift between, let's say, Trump voters and Clinton voters, in ‘16 and ‘20 and ‘24 after the first Donald Trump victory, there was, I don't know if it was a strategy or just like an emotional reflex, among millions of people, but folks stopped talking to each other…
Media Clip 53:01
For people on both sides of the protests, it's the end of the road for many relationships, both in real life, ‘I feel like maybe we don't belong each other's lives’ and on social media, by unfriending contacts on Facebook.
Rinku Sen 53:14
…and isolation usually doesn't help movements built around love and collectivity and compassion and equality and freedom. So isolation doesn't help that. And so I'm very interested now to find really, since the pandemic, the reentry of community service, community art, community, building mutual aid in in relation to organizing and social action. I think that's a trend that's going to continue, and it is the other lesson from history about how movements do the best work and get to the most people. And then, you know, we don't own too many platforms, us, but, but we're not at zero. And 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 54:45
I think that’s a really provocative and thoughtful recommendation and suggestion that we really challenge ourselves to overcome some of the what, I oftentimes think of more, I’m one of those people that's now becoming less and less present on social media platforms, so I think of it even more now, because when I walk through my neighborhood, it's the it's the yard sign division, right? It's like, am I going to talk to that person with that yard sign, right? And how do we overcome that, right? And I think you're absolutely right, right? We're not, we're not, we're not advancing any social movement if we're just preaching to the choir, right? We need to bring in a whole new congregation that might be skeptical of what we're singing or what we're preaching. That's a hard thing to do. It's hard thing to come back from right. As we've become more mistrustful, more polarized, you know, arguably in certain corners, more hateful across our society.
And so you might not have one off the top of your head, but I'm curious if the if there are any particular examples where you are seeing movements, campaigns, communities that are like, You know what? We aren't friends, we wouldn't be friends on Facebook, but we're going to get together one, you know, on Mondays at the local coffee shop, and we're going to talk, and we're going to talk like people that don't have yard signs that would keep us from, you know, knocking on each other's door.
Rinku Sen 56:22
Yeah, I think I mean next year is the semi-quintessential, or 2026 is the semi-quincentennial of the country. And there will be lots of official events whose flavor, I think we can predict. But there, some of the things I've seen are people just putting together lots of food events. There are going to be many places to eat together next year with people who are not exactly like you. And I encourage us all to go to do as many of those as we can. I love the work that More Perfect Union does they, they're journalists, and they cover labor organizing, and I think in workplaces and among coworkers, there's a ton of people just figuring out how to do it, how to get the thing done. You know, in my neighborhood, actually, there are fewer yard signs. There was a distinct shift before the ‘24 election, and I take that as an invitation from my neighbors to go talk to them.
Luke Waldo 57:37
Well, I think that's a great place to wrap right is, let's building off that last conversation about food and culture. Let's, let's find opportunities to eat together, to share right, to share food, to break bread, and to talk again, right? And to find some common ground and find humanity again in one another, especially those that we've maybe unfriended in 2016 there's, there are opportunities to find common ground again. So we've had a really, really thought provoking, really inspiring conversation. Is there anything Rinku that we did not talk about, that you wanted to talk about before we say goodbye?
Rinku Sen 58:16
The only thing I'll say is that it's important to pay attention to the stories in your own life and around you. Both Shattered Families and Drop the I Word came out of stories I heard and my colleagues heard in the course of being with people. So you never know what's going to give you a way in to the things you, the ideas you want to organize around. And so keep your keep your ears open.
Luke Waldo 59:01
Rinku Sen has given us frameworks and strategies grounded in history, tested in the field, and honest about what this work actually requires.
She reminded us that movements throughout history have done four critical things with their narrative power: they recruited constituencies and built authentic relationships, they polarized choices, they changed who belongs in the story, and they shifted narrative power, who gets to speak, where, and to whom.
Rinku also challenged us to reflect critically on how yesterday’s movements built on shared values and trust have splintered more and more today into isolation and division. She showed us that isolation doesn't help movements built around love, collectivity, compassion, equality, and freedom. Our greatest resource, our most open platform, remains conversation between people. We must activate it thoughtfully, rigorously, and joyfully.
Which brings us to some vital questions for our next episode: If narrative change requires relationship-building, what are the most powerful ways to forge connection and shared humanity? How do we create the conditions for those conversations Rinku is calling us toward? What role do art, music, and food play in fostering the sense of belonging required for collective action?
Throughout history, movements have known something essential: that culture, food, art, music, create the connective tissue that makes collective action possible. That eating together, creating together, experiencing beauty together embeds itself in our bodies and makes isolation, mistrust, and hate harder to tolerate.
In our next episode, we move into these creative space of culture, art, music, and food, speaking with changemakers like Tarik Moody, Emerald Mills-Williams, Shary Tran, and Megan McGee who are using these shared human experiences to build the powerful relationships that make narrative change possible.
You've been listening to Overloaded: Understanding Neglect.
Until next time, 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.