When we started this season, I asked a simple question: What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently? We've spent these episodes exploring that question from every angle. We've heard how dominant narratives get stuck in the past—how poverty became neglect in federal law, how the "monster" frame lets society off the hook, how mandated reporting leads to surveillance instead of support. We've learned that narratives aren't just stories we tell—they're patterns in our thinking. They're the invisible architecture that shapes how we see families in crisis, how we design our systems, and what we believe is possible. And we've heard from people doing the hard work of changing those narratives: Rinku Sen, learning from social justice movements. Dr. Pegah Faed, building community pathways to support instead of child welfare investigations. Desmond Meade, Pardeep Singh Kaleka and Claudia Rowe, refusing the "monster" and enemy narratives to instead dig into complexity and build relationships across divides. So, how do we actually do this? How do we move from harmful narratives to constructive ones? How do we measure whether it's working? And most importantly—how do we maintain hope when the work is slow, when we face backsliding, when the dominant narratives feel overwhelming? Today, Jess Moyer from the FrameWorks Institute returns to help us synthesize so much of what we've learned this season and chart a path forward. Because if narrative change is about tilling the soil—preparing the ground for new ways of thinking to grow—then we need to understand exactly what we're planting and how to tend it. Jess has been our guide throughout this season, helping us understand the mechanics of how narratives work. Today, she helps us move from diagnosis to action. From understanding what's broken to building what could be. This conversation asks us to consider: How do we tell stories of hope without spinning the truth? How do we acknowledge that systems are rigged for many people while building collective will to fix them? How do we balance urgency with patience when narrative change is measured in decades, not months? And perhaps most importantly: How do we know this work is actually making a difference? This is episode 14: Offering Up a Positive Vision.
Host: Luke Waldo
Co-Pilot / Guest: Jessica Moyer – FrameWorks Institute
Clip Speakers:
00:07–03:15 – Luke Waldo – Setting the Stage: From Harmful Narratives to Action
Luke reflects on the season’s central question: "What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently?". He recaps the season's exploration of "monster frames," the "surveillance vs. support" dichotomy, and the "invisible architecture" of narratives that shape systems. He introduces the shift for this finale: moving from diagnosis to action and chart a path forward for narrative change .
03:15–05:27 – Jessica Moyer – Framing as an Ambitious Endeavor
Jessica Moyer returns to serve as "co-pilot," framing narrative change as a decade-long strategy rather than a quick fix. She emphasizes that the goal is moving toward a space of hope and innovation, even amidst deep social polarization and mistrust of institutions.
05:27–12:04 – Jessica Moyer – “Humans Winning”: Countering Fatalism through Reframing
Jess explains why stories about "humans winning" are essential.
13:42–18:16 – Jessica Moyer – Framing as Art and Science
Luke asks how storytelling ensures that data isn't lost but delivered effectively.
19:13–21:35 – Jessica Moyer – The Missing Story of Healthy Development
Jess identifies a key dominant mindset: that healthy development is the "natural norm".
22:17–25:22 – Jessica Moyer – Lessons from Tobacco: From Vice to Defective Product
Jess provides a classic example of successful narrative shift: tobacco.
25:22–31:13 – The Evolution of Worthiness: From Support to Surveillance
Luke and Jess examine how the framing of public assistance has shifted over time, using an example from Prudence Beidler Carr of the ABA Center on Children and the Law.
31:13–43:20 – Filling the Blanks: Navigating the “System is Rigged” Narrative
Luke explores the "system is rigged" mindset, which FrameWorks Institute research shows is widely held across the political spectrum .
45:44–49:12 – Collective Efficacy: Proving That Change is Possible
Jess highlights the importance of "Collective Efficacy", the belief that the public can actually change systems.
51:38–1:05:29 – Productive vs. Toxic Mindsets
Jess and Luke discuss how to diagnose the cultural "mindsets" at play.
1:05:29 – Luke Waldo – Closing Thoughts: Tilling the Soil for Well-being
Luke synthesizes the shift from a "protective, suspicion-based narrative" of child abuse to a "proactive, constructive narrative" of family well-being. He concludes the season with the metaphor of "tilling the soil", creating the conditions for new ways of thinking and collective action to grow .
Closing Credits
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Luke Waldo00:07
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.
Throughout this season, I have asked a simple question: What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently? We've spent this season and these episodes exploring that question from every angle. We've heard how dominant narratives get stuck in the past.
Media Clip01:08
Latest reports from the Japanese say that,,,
Luke Waldo01:10
Poverty became neglect in federal law.
Prudence Beidler Carr 01:12
The Flemming rule, right? You can discriminate against a family based on their unworthiness for public support, as long as you remove that child from the home.
Luke Waldo 01:20
How the monster frame monster lets society off the hook.
Claudia Rowe 01:26
This person is a monster.
Luke Waldo01:28
How mandated reporting leads to surveillance instead of support.
Valerie Frost01:30
Right now on this call, CPS could come knock on my door. They could go pick my kids up from the school.
Luke Waldo01:34
We've learned that narratives aren't just stories we tell, they're patterns in our thinking. They're the invisible architecture that shapes how we see families in crisis, how we design our systems, and what we believe is possible. And we've heard from people doing the hard work of changing those narratives. Rinku Sen learning from social justice movements.
Rinku Sen01:54
Women have rights, and we're watching.
Luke Waldo01:57
Dr. Pegah Faed building community pathways to support instead of child welfare investigations.
Dr. Pegah Faed02:04
That triggers reporting even when there's really little concern for a child's safety.
Luke Waldo02:09
Desmond Meade, Pardeep Singh Kaleka, and Claudia Rowe refusing the monster and enemy narratives to instead dig into complexity and build relationships across divides.
Pardeep Singh Kaleka 02:21
If violence really has no roots, then healing has no path.
Luke Waldo02:27
So, how do we actually do this? How do we move from harmful narratives to constructive ones? How do we measure whether it's working, and most importantly, how do we maintain hope when the work is slow, when we face backsliding, when the dominant narratives feel overwhelming. Today, Jess Moyer from the Frameworks Institute returns to help us synthesize so much of what we've learned this season and chart a path forward. Because if narrative change is about tilling the soil, preparing the ground for new ways of thinking to grow, then we need to understand exactly what we're planting and how to tend it. Jess has been our guide throughout the season, helping us understand the mechanics of how narratives work. Today, she helps us move from diagnosis to action, from understanding what's broken to building what could be.
Jessica Moyer03:15
I love that setup, actually, because you're right. What we're talking about is kind of an ambitious endeavor, endeavor, endeavor.
