Building power requires more than organizing people and making campaign demands – it also involves shaping deeply-held values and beliefs in our society so that we can enact long-lasting change.  In our one-on-one conversations with leaders, we often hear people share that the widespread ideas about our society – what organizers refer to as “dominant narratives” – don’t match up with their actual experiences. Many of us have grown up hearing that the U.S. health care system is expensive because it’s the best care in the world, that people are simply unhealthy because of the choices they make, or that not everyone is deserving of health care. Our leaders very quickly start to realize that these dominant narratives justify inequities and corporate greed in our existing health care system, and keep us powerless. 

Three people stand side by side, smiling after presenting at the Colorado Health Symposium.

At Center for Health Progress, our leaders craft and amplify new narratives that challenge the status quo and offer a vision of what the future can hold. We call these new narratives “counter-narratives.” Other community organizers – like TakeAction Minnesota and Ella Baker Center for Human Rights – taught us that in order to win structural change, we need to develop, plant, and grow new narratives. But how do we do that? How can we understand the many ways in which narratives impact us as individuals and our fight for equity and justice in health care?

CHP Leaders Partner with Researchers

We began a partnership with a team of narrative researchers in fall 2022, to explore how research – grounded in organizing and conducted in partnership with the people most harmed  by dominant narratives – can help reveal narrative possibilities. For about 6 months, leaders from our communications organizing team met with these researchers to design a study to help us answer an overarching question motivating CHP organizers: How do we counter the dominant narrative about health in a way that resonates with people, encourages them to see themselves in a counter narrative, and mobilizes them to take action?

After working together to create an interview structure, the researchers interviewed seven of CHP’s leaders to understand how the dominant narrative about our health care system harms people. After completing the interviews, they used survey research to test which counter-narratives might motivate people to join with others to take action, as compared to how people responded to the dominant narratives.

Presenting at the Colorado Health Foundation Symposium

We completed the project this summer and shared the findings publicly at the Colorado Health Symposium session, “(Re)Writing Narratives: Advancing Equity and Justice” (check out photos of Jasmine, Marissa, and Yusra, above!).

CHP Leader Jasmine Sandate opened the session, sharing her personal story of how the health care system engrained her and her family with the false belief that they are to blame if they become sick or don’t understand the complex health care system. Jasmine shared how this harmful narrative has contributed to her hesitation to get the care she needs and kept her feeling powerless – a feeling that could stand in the way of taking action to improve health for herself or her community. 

Marissa Hallo, CHP’s Senior Communications Organizer, shared how leaders on her organizing team developed a narrative that unifies health care workers and patients, and what her team learned about the importance of calling out the profit-driven practices of health care executives. 

Last, Yusra Murad, one of the core research team members, shared findings from the survey phase of the research study. She showed evidence demonstrating that the dominant narrative does exactly what it is designed to do: it reduces people’s willingness to act and makes people blame patients and individuals, not the systems or government, for the problems we face in health care. She also showed how counter-narratives – rooted in a positive vision, clearly identifying who is really to blame, and identifying values we all share regardless of race or class – can shift attribution of blame and promote more intentions to act for social justice. In sharing the findings with the leaders and the audience, we discussed ways that this research offers promise that shifting the stories we tell about the health care system can shift the underlying logics and beliefs that we use to understand it. 

Up Next: American Public Health Association Annual Meeting

We’re excited to head to Minneapolis next week to share our work in two sessions at the American Public Health Association Annual meeting! We aim to reach new audiences of health advocates, researchers, and organizers and share the potential for narrative research that is grounded in community leaders’ lived experiences and visions for our health care system.