Giving Compass' Take:

• Philanthropy needs to acknowledge that there are three narrative opportunities currently in play regarding COVID-19: the story of what happened, the story of what now, and the story of what next. 

• Depending on who the influencers are, the narratives will be crucial for deciding who is responsible and who receives help.  How can philanthropy help shape narratives so that marginalized groups will receive the care they need during the pandemic? 

• Read more on philanthropy in the time of COVID-19.

It’s long been said that the winners write history. The great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe captures this in a proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” This was clear in 2009 and 2010, when many of the powerful individuals inside the US government and in Wall Street banks, along with pundits and politicians, fueled the narrative that poor people who had “gotten too far over their heads” in homeownership were responsible for the Great Recession. There was little mention of predatory lending, growing inequality, or a lack of consumer protections in the financial industry overall. This narrative of individual responsibility—rather than lack of financial regulation, and structural and systemic inequities—laid the groundwork for bank bailouts and even more unchecked power in the financial industry. The misdiagnosis of the problem and investment in the wrong solutions pushed the United States into a deeper spiral of economic inequality with clear winners and losers.

The narrative implications of the COVID-19 pandemic could potentially follow suit. 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.

Read the full article about shaping the nonprofit narrative by Kristen Grimm at Stanford Social Innovation Review.