Luke Waldo03:22
Our conversation asks us to consider, how do we tell stories of hope without spinning the truth? How do we acknowledge that systems are rigged for many people while building collective will to fix them? How do we balance urgency with patience when narrative change is measured in decades, not months, and perhaps most importantly, How do we know this work is actually making a difference?
This is episode 14, Offering Up a Positive Vision.
Jess, welcome back. Thank you again for serving as my co-pilot on this season.
Jessica Moyer04:00
Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed the conversation so much so far, and, and look forward to keep it going.
Luke Waldo04:07
Great. And so we are going to today really focus, as I mentioned, on how we move from these dominant historical narratives into more of a space of hope, innovation around systems change, in particular, while also acknowledging that we are in this oftentimes very volatile kind of narrative space, and certainly social and cultural space in our country that has deep polarization and also pretty deep mistrust of many of our systems and institutions, and so we're going to explore quite a bit of the Frameworks Institute research of late in that space, and ultimately end our conversation with some practical next steps for our listeners and our audience. So, with that, we're going to start with. A question in which we argue that a narrative of hope is a strategy, not a spin, and Tshaka Barrows highlights in this season the need for stories of humans winning.
Tshaka Barrows05:10
There's a real shortage of examples of us figuring ourselves out.
Luke Waldo05:16
Can you share a Frameworks-tested example of a positive solutions-oriented story that was proven to be more effective than a problem-focused story, and explain why it worked?
Jessica Moyer05:27
Yeah, I love the framing itself of humans winning and stories about humans winning. I think that's a great way to think and talk about it, and I couldn't agree with Shaka more that we need more of those, and we've actually tested lots of different, in lots of different cases, how you can move from a problem-focused story to a solutions-focused story. There's, I mean, maybe a good place to start is that those humans winning stories work in a lot of different ways, they do a lot of different types of good, good things to, you know, advance the conversation. For one thing, are really effective at kind of combating stereotypes, negative thinking about people. It's so easy to talk about people as the problem, but we're, if we're talking about humans winning from the get-go, we're bringing people into the story, but as part of the solution, we're seeing people as the agents for positive change, and that counters fatalistic thinking more broadly. It's also really easy for us, kind of as a society, to slip into just sort of a resignation to big social problems…
Tarik Moody06:40
Like how do we strike this in a way that's not like make people guilty and be angry, and you know, even though I was angry.
Jessica Moyer06:49
It’s hard to feel like we like things can change fundamentally, and we can make big shifts, big positive shifts in our society, in our lives, but humans' stories about humans winning counter that feeling, those sort of fatalistic tendencies, and maybe most importantly, they build understanding about how change can happen. They help us build up the pictures in our minds about what change looks like and what the process entails, and we start to see ourselves in that picture, so a particular example that comes to my mind came up as part of a project that we set out to do. This was actually a handful of years ago now. 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 do poverty. We were specifically looking at concentrated urban poverty.
In the case of this project, we were working in collaboration with an organization, a network called Purpose Built Communities, but some of the some of what we encountered when we set out on this endeavor to reframe poverty were things like that, it, what it did was surface mindsets that we hold as a culture around poverty, so one is that poverty is one of those problems that will always be with us, it's hard to even imagine a world poverty doesn't exist, and that in itself is a roadblock. It's a thing that makes talking about the potential for change and change, you know, actions that need to be taken a little bit harder to work into the conversation, and there's even a sense that poverty is natural, like that, you know, we will always, we have always had, and we'll always have rich and poor, and that's sort of a way that we organize ourselves as a society into groups, and we almost need those different social classes. There's again, this is one of those sort of implicit mindsets that we hold, not necessarily an opinion that folks would assert or say, but again, that's working against the goal, and then the biggest sort of hurdle here was that the concept of poverty is highly racialized, so even in getting into the work of trying to have a conversation about poverty, we quickly ran into really toxic, harmful, racialized stereotypes…
Claudia Rowe09:23
…a demonization of certain kinds of families, right, only certain families of certain economic classes, and often certain races…
Jessica Moyer09:31
…especially when we're talking about concentrated urban poverty, there's almost sometimes even, and we saw this in kind of pop up in lots of different ways throughout the research process primarily through coded language, but there's oftentimes even a conflation between blackness and poverty. We found that even just using the word poverty has a way of making people think about poor people rather than poverty as a social issue.
Two, and those poor people that kind of are conjured in the public mind tend to be black people, so that this could be a much longer story, and I could kind of walk through all the different sort of changes we made along the way. This was a real learning process for us, 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, a 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 a disinvestment and under investment for years or even decades to work together to to establish third spaces where folks can get together and build relationships and celebrate their culture and and make their surroundings inviting and safe and sites of joy and expression and and health, 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, 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 focus, where we put the emphasis, and it was just, 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 Waldo12:04
Yeah, what is so compelling about Frameworks Institute's work is that your work sits at the intersection of the art of storytelling, what we oftentimes think of in art, and the science of data, right, getting a sense as to how those stories or those narratives are landing with people, as you pointed out in the last example, and in previous conversations we've had in the United States, there has always been this kind of concept, this narrative of the will always be winners and losers, and you know, when I think about, in particular, this conversation about poverty, we had a guest earlier this season, Dr. Pegah Faed from Safe and Sound, and she shared in her work that there's this key finding that poverty-linked reports make up the vast majority of their hotline calls, right, so we're talking about people being concerned about child maltreatment, and in essence, they're really calling about families that are living in poverty.
So, given that the ultimate goal for this podcast, and for many of our many of our guests, is some form of systems change, which will require that policymakers and leaders act on some of this evidence. How does the framework's methodology ensure that a compelling story acts not as a distraction from data, but as the essential delivery mechanism that makes this kind of complex systemic evidence about, for example, poverty and neglect, actually comprehensible, memorable, and actionable for the public.
Jessica Moyer13:42
This is a fun question for me to kind of unpack. I love thinking about framing as both an art and a science, and it sort of particularly resonates with me because I'm a researcher now, but my first degree was in art, and I like to think about pulling in the creative and the, you know, the emotional aspects, the expressive aspects. I agree, both of those are super important, and evidence is really important from the position of social change and social advocacy. I think you know we have to be curious, we have to be observant, we have to measure, but when we lean into an evidence-based approach that also comes with some caveats, I think.
