When listening means actually doing the work

Seven years ago this month, straight after co-facilitating a weekend-long workshop on ‘Radical Listening’ at the Kripalu retreat in Stockbridge Massachusetts (more on that some other time), I flew to Berlin, to co-host a convening on narrative change. At the time I worked as Director of Media and Narratives in the Public Health Program of the Open Society Foundations, and for the previous two years I had co-chaired a foundation-wide community of practice on narrative change along with my colleague Alvin Starks. We were convinced that as grantmakers in the fields of human rights and social justice, we should be placing more emphasis on funding narrative and culture-focused strategies in addition to approaches such as policy advocacy, strategic litigation and community organizing that our foundation, and others, had long supported.

At the same time as we had been building a global learning community of grantmakers within the foundation, the organisation Narrative Initiative had been building its own international learning community among civil society organizations. So we decided to hold this convening as a collaboration between our two groups. We designed the 3-day agenda so that each organisation could hold its own sessions focused on the interests of its particular community, but then we would meet together in plenary at least twice a day to enable cross-pollination, with the grant makers and civil society leaders learning from one another.

We titled the gathering, ‘Meeting the Populist Moment’.

One of the defining moments for me was the plenary on the second morning. In a ‘fish-bowl’ set up, a cluster of non-profit leaders were seated at the front of the room, talking amongst themselves about how their organizations were incorporating narrative and culture-based approaches in a bid to counter the advance of authoritarian populism. The rest of us sat arrayed around the civil society leaders, and just listened.

For the grantmakers in the room, such as myself, the conversation was eye-opening. While we had been preoccupied in addressing institutional reservations about these seemingly ‘risky’ new strategies, and trying to show evidence of their worth (with sessions focused on questions like ‘Why are we talking about narrative change?’ ‘How do we engage in narrative change work?’ and ‘How do we measure success?’), it was clear that the non-profit organizations were way ahead of us. They had quickly grasped the importance of learning to operate on the terrain of narrative, culture and spectacle and were already doing the work: trying out new strategies and approaches in a very thoughtful and sophisticated way.

The overwhelming lesson I and several of my colleagues took away from that session was that we needed to stop being so paralyzed by internal naval-gazing and by trying to identify the ‘perfect’ approach before funding anything, and focus more on getting money out the door so that visionary civil society leaders, like those in the room with us, could try things out, could get on with the ground-breaking work they were trying to do. The excitement and learning from that session certainly gave new energy to my work over the next several months, until Covid and organizational restructuring threw everything up in the air.

As I sit reflecting on that gathering seven years later, I must confess to feeling somewhat cynical and disappointed. My excitement at the frank talk, and genuine listening, that took place between nonprofit and movement leaders and grantmakers, seems naive. Seven years later, I still find myself at meetings and on calls where grantmakers obsess over the same basic questions we were focused on in Berlin: ‘Why narrative? How? How can we guarantee success? How can we avoid the risk of failure before taking the first step?’ Seven years later, non profit organizations and movements have developed even more sophisticated theories of change, and have a wealth of experience of both failure and success. Seven years later, I have lost count of the number of times non-profit and movement leaders have repeated their pleas for long-term, unrestricted funding, for room to experiment, for funding that is not siloed and divvied up into restrictive focus areas: health, climate, democracy, gender, race – in a way that prevents organizations from addressing these issues in an integrated way, which is how they show up in real life.

Seven years later, philanthropy seems more frozen by fear and more fragmented than ever. Seven years later, even more scoping exercises have been done, even more (often excellent) research into promising progressive narratives about democracy, gender, the economy, and race. Yet there is little to no funding for actual implementation and experimentation — for testing out some of the promising approaches and ideas outlined in all of those research reports. Far from increasing, the funding pool is shrinking. Far from integrated, unrestricted funding, grantmaking seems more siloed and more short-term and more restrictive than ever. Philanthropic foundations are defunding critical organizations, shutting up shop, or tied up in internal restructuring and re-strategizing while the world is burning.

I have written before about the value of listening in and of itself — as a powerful way of being with other people, of connecting with one another, of bearing witness. I still believe that to be true. However, there also comes a time where listening requires something more — when having listened, we need to do what is in our power to do, to change things. This is particularly true across differences of power and privilege Otherwise, after a time, listening becomes just another form of manipulation and procrastination. There comes a point where we have listened enough, and we know what needs to be done — and we actually need to go out and do it.