Giving Compass' Take:

• At Stanford Social Innovation Review, Kristen Grimm urges organizations and donors to foster the right COVID-19 narrative that promotes constructive progress.

• How can we learn from past crises to make sure marginalized communities don't suffer in the aftermath of COVID-19? Why is the right narrative so essential in ensuring this?

• Learn more about the importance of your role in the COVID response effort.

The groups that set the narratives about what happened during the COVID-19 crisis, what to do now, and what’s next will have outsized influence on who we hold responsible, who gets help, and what we do moving forward.

As people seek meaning in what feels like madness, we will identify heroes, winners, and villains, and use them to describe this challenging and transformative time. Narratives will emerge that rationalize—or ignore—certain decisions. If the narrative that China is to blame for the coronavirus takes hold and spreads, for example, it will trigger a dramatically different international response than a narrative that the world was unprepared and missed early warning signs that could have kept us safer. Whoever succeeds in crafting this narrative and making it stick will have the power to reimagine and remake our world for the foreseeable future.

As philanthropies and NGOs do their best to not only respond to immediate needs of those they serve, but also make sense of the larger picture, it’s important to recognize that there are three narrative opportunities currently in play: the story of what happened, the story of what now, and the story of what next. We have a chance to define the past, the present, and the future—and connect the three—in ways that set the world on a better course.

Everyone agrees that the world will never be the same. But what changes will depend on what we decide this pandemic meant, what we tell ourselves we did in the face of it, and ultimately how we came out of it. We will make meaning. Each of these three narratives can set us up well or set us back. Which of these narratives can your organization help shape?

Read the full article about the right COVID narrative by Kirsten Grimm at Stanford Social Innovation Review.