So, one thing is evidence always requires interpretation. We have seen in lots of different projects that we've done where we've shared a statistic or a fact or a piece of data with a group of research participants that we always, I mean, it's kind of fascinating to me, actually. I love observing this process, but there's just the natural kind of tendency to want to deconstruct it. So we always see folks asking, well, who, you know, who says this is true, what was, who came up with. This, who are the experts that are asserting that this statistic is accurate, or kind of answering, posing and answering questions for themselves about why is this important, why does it matter, why do we need to know this, thinking about what's not included in that statistic, so people think and sometimes hypothesize about how it got, you know, how this thing came to be true, or what some of the causes are behind this sort of end result presented as a, as a piece of data. So that's one thing. There evidence always requires some interpretation, some sense making, some kind of contextualizing, and never speaks for itself. Or maybe a better way to put that is, it should never be allowed to speak for itself, because there's a story there, whether or not you're telling it, and if we, as communicators, put sort of the evidence out there for folks to interpret, but don't provide any guidance or context about how to effectively and accurately interpret it. Folks will make sense of it, and kind of draw conclusions based on what they already believe to be true, or based on the assumptions that they already hold.
So that's one thing. And then I guess the other thing I would say is that evidence is always.. so maybe a good way to put this, is no one piece of evidence should ever be allowed to to stand alone, because you know we, we need to tell stories that are informed, that are that incorporate evidence, but ideally they're they're informed by all of the different sets of facts and all of the information that we have access to, and it's really, I mean, as, as humans, we think in story. Story is the way that we answer those kind of always lingering questions. So, as communicators, story should really be our sort of our north star. That's where we ground what we, what we want to pay the most attention to, and what we want to be guided by. And I think maybe a good way to think about it is rather than being worried about a story distracting from the data, there's a bigger risk of data distracting us from the story, and it's really the story that holds the meaning, both for us as communicators, that's what we're trying to say and get across, and for audiences, for the general public, that's the story is where folks will be able to draw some of their own understanding about why this matters in the first place…
Uri Hassan17:42
…and my task as a speaker is to make your brain similar to mine.
Jessica Moyer17:48
…also what to do with it, because, because that's the other thing about data, it, it is signals sort of how we should make decisions or change our behaviors or engage differently based on knowing this new thing, having access to this information, and we need to do be guiding that conversation, or be be not sort of believing that part of the conversation for folks to figure out themselves.
Luke Waldo18:16
That last point, there was a there was a line in one of the one of your Frameworks reports that really struck me that I think resonates from your last point, which is this idea that we keep rolling out good ideas without the story, and that's why they stall, and so when you, when we think about, for example, this this shift from more kind of negative framing, like let's change the child welfare system, or let's reform, or let's defund systems to a more positive frame of say let's invest more in families, right, let's revitalize our neighborhoods, etc. What exactly is the missing story that is preventing innovative policies like upstream prevention or flexible funding, for example, from gaining public support, even when we have strong data to support that?
Jessica Moyer19:13
I think there are two parts to storytelling. One part is knowing what stories are already out there, which are the ones that get the most traction, are being told the most, are the most familiar. We call those mindsets, for, you know, what are the cultural mindsets that are currently most dominant. And then the other piece of that is, what are the stories that we want to be sure get some more traction and get told more often, and can feed into a narrative shift and help a new narrative take hold. One, I think one example is there is a dominant mindset, a dominant way of thinking about child development in terms of positive development is the norm. It kind of happens naturally. Actually, that's that goes without saying, that's the assumed state of being positive healthy development is expected. So, when we observe negative outcomes, for one thing, we do a lot of finger pointing. Who, who's responsible for that? Who should be blamed? Where did somebody mess up, or or take a wrong turn or make a bad decision.
Kim Dvorchak20:24
We noticed as a group of child welfare advocates and stakeholders that there was a narrative emerging through media articles and certain interviews that children were potentially facing harm at home.
Jessica Moyer20:40
But the other thing that's missing there, the other way that this kind of dominant way of thinking of positive healthy development is sort of the natural or norm, normal state of things, is that all of the work and resources and relationships and environments and programs and policies and support that are actually involved in a healthy development process, everything that that actually requires and what that looks like is kind of invisible and not appreciated and not understood very well, so I feel like that's the missing story to put it in in the terms that you laid out in the question. The missing story is about what healthy development looks like and entails, and who all plays a role in it, and what sort of resources and supports need to be a part of it.
Luke Waldo21:35
So, obviously, your work focuses often at Frameworks on moving from kind of these individual level of narratives to more systemic or collective kind of responsibility, can you share a, an example of a policy or systems change that was unsuccessful because the story that was supporting it was really just focused on a particular incident or an episode, very individual focused, and how a shift to a more kind of contextual focus would have been a better alternative, or could have advanced the story in a more positive manner.
Jessica Moyer22:17
Yeah, I think, I mean, there's some sort of well-known examples that speak to this, probably listeners will know the tobacco example we previously tended to think about tobacco as a vice, and to sort of blame folks who smoke, who use tobacco products, as being, you know, having made irresponsible choices. It was thought of at that individual level.
Media Clip 222:39
Yes or no, do you believe nicotine is not addictive, Congressman. Cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no toxic.
We'll take that as a no. And again, time is short. If you could just.. I think each of you believe nicotine is not addictive. We just would like to have this for the record.
Jessica Moyer22:59
But the shift away from tobacco as a vice to tobacco as a defective product was a way to help people see the system at work, and to appreciate that actually that that substance has been engineered to be addictive, and it's targeted, you know, it's advertised in targeted ways to communities who have higher rates of usage, and that led to instead of kind of stigma and blame on individuals, it led to actual policy shift.
Media Clip 323:26
Altogether, we're investing about $225 million in programs like the one in Ringgold County, Iowa, where they're using evidence-based tobacco control interventions to decrease tobacco use in low-income rural populations.
Jessica Moyer23:43
We saw less use and good outcomes across the board. So, I mean, the shift towards a defective product also meant kind of shining a light on the industry and industry practices themselves, and so you know there were the hearings among tobacco CEOs of various tobacco companies, and sort of an interrogation of the decisions they were making in their boardrooms and with their marketing firms. That's, I think, one of those tipping points.
And then another one is probably when we saw some significant policy shifts, and then the positive results of those shifts, so certain public spaces were declared tobacco-free. We could no longer smoke on planes or within 25 whatever it is, third number of feet from buildings, and there were some restrictions put around, you know, having advertising campaigns be right outside of elementary schools and those kinds of things. And then we started to see, actually, that you know it's nice to be in these public spaces and not be inhaling secondhand smoke, and so I don't think there was any one thing that was sort of the linchpin, and then we saw a complete new direction of the conversation, but there were several points at which we got a little bit of a momentum boost. And then there's a little bit of a chain reaction to where one seeing some movement facilitates other better decisions, and then seeing good outcomes come from those changes is encouraging and kind of helps build support and public will and demand for additional decision rights.
