We Need a New Narrative About What Creates Health
HIP’s new short film explores the power of transformative narratives for structural change
By Jessi Corcoran
It’s never been more important to advance a new, transformative narrative about what creates health.
Narratives are values-based themes that we use to understand our world. A narrative communicates and reinforces a worldview — which informs what we view as the problem and its solutions.
Trump’s re-election (and the reactionary MAGA movement more broadly) demonstrates that harmful and dangerous narratives are dominating the public sphere. Take, for example, the pervasive “anti-woke” sentiment building over the past several years, which has turned “equity” into a dirty word in many circles. Or the way “individual freedom” has been animated in the backlash against public health orders and government regulation of harmful corporations. Harmful dominant narratives asserting white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalism threaten our attempts to dismantle systems of oppression.
These harmful dominant narratives are so strong that they’ve infiltrated more than just Trump-supporter circles. We still hear echoes of individualism in liberal-leaning narratives about the “American Dream,” for example. And public health training, funding, and practice still largely focus on individual-level or mid-stream interventions for health.
Those narratives don’t serve our long term goals of health equity and racial justice. Instead, they reinforce the exact systems and structures we aim to dismantle and transform.
But here’s the good news. We can change the narrative. Especially when we lack power in other arenas, narrative change remains a powerful tool in our fight for equity and justice.
Transforming the Narrative
Transformative narratives can shift the public’s understanding of the problems harming our health (like corporate greed) and what solutions are possible (like policies that regulate corporations). We must allocate energy and resources to champion a new narrative about what creates health — both internally at our organizations, and in the public. Our communications, strategies, and approach should align with a bold, transformative narrative rooted in love, healing, and a deep knowledge of our shared fates.
Narratives for Health Equity
Human Impact Partners, as part of the Narratives for Health project, developed this short film about the power of narrative. It demonstrates how harmful dominant narratives about individual responsibility, scarcity, and free-market solutions are harming our communities and our health — and offers a path to shifting those narratives so we can transform what is possible to achieve for our collective health.
We encourage you to share this video with your colleagues, partners, and networks. Use it to spark deeper conversations about narrative change practice in your public health and social justice circles.
Here are a few prompts to help guide your discussion:
- Where do we see harmful or transformative narratives coming up in our community?
- How are harmful dominant narratives showing up in our work? How can we shift away from these?
- How are transformative narratives showing up in our work? How can we actively advance transformative narratives across all of our work?
As James Baldwin said, “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
Let this be our call to action.
If you’d like to learn more about narratives and how to advance them, check out Narratives for Health’s Train the Facilitator series, where you will gain skills and join a coalition of narrative builders working to transform our future. You can also read more about the Narratives for Health project in a blog post from our partners at County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, “Powering narrative change through partnerships.”
Special thanks to HIP staff Selma Aly and Renae Badruzzaman for pouring their expertise and immense creative talent into developing this inspiring short film.
- Jessi Corcoran (she/her) is a Capacity Building Project Director at HIP, where she provides training and technical assistance, develops resources to support the centering of health equity, and leads HIP’s Narratives for Health project in collaboration with CHR&R and partners.
- Selma Aly (they/she) is a Bridging Partnerships & Strategies Project Director at HIP, where they support public health agencies in advancing equitable policies, practices and procedures.
- Renae Badruzzaman (she/her) is Health Instead of Punishment Project Director at HIP, where she brings a heart-centered eagerness to build capacity within the public health sector to take action towards abolition, listen to those harmed by oppressive carceral systems, and facilitate more liberatory, access-centered spaces.
