Table of Contents (5) - Flipbook - Page 9
D
ear friends,
As the year turns over, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’ve gotten
to where we are and what it will take to get to a better place. I keep
coming back to the balance between the short- and long-term dimensions of social change.
There are time-sensitive challenges right in front of us, right now, that demand immediate action—from
talk of mass deportations to potential rollbacks of lifesaving public health interventions. How we frame
these and other immediate issues will shape how people perceive them and the actions they do or don't
take. Yet preventing and reducing harm in the near term is not our only task. In the long term, we need to
steer toward a very different geography of assumptions, attitudes, and social norms.
Right now it feels like we’re in the middle of a storm, and it’s hard to know how to allocate our resources
and attention. But the answer can’t be focusing only on the short term at the expense of the big-picture
work—it has to be both.
We need to act now to prevent state cruelty against immigrantsand
and we need to build a society that treats
every human with dignity and compassion. We need to resist upcoming attacks on vaccinesand
and we need
to shift mindsets on health so that valuing prevention, science, and community seems like common sense.
The good news is that short-term policy and long-term narrative and culture work can be intertwined—
and we can look to contemporary movement strategy for examples. As the LGBTQ+ movement has
unfolded and evolved across decades, framing and policy wins were made possible by significant
narrative work. The same is true for the tobacco control movement, the environmental justice movement,
and more.
We must do the “now” stuff and keep our eyes on culture change, even—and maybe especially—when
distractions abound. History shows that chaotic times are exactly when we should lean into the long-term
work. Disruptive moments—like political upheaval or public health crises—highlight the inadequacy of
existing ways of thinking about problems and increase people’s willingness to think differently about what
is required to fix them.
If we aspire to get to a place where we’re not perpetually having to keep the worst from happening, we
must devote serious effort to long-term culture change. This will require a lot of “both/and” and a lot of
“all together.” It’s about bringing together advocates, scholars, organizers, media strategists,
policymakers, storytellers, artists, and creatives, and building narrative power. I’m finding the idea of
“all together” hopeful as we move into 2025.
In partnership,
NAT KENDALL-TAYLOR
CEO
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