Luke Waldo25:22
So, yeah, we've been talking a lot, and not surprisingly, we've been talking a lot in the season about shifting away from dominant harmful narratives, right? So, you know, we've talked about when we talk about poverty, right, we talk about kind of winners and losers, this idea that we need to get away from talking about poverty. We're now talking about trying to shift people away from smoking, right, a behavior that has led to many, many people dying prematurely in this season. I had a conversation with Prudence Beidler Carr from the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. There's an example here that I think is really interesting, that she shares a history that starts in the early 20th century, and kind of the foundation of the assistance for dependent children, which is now known as TANF, or we can just call it more generally kind of our part of our social safety net, a financial social safety net that was designed to support parents, particularly mothers who were struggling financially, to be able to pay their bills, pay their rent, pay their mortgage, make sure that their kids had food on the table, so on and so forth, and it was really, quite frankly, framed quite positive…
Prudence Beidler Carr 26:43
…and in some places it was thought of as a badge of honor, right, to be thought of as like I've been judged to be worthy enough and good enough as a parent that I'm now receiving this public assistance…
Luke Waldo26:57
…so we're addressing poverty with a solution that is let's give families money to be able to not be living in poverty, and then that shifts to language around individuals being unfit. Now, this was very racialized. This was at the time of trying to integrate schools, and there's a shift towards language of unfit to receive this sort of funding, which, of course then triggers policy consequences, and so on, eligibility consequences, and so on, and then from there, not only unfit to receive financial benefits, unfit to then parent your children, because you don't have the finances to do so, you're now living in poverty, so we all sudden are kind of conflating poverty and neglect, so you've got this challenge of we can approach a problem by framing what we want for families or we can frame a problem from a what we want to defeat and I wonder if there is a particular strategy as you've pointed out with the kind of smoking cessation, if it makes sense to do one over the other, if that, if that makes sense.
Jessica Moyer28:06
Yeah, it, it does make sense. And I think one thing is maybe we should get away from the a little bit of the either or, because I think we have to do both things. I think we have to, we need a vision, we need to know what, how we want the world to be, what we are moving towards, what we want to promote, and what success looks like, however, you know, and whatever, in relation to whatever social issue we're talking about, and we need to be able to talk about current challenges and what we're up against and what needs to change, that's maybe the reason we're advocating for change, is because there are things that are different from how we want them to be, but there, but just like you alluded to, there are ways to do that and ways to balance those two things, because one can get in the way of the other, for sure, so what here?
One thing is, where do we place our emphasis? We can emphasize, and kind of, if we think about how the total high of communications collateral that we have, the number of minutes we have of airtime, or the number of pages we have of written material, whatever it is, we, we want to fill the bulk of that with solutions, and so that's one thing, emphasis, and how, how we sort of divvy that up.
Another thing is order. There's a real tendency within the advocacy world to start with problems and then eventually get to solutions, but flipping that is a really effective strategy. So, let's start with the vision. Let's start with what are we aiming for here? What do we all want to see? What's possible? What are we shooting for? And then where are we falling short of that goal, or what? How does the current state of things differ from that aspirational vision? And then we can get into the problem stuff secondarily, you know, it's not, it's not what folks. Hit with first, and there's a lot of power in that first line of a speech, you know, proverbially speaking, like there's a, there's a lot of power in what we, what we lead with in terms of what people take away and what carries the most weight, and then a third thing is level of specificity, because there's also a tendency to kind of get really into the details about how people are struggling or hurting, or what, just kind of the nitty gritty of what's wrong, and the harms that have been done, and the consequences of bad decisions and bad policies, but there's a lot.
Conversely, there's a lot of power in achieving that same level of detail when we're talking about what does work and what the benefits of good policies look like and how it feels and you know smells and tastes and what the experiences are of reaping the benefits of getting it right we need to get visceral and specific and and concrete to not just talk kind of abstractly about a better world, but get into that, those same details at that same level when we're talking about the solutions, as, as when we're talking about problems.
Luke Waldo31:13
There's been research done broadly understood at Frameworks as the state of American culture, and so I'm going to draw some, some, some of these questions are kind of drawn from that, that research that that's been ongoing and really kind of navigating this, this, this emerging and now pretty well established kind of mindset of systems are rigged or systems are not serving me right, and I want us to then kind of move through that and see how we can challenge that and kind of shift the narrative back to a place where people believe that systems are in fact here to support us or to empower our communities or empower our families, and so on.
So Frameworks’ research, as I've mentioned, has shown this system is rigged mindset is widely held across the political spectrum, so this isn't a right thing or a left thing. This is becoming a bit more universal. Many people already believe our systems don't serve them, so How should we, as we put our communicators' hat on, especially those of us in family services, effectively fill in the blanks where we're explaining how the system is rigged right to channel this frustration more towards collective progressive solutions and away from exclusionary scapegoating narratives, and I guess I asked that question because we have seen recently this idea that just telling people that the pain that they're feeling isn't real doesn't work right, so how do we acknowledge that systems have not worked for too many people while also kind of look building from that to build towards more kind of collective progressive solutions?
Jessica Moyer32:57
Yeah, we have seen that this idea that the system is rigged, which can be applied in lots of different ways, but, and as you say, is held by folks across the political spectrum. It's also held across age groups, across income groups, across racial identity groups. It actually came to a point where we had to really do a deep dive into this particular mindset, because it's, it has just really been brought to the forefront of our collective thinking over the past handful of years, and it's an interesting mindset in that it is both sort of hazardous, there are ways in which it is an obstacle to getting where we want to go, and also, like you say, gets at something that is true, and that is a universal experience that we need to, to some degree, reckon with collectively.
I'll also say that we have identified a sort of closely related mindset that the system is broken, the system is rigged, is actually takes things a little bit further, and the idea here is that this system was designed to disempower or to serve some and to disserve others, is one way to put it. So, there's actually like a almost an assumption of intent, or at least a power differential that is contained with within this particular mindset, and like you said, there are a lot of blanks that that can be filled in and are filled in in lots of different ways. So maybe that's the first thing I'll say about system is rigged framing, because there's the mindset that the system is rigged, which we need to be aware of and kind of reckon with, navigate through or around, but then what we found in some of our prescriptive testing is that there are actually ways to use this idea that the system is rigged explicitly in our communications to achieve the goals that we want to achieve to build. Public understanding to build support for solutions that we know are needed.
Rinku Sen35:04
You know, we cannot meet polarizing narratives with entirely non-polarizing narratives.
