Many people working in nonprofits and philanthropy say they want to reduce poverty, and increasingly, foundations, nonprofits, and social-movement organizations are developing communications strategies and telling stories that aim to dispel the myth that the US economic system is equitable and fair.

However, the Right has long propagated narratives that shape our society’s institutions and culture—and it requires conscious effort to upend them. As such, the stories shared by nonprofits and philanthropists too often reinforce the status quo rather than change it. Inadvertently, myths that poor people are lazy or inherently bad, or that rich people earned their wealth by sheer fortitude and hard work, creep in. Mythologies of both the “undeserving poor” and the “meritorious rich” erase legacies of racial capitalism and its systemic exploitation, theft, and violence.

In 2019, our team of practitioners (Radical Communicators Network), scholars (Center for Public Interest Communications), and creatives (Milli) began to explore narratives about poverty and wealth coming from the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors. Having spent decades working in and studying these sectors, we found that many well-intentioned organizations uphold harmful narratives about poverty and wealth in their efforts to counter them.

To explore the narratives coming from philanthropy and nonprofits, we conducted an academic literature review, a content analysis of narrative work from a sample of organizations working on issues related to economic inequality, and interviews with representatives from organizations doing storytelling well.

The product of our three years of work, BROKE is a multidisciplinary toolkit that identifies pervasive narratives about poverty and wealth coming from the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors and offers guidance on how to tell better stories for economic justice. In addition to providing nonprofits and philanthropy an opportunity to examine the stories they tell about poverty and wealth, BROKE highlights ways that movements can craft new narratives rooted in social science as well as the wisdom of lived experience of poverty and economic-justice organizing. We hope that by collaborating to tell better stories about how the rich get rich and the poor stay poor, movements—including activists, communicators, storytellers, and strategists—can begin to transform an oppressive capitalist economic system and build a free, just world in which all people can live with dignity.

Read the full article about nonprofit narratives for economic power by Jack Barry, Ann Searight Christiano, Michael Huang, Shanelle Matthews, Annie Neimand, Rakeem Robinson, Heena Shah, Trina Stoutand and Zakyree Wallace at Nonprofit Quarterly.