STORY FIRST

More than two decades is a long time to do anything. As a public interest communicator, it’s long enough to have worked in places you never expected, on causes you felt passionately about, with people who changed how you see the world. Long enough, also, to know exactly which part of the work makes you want to get up in the morning.

For me, it has always been the story.

I'm not leaving strategic communications. I'm sharpening it around a conviction that has only deepened over the years: public interest communications is most powerful when it starts with a story. It’s the moment when a real person sits down, starts talking and says something that makes you think: if the right people heard this, something could actually change.

Going forward, social impact storytelling is the organizing principle of my practice — not one tool among many, but the foundation everything else is built on. For me that means the specific, disciplined, ethically grounded work of gathering real human narratives and deploying them to advance a mission. The kind that moves a policymaker, shifts a funder's thinking or brings a community into genuine partnership with an advocacy organization.

Here's what my approach looks like in practice.

I start with listening — no surprises there. It sounds obvious until you've watched enough organizations arrive at a community meeting with their narrative already written and their questions designed to confirm it. Real listening changes what you find. And what you find changes everything built on top of it.

I treat consent as a practice, not a checkbox.

When I produced short video stories for a nationwide initiative to encourage civil discourse between Americans from all walks of life, I sought to capture stories people could trust. That meant being honest with every person I interviewed about what I was doing, why and where their story was going. Seventy-five interviews. Twenty-four million people reached.

Trust doesn't scale unless it's built one conversation at a time.

I frame stories around agency and hope rather than suffering and need.

Not because I choose to ignore difficulty, but because stories centered on what people are doing and capable of are both more ethical and, as it turns out, more effective. Audiences respond to agency. Policymakers respond to possibility. Funders respond to evidence that change is happening.

I build storytelling programs as well as individual stories.

A single compelling narrative is a social change asset. A well-governed story bank, built on consistent ethical practices and tied to a mission-driven organization’s strategy, is a social change capability. It means having the right story ready when a funder asks, a campaign launches or a policymaker needs to hear from someone whose life is directly affected.

If you lead or work in a mission-driven organization and you're wondering what your storytelling program could accomplish — or whether you actually have one — I'd love to have that conversation.

The right story, told at the right moment, can change what happens next. I'm here for that work.

Follow me for a new series on social impact storytelling — the strategic and ethical use of real human narrative to advance a mission.