Jessica Moyer35:12
But we do need to tread lightly. I think we just need to be really careful in terms of how we go about it, because exactly as you say, we don't want to reinforce the notion that systems itself, by the sheer fact that they are systems, are a problem. We don't want to encourage folks to sort of resort to individualistic thinking, which, which is a different kind of impediment in its own way, we don't want to, we don't want to increase thinking that systems are inherently flawed, and that we shouldn't be trying to make decisions at a collective level. We inevitably need to do that. We need to create and maintain systems that work for us, so we don't want to kind of reinforce this system is rigged mindset in a way that encourages people to disengage from and divest from systems altogether…
Tarik Moody36:04
…because it's systemic, not an individual's cause. You want to feel like there are people doing something, and then maybe someone's listening wants to help out, right? Want to get engaged, or they want to share the story of somebody is trying to do something.
Jessica Moyer36:19
…but we can fill in the blanks in ways that help move the conversation forward and shift the narrative and in helpful and productive ways, if we're thinking about the child welfare system, that's one kind of system that there's widespread agreement, the fact that it's broken, that it's rigged, it's a system where there are lots of different ideas about how it's rigged and who's doing the rigging and to what effect, so as folks who want to reform and fix and change the child welfare system, here are some of the ways that we can fill in the blanks, and I, I want to be careful to not be too specific and prescriptive here, because there are so many subject matter experts who know much more specifically than I do about the specific interventions, the specific solutions that are needed, and, and who could fill in the blanks in more precise ways than I, as a non-subject matter expert, would be able to, but there is, for example, a lot of talk about how black and brown families are over represented in the child welfare system at every stage, you know, from initial flagging and reporting to investigations to separations to reunification and permanency, kind of across the board, black and brown folks are over represented, and there's a lot of talk about the need for increased attention and resources being sort of funneled toward black and brown families as a way to to repair the system to fix what's not working, that leaves open different interpretations about how the system is rigged, so or potentially multiple interpretations, kind of two big maybe categories of interpretation. One being that the system is rigged against black and brown families. The system is essentially racist. There's racial discrimination inherent within the system that needs to be addressed, which leads to the over representation of black and brown families.
The other interpretation, or sort of set of interpretations, is again the system is rigged, but the system is rigged in a way that provides special treatment, handouts, unearned resources to black and brown families and communities, and obviously that's a very different way of thinking about how the system is rigged. There's almost a reverse racism kind of argument implicit in that interpretation. So I just offer that up as a way to say that, as a way to illustrate how important it is that we are explicit in filling in those blanks, and when, when we, if we refer to the system being rigged, that we are clear about how it's being rigged, and also what needs to happen, and to, in order to unrig it, because that's another thing that's often left out of the conversation, so the way to do this is really to not leave it open-ended, who's at fault or where the where interventions are needed and by whom, but actually to connect the consequences, this over representation of black and brown families, that's that's a consequence that's not the cause, but we can connect the dots back to explaining what has led to that over representation and to building understanding about the process at work, so we can talk about policies that, whatever the intention behind them, carry different impacts for different racial identity groups.
We can talk about policies within the child welfare system that, for example, privilege. Privilege two-parent households, two-parent households are not representative of every community, every racial group, every cultural group equally. They tend to, that tends to be a privileging of white folks in the way that white households are structured. Same thing about single family homes, there's a privileging within child welfare policies of the single family home, which is kind of at best invisible to the fact that lots of folks, and disproportionately non-white folks, are more likely to live in intergenerational households and multifamily homes, so those are, and I'm sure you know, experts in this area could come up with lots of other even clearer examples, but the point here is we need to name both the causes and the consequences, connect the dots between those two things, and then keep the dots going to all the way towards solutions, so how do we change the policy? What should the policy look like instead, so that we get a different outcome, and so we deal with the over representation of some groups in the child welfare system in a way that matches what the underlying, what the root cause of the problem is in the first place, rather than, as you say, scapegoating and misplacing blame.
Luke Waldo41:24
Our initiative, this podcast is really focused on reducing family separation for reasons of neglect, because we, we know that the vast majority of families in CPS are coming to their attention because of neglect, and neglect, if we invest in families differently, right, we can, we can keep kids safe, healthy, and with their families, and yet even in this space we're seeing some real significant polarization, where there's this argument that no, in fact, we don't have enough surveillance, we need, we need, there are too many kids that are unsafe when we need more CPS intervention, and this assumption from folks on that side that our argument is now all kids at all costs should be staying with their families even when they're unsafe in this it's just not the argument right and so I worry at some level that in an attention based economy in which we live now right and an information saturated you society that there's kind of this need to stand out, right, and you stand out with, you know, defund the police or defund ICE or defund child welfare, instead of speaking to look, there are kids that need CPS intervention, there are kids that are being physically abused, sexually abused, and harmed by extreme cases of neglect, and also there are many families, many parents who are loving, caring, nurturing parents whose only fault is living in poverty, for example, because of some systemic failures, right? They don't get paid enough at their job or jobs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so I just think it's a really complex challenge to make these arguments polarize our arguments without demonizing one another, right, or polarizing people through that conversation.
Jessica Moyer43:20
I'll just highlight a thing that you also touched on, which is this sort of attention-based economy dilemma. I think there's there are ways that we have incentives to cut through the noise, to capture attention, to get ourselves inserted into the conversation at all that actually go against the objectives that we're ultimately trying to achieve, and sometimes the sometimes we're a little bit caught between doing those things, and really this is where the art of framing part comes in, because there are absolutely ways to to capture attention that don't compromise the mission, those sometimes take some work to arrive at, and to figure out, and oftentimes, in my experience, it takes a collaboration of different folks who have different skill sets to get there.
Jared Robinson44:12
Casey Family Programs has this fantastic network of national partners that they work with. That space was just jam-packed with policy updates and updates on what families need and what they were experiencing, and so we saw this need to convene comms-minded people who had an interest in pushing back against these harmful narratives,
Jessica Moyer44:30
But that's really the goal, that's what we need, be heard, and also have the things that we're saying and that get heard be moving us in the actual direction we want to go.
Luke Waldo44:41
No, I think it's a great point, and I continuing that conversation around how we confront the cynicism, the growing cynicism, the mistrust, or the skepticism that many people in our society are feeling right when it comes to not only the systems, the institutions that have long been the foundation, really, of civil society in this country, but also that, as you just pointed out, right, this kind of skepticism, oftentimes of facts, of data, of science. So taking that almost all together, because I think in many ways they sometimes go hand in hand, right. How do you advise communicators? Right, how do you advise those of us listening today to strategically leverage positive, solutions-oriented stories to build what you call collective efficacy, right? Again, this belief that we, the public, can actually change systems by changing hearts and minds.
Jessica Moyer45:44
Yeah, we, we need those stories. I think we, as communicators and advocates, we need to tell those stories as, as a way to be instructive about where change is possible and what kinds of collective actions can lead to that change, because, like you're saying, that the cynicism is real, the sort of feeling discouraged and disengaged, and lots of other things along those lines. Those feelings are all real, and they affect how we show up, and sometimes we need to be telling stories about solutions for ourselves to remind ourselves of about why we're doing this work, and and where real opportunities for change, real possibilities exist, and also how we have made change in the past, where there are successes that we can lift up and celebrate and learn from, and you know, be inspired by.
And I think that, you know, in terms of communications, in terms of how we tell those stories. What's really most effective is to do more showing than telling, getting really into the details of how has this worked. Who has rallied together to make stuff happen, and what has happened? What have been the results of past campaigns and past organized collective actions? We're working on a project right now at Frameworks on Racial Justice, and we're working with a group of community organizers, and we asked them, Can you give an example of a specific collective action that you were involved with, or know about, or kind of, you know, how to a front row seat, too, in some way?
I mean, we, we talk about collective actions all the time, but there's something really different about getting into the specifics and talking about particular ones. And folks shared stories about, you know, in one community, community members rallying together to make sure that a sugar tax didn't expire that was scheduled to, and folks came together and said, actually, I don't. We don't want you know, sodas and sugary drinks and empty calories to be more available, more accessible in our community. We want that to stay in place, the sugar tax to stay in place, and the revenues from that sugar tax to go to making healthy foods and produce and nourishing foods more affordable, more available.
There was another example of a community that there was a family that was being threatened with eviction by a kind of uber wealthy developer/landlord, and folks in the community rallied together and organized a pray-in, and they shed light on the fact that this, the landlord was actually kind of exploiting the laws as written in the books. The family was able to stay in the house in the end, but also it brought attention to tenants' rights and also ways that policies that are kind of official, officially on the books, aren't always implemented in the way that we need them to be, or enforced in the way that we need them to be, and it sparked a wider conversation about those kinds of issues.
So, those are just two examples, but they really show rather than tell how we can kind of show up together, what we can do in terms of organized selective collaborative participation, and how that, how it contributes to moving in the right direction, getting us towards kind of bigger, wider societal change we want to see.
Luke Waldo49:12
Right. So, there's two things that I heard from you there that really struck me. The first was this idea that, first and foremost, even within our own teams, within our own communities, neighborhoods, families, for that matter, I guess having, having these conversations, exploring right our own narratives that we're trying to elevate in some ways is a productive exercise, right? That we're going to have broader impacts on say systems or on on policies on a particular community's way of thinking, we need to start by making sure that we ourselves really understand the details, as you pointed out, right, that we have to get kind of get into the weeds to understand the the arguments behind our broader narrative, so I think that is an exercise that I think we don't often fully practice.
The second is, and I think we talked about it a bit earlier, was this idea of at some level kind of polarizing ideas or narratives, right? Understanding that there are kind of two sides to the story, while we know that there's oftentimes much more gray, but there are certainly some poles, right. So, how do you kind of elevate your own kind of counter narrative to contrast with quite clearly, right, the maybe the dominant narrative, or this understanding that, well, I'm just found, as you pointed out, with tenants' rights, right, I'm just, I'm just following the law, right? The law says I can do this, and so I'm doing this as a landlord. Okay. Well, let's expose that, and let's, let's really look at what that law says, and is it being right? Is it truly being followed? Is it a harmful policy? And here is what we're trying to argue, right. We're trying to keep somebody in our community who's contributed to our community and is doing all the right things, right.
So, when we think about this idea of kind of re-authoring or reimagining cultural narratives, that implies that advocates must again first know what narratives they are fighting against. So, again, kind of this kind of polarizing narratives, right? In your work with partners, and we can continue to build off of what you just said. What are the key method methods or steps frameworks uses to help them diagnose the dominant toxic narratives that that they need to sideline or confront before they can begin to replace them with more constructive narratives?
Jessica Moyer51:38
So we tend to think about cultural mindsets, in terms of them being either productive or unproductive, from that standpoint of, do they get us to where we want to go, or are they standing in the way. And then there are some that that we do identify as toxic because they sort of run counter to our deepest shared values as humans, if the ones that are sort of rooted in, for example, racial stereotypes, those we don't have a problem naming as toxic, but for the most part, we're just, we're, we're working with the idea that these mindsets are shared across our culture, and we all have access to all of them, so we're not talking about different groups of folks who think in different ways, we're kind of talking about the cultural landscape, and then empowering communicators to navigate that landscape by activating the patterns that will help them achieve their, their goals, and our kind of social change goals, and, like you said, steering clear of the ones that are harming those efforts are making it more difficult to make the change that we want to see.
Another thing is, I think all the other things that you alluded to are always at play, like I think. Well, okay, two different things are bouncing around in my mind. One is that one is about the motivations of the drivers of the narrative we are always thinking about and working with partners who are thinking about positive social change systems level change and that is the goal, but there are lots of other goals that folks have when they set out to communicate, and I think there are, for example, one goal for some communicators, in some contexts, is to kind of spike to tap into fear as an emotion, and to spike people's feeling of being threatened or concerned…
Kim Dvorchak53:31
…because child abuse would be invisible, and children would not be going to school where there are teachers who serve as mandatory reporters and other folks that might be able to identify if there was abuse in the home…
Jessica Moyer53:48
and that can lead to particular outcomes that serve certain purposes. Positive social change is not one of them. In fact, kind of when we're feeling fearful or threatened, we're less likely to less sort of able have less space to think about how to engage in action and and think about the long term, for example, it makes us kind of heightened in the in the moment and need to attend to that emotion rather than thinking broadly and more systemically, but that's one kind of pull in the direction of a particular kind of narrative change, or one thing that it, that describes a whole set of kind of stimuli that activate unproductive mindsets.
Luke Waldo54:31
And maybe, maybe that's what I was trying to get at, because I was really, really trying to grapple with, you know, how do we tap into the right, the right energy, right, be able to kind of create the space again till the soil in a way that productive growth and change can really happen, and I think you answered that really eloquently, and it makes sense, right, I mean, this is a lot of the work that I do right this idea, if people are afraid, right? If people are constantly bombarded with toxic stimuli, and so on, they, of course, either freeze or they fight, become more impulsive, and impulsivity is not oftentimes known for creating positive change. It oftentimes leads to the exact opposite, and so, or at the very least, it produces outcomes of survival rather than right again, innovation or sustained growth. Because, again, I'm just thinking about in this conversation, and so much of what we've tried to explore with you in these conversations is, how do we do this work better? Right, how do we do it strategically, and that component for me, especially in our current state of politics, our current state of how we engage with one another online and social media, and so on. It is not a constructive space. It is not a terribly compassionate or hopeful or optimistic space, and not surprisingly, as you've just pointed out, it often devolves into shouting matches rather than to some sort of constructive kind of systems change, or for that matter, kind of building of community, and so on. So,
Jessica Moyer56:17
Can I say one, just one more quick thing about that? Yeah, I'm just thinking about how I mean we always talk about these dominant mindsets, and the dominant ones are the ones that are kind of we're exposed to all the time. They're really easy to queue up, the ones we've talked about over and over again, that kind of are threads throughout lots of different social issues, individualism, us versus them thinking, the fatalism, sense of fatalism, we described earlier. There's a handful that are kind of extremely dominant and cross-issue.
There are recessive mindsets as well, meaning alternatives to all of those dominant mindsets exist, and they're, they're a little bit trickier to queue up because they aren't so pervasive, they aren't dominant in the same way, but they're there. We're not, we're not like inventing out of whole cloth. Those of us who are working to create change rather than to reinforce the status quo have a little bit harder of a job because we're needing to pull out those recessive mindsets rather than just activate the ones that are kind of already super easy to activate and probably activated without us doing anything anyway.
Luke Waldo57:22
No, that's a great point. So, I want us to shift a bit to how do we know that narrative change is working right? How do we, how do we essentially evaluate progress or impact, right? And so I want to start by, and you've been great about offering examples that I think really help people see in their mind's eye what, what is what, what narrative change looks like. So, the if the ultimate goal of narrative work is behavior and systems change, at least in the context of our conversation, based on Frameworks’ research, what is the most significant or surprising behavioral shift, whether in policymaker action or public engagement that you have seen occur as a direct result of a successful sustained framing strategy?
Jessica Moyer58:11
That's a big question, because measuring narrative change is a big undertaking, and we do, we do engage in it, I think it's fair to say the biggest way we engage in it is through partnership, because there are ways that we try to assess impact and change, and we identify indicators, but we need all hands on deck for this kind of an effort.
So, at Frameworks, we are especially focused on this idea of mindsets, we map the cultural landscape, both in terms of what are the mindsets that are more dominant, which ones are less dominant or recessive, but also how do those mindsets, how do they shift over time, how do, how does that kind of foreground and backgrounding look different in different kind of periods throughout our history, and we're seeing some changes in how, which ones are being pulled to the front versus kind of pushed to the background in this moment, but other indicators are things like which we also look at, what are the kind of shifts in words and phrases that we're seeing most often in in media, what are the topics that are becoming more or less salient? What is happening with the policy landscape? Where what kinds of policies are getting traction versus not? How what's happening in terms of who, who the major players are, who are the leaders, who are the spokespeople, and how is that shifting the sort of key actors or key players?
So identifying what those indicators are is really at the core of doing narrative change analysis, and and it connects back to the our or any organization's theory of change. Our theory of change at Frameworks is the idea that if we change the way that we communicate if we make different kinds of framing decisions based on empirical evidence, having done the research to know which frames have which kinds of frame effects, what the implications of those different choices are, that those shifts in communication filter up into the discourse, they change how we as a culture, as a society, talk and what gets kind of aired in the media and news outlets and arts and entertainment, which in turn shapes how we collectively think, how we understand the world together, which has implications for the kinds of decisions that we make, the policies we implement, the practices that we normalize and there's not a kind of linear progression along those things. There's lots of feedback in the arrows going in both directions, but it maps out a course for how we can be part of a narrative change effort, and also the different kind of indicators that we can look at along the way to see how change might be happening, and how our efforts might be having an impact. How we might be successful.
So, you're asking for a specific example, I think perhaps unsurprisingly, is the one of the best examples is the issue area that we've been working on the longest, and that makes sense because of how repetition and time and persistent communications is the recipe for this kind of change, but on the topic of early childhood development, which we've been working on since our founding over 25 years ago, now we've seen massive changes in the field. I think that the narrative shift overall has been one that's moved away from vulnerability and moved instead towards a healthy development framing, that a story about brain development.
So, the new this new narrative has involved several metaphors that explain the science of early brain development, for example, the serve and return metaphor, which helps explain how essential interactions between infants and caregivers are, so that that new framing, that new narrative has filtered up into the discourse we're seeing, we're seeing media outlets, and in the news, and in, you know, various articles across all kinds of platforms, and we're seeing those metaphors in this kind of new framing strategy, the concepts, critical concepts around early brain development being used by high-profile figures like President Obama, Goldie Hawn, Kate Middleton, Jennifer Gardner, just to name a couple.
Media Clip 4 (Catherine, Princess of Wales) 1:02:37
I've seen that experiences such as homelessness, addiction, and poor mental health are often grounded in a difficult childhood, but I have also seen how positive protective factors in the early years can play a critical role in shaping our futures too.
Jessica Moyer1:02:56
But it really has changed the discourse, and that in turn has changed thinking how we together kind of understand early childhood development. Lots of studies have been done to measure how understanding has shifted. For example, many more people now understand that when babies cry or coo or make sounds, they're not just making a ploy for attention, which is what two decades ago was the general understanding. In fact, there were even some ideas about that being sort of manipulative, attention-seeking behavior that we should discourage, but we understand now that that's those are early attempts at communication.
That is what communication looks at, looks like in those early years, and that the skill building is happening, and that's how we build a foundation for building all kinds of other skills and developing communication across the lifespan, so thinking has shifted, and then policies have shifted too, and we've seen significant over the past couple decades, we've seen significant increases in public support for things like paid family leave, the child tax credit programs like Head Start, and even universal pre-K, Medicaid expansions, etc. etc. There's lots more work to be done there, but there's much more support and backing, and and willingness to fund all of those kinds of programs and efforts. This is maybe a good point to mention that social change and narrative change is not linear, and we, you know, I think we all can think about ways that we've seen some backsliding, in particular over the past year we're not where we need to be, and we have in some ways regressed, but we know that that this tool works, and that it's essential, and I think seeing how we've made progress, and also recognizing that in a lot of, in terms of a lot of these other indicators, in terms of. Public support in terms of public understanding of how early brain development happens, in terms of how we collectively think and talk about early childhood. We are light years ahead of where we were, and we have a lot that we can build on. We need to kind of re hone our tools and keep at it, because there's a lot more work to do, but this, this is an effective strategy and a needed one.
Luke Waldo1:05:29
Yeah, so there's, there's so much there that I am going to try to unpack very, very concisely, because there's some examples that have come up in this season of the podcast that I think illustrate what you've just talked about, so one was around how do we evaluate, and I think you made it very clear that this is big work and requires partnership, and so it makes me think about a conversation that I had with our partners in this Narrative Change network, that's a national network of lots of large national kind of nonprofits, and so on, but also, you know, more regional or even local nonprofits who are invested in, in kind of creating narrative change to lead to better kind of policy and systems and family outcomes, right, and one of the cool things, and the reason why I wanted them on the podcast this season is that they are measuring annually the media narratives, right, and so over the last five years we've seen a real shift from this kind of more protective, kind of suspicion-based narrative of child maltreatment, of child abuse, right, of kind of, you know, bad parents or abusive parents, to more of a narrative around kind of child and family well-being. And that's important, right, to your point, because it then shifts how we think about how we react as a society, or how we, or how we become more proactive as a society, right, to your point, with the early, you know, early childhood development. Instead of looking at these vulnerable creatures as something that we have to protect, we're seeing them as right, these engaged, right, little creatures who are super reactive to our engagement with them, right, and that changes how we invest in programs, right. We either invest in programs that are going to protect or suspect bad behavior, or we're going to invest in more proactive, right, more building, right, more constructive kind of programs that allow parents to be more involved with it with their kids, right, rather than separated from the kids, because you know, God, God forbid, you know, we can't trust them with their kids to keep them safe, for example.
So I want to end with, in many ways, how we started this season, which was for me, again, a very powerful illustrative metaphor of tilling the soil, right? So you describe, as we've discussed today, culture change as a slow and ambitious endeavor, much like tilling the soil and preparing it for right, what is going to grow from it. We've had a conversation this season with Dr. Pegah Faed, who echoed this sentiment by saying narrative change is a discipline, not a launch. It's something that you do over and over and over again. So, for advocates, for communicators, for people like me, for listeners who feel overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge of changing systems or strengthening families or reducing poverty and neglect. What is one small actionable step they can take today or this week to begin the process of tilling the soil for better systems and better outcomes for all kids and families?
Jessica Moyer1:08:55
I completely agree with the idea that this work of narrative change is a discipline rather than a launch. I like that way of putting it, and it is slow. It is, it does require persistence. It does take time and coordinated effort, lots of different messages, lots of different communicators, lots of different platforms. The flip side of that is that we have lots of different opportunities to do this work. We can do it in big ways that involve huge investments of resources, for example, and we can do it in small, tiny ways, kind of constantly. You know, we're all humans, which means we're all communicating all of the time, and each one of those conversations, or social media posts, or, you know, messages, or talking points, or whatever it is, each one of those is an opportunity to contribute to narrative change.
If I had to offer up one thing that folks can do, and this applies to anyone, it's one. My favorite things, because it, I think it's a light lift, it, you can do it without a ton of effort, and you get a lot of bang for your buck. It's, it's, it, it also involves a lot of impact, and can make a big difference, can be really compelling, and really, it's just, it is also really flexible, I'll say that too. It's also a thing that has lots of different iterations and can be interpreted and kind of iterated in lots of different ways. So it's the idea of offering up a positive vision and doing that at every chance that you get. It's a way to, for one thing, appeal to what we all care about. It's kind of helping us see what's possible and what we all want to work towards together. It can be what's, you know, what's the vision for this particular initiative happening in my neighborhood next week, or what is the vision for how our society gets redesigned a decade or two from now, but looking forward, thinking collectively, and offering up a vision that is as visceral as possible, fill in as many of those colorful details as you can, and really appeal to those shared values.
I know it's easy, and I sometimes hear people in this moment lamenting that we don't have shared values anymore, or that, you know, that almost buying into a little bit of an us-them mindset, and saying, you know, some, a bunch of people just don't care about the things that I care about. The research that we have done at Frameworks shows that there are differences, for sure. There are, you know, contestations and things that have to be reconciled, views that have to be reconciled, but at a really fundamental level, there are a lot of values that we all share across the society, with you know, exceptions of at the margins, but we all care about fairness. We all care about dignity. We all care about realizing human potential. We all care about, you know, shared prosperity, our shared humanity. We all care about ingenuity. We all care about, you know, solving problems and being creative, and we can offer up a positive vision that appeals to these shared values and does so in a way that is instructive and also inspiring, helps us feel motivated, see that change is possible, kind of build a sense of collective efficacy, and also start to kind of pave the way for the how, how we can go about it, what it will look like to work to get there together.
I like to think of it in terms of just finishing the sentence, I want to live in a world where, and everybody can do that, it doesn't have to be, you know, verbatim, using those words, but, but ask yourself that question, How do you want to finish that sentence, and then how can that idea be incorporated into and across different communications.
Luke Waldo1:13:30
When we began this season, Jess gave us a metaphor that has stayed with me: narrative change is like tilling the soil. Creating conditions for new ways of thinking to grow.
Today, she showed us what that looks like in practice.
We learned that hope is a strategy, not spin. That we should lead with solutions, not problems. That evidence never speaks for itself—it requires interpretation through story. And that we can use the "system is rigged" mindset strategically, but only if we're explicit about how it's rigged and what needs to happen to unrig it.
This season has shown us we've made real progress. Prudence Beidler Carr showed us how poverty became neglect in 1961, and how understanding that history helps us confront it. We heard from Dr. Pegah Faed about shifting professionals’ mindsets from "Should I report?" to "How can I support?" We learned from Megan McGee and Rinku Sen that our greatest resource remains conversation between people. From Desmond Meade and Pardeep Singh Kaleka, that authentic relationship disrupts harmful narratives. From Tarik Moody and Claudia Rowe, that media and journalism can create curiosity through complexity instead of harmful headlines.
And we saw how culture—food, art, music, storytelling—creates the connective tissue that makes narrative change possible.
Jared Robinson and Kim Dvorchak have shown us that the evidence is clear: mentions of prevention in child welfare coverage went from essentially zero in 2020 to 20% by 2024. The language has shifted from child protection to Child and Family Well-Being. The soil has been tilled. Seeds are growing.
But we have to keep at it. So here's what I'm taking away:
Start with vision. Tell stories about humans winning. Use evidence to build understanding. Center the voices of people who've experienced the systems. Practice presence with people who disagree with us.
And remember: We think in story. Story is how we make meaning.
Every conversation that starts with curiosity instead of judgment, every policy that invests in families instead of surveilling them, every moment of genuine presence across difference—these are all acts of narrative change.
The stories we tell shape the world we build. And the world we're building—where all children and families can thrive, where systems serve rather than surveil—that world requires better stories.
Stories we tell together. Stories we make real through persistent, patient, collective action.
Thank you for joining us for Season 4 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect. Thank you to every guest who has taught me so much about the power of narrative, to Jess Moyer and the Frameworks Institute, to Prevent Child Abuse America, and especially to Nathan Fink for bringing this season and these stories to life.
The soil has been tilled. Now let's see what grows.
Keep asking: What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently?
Because the answer to that question might just change everything.