EDITORIAL
The Stories We’re Speaking Into
Across the field of music for social impact, a lot of energy goes toward communication: Tell your story. Build your evidence base. Find the right combination of data and narrative, and you’ll finally get the support or decisions you’re seeking.
I work across sectors on exactly these goals: helping organizations design research studies that reflect their unique approaches and articulate their impact in ways that actually land. So I get it: refining communication is valuable work.
But it’s not the full picture. And our failure to see that full picture keeps us from igniting the changes we value.
How so? For one thing, it’s common in the field to pit “stories” against “data” or “narrative” against “evidence”—as if these are competing approaches. But stories are a form of data. Narratives are evidence. Treating them as opposites keeps us tinkering with details rather than tackling the real problem… Which is this:
In reality, it’s rarely evidence that drives decisions. It’s the stories and values of the people receiving it.
I want to be precise here, because this is easy to misread. I’m not saying that decisions are driven by the stories we tell. I’m saying they’re driven by the stories decision-makers are already living inside of: their beliefs about how change happens, who matters, what’s possible, what counts as real.
Neither a great study nor a compelling story can reach someone whose own story—about their life, their sector, the world, the future—can’t value or accommodate it. Example: a funder who passes on your community music program may have received excellent evidence about its effectiveness. But their own story about the community, about what art is for, about how social change works, shaped whether and how that evidence mattered to them.
When evidence does make a difference, it’s never just because it’s of high quality. It’s because the person receiving it has a story in which the evidence holds value and makes sense.
In short: It’s never just the evidence. It’s the story the evidence lands in.
If having great evidence were the determining factor, then here in the United States, we’d have universal healthcare; we wouldn’t still be cutting arts education from schools; and we’d have addressed the environmental and structural factors that allow zip codes to predict life expectancy. (To cite just a few well-studied examples.)
The evidence for the value of these changes has been rigorous and clear for years. When people oppose them, it’s not because they’re waiting for better science or more moving stories. It’s because they themselves have a story—about life, about power or money, about what matters, about how things work—that renders the evidence valueless or beside the point.
In short, the solution is rarely to pile on more evidence. The solution is to change the story.
Which raises the question that drives my work: What does it take to change the story?
Not our story. Theirs. The funder’s. The policymaker’s. The billionaire’s. The CEO’s. The world’s. Society’s.
The power to fundamentally alter individual and collective narratives, to shift cultural perceptions and values, to shape new norms and expectations—that is a key power of artists and the arts. And if we’re honest, it’s a power even this field underestimates.
This power isn’t a replacement for the direct impacts that arts-based programs have on participants, nor does it make our efforts at rigorous evaluation irrelevant. Instead, it operates ahead of and within those efforts—going upstream to change the beliefs, values, and stories that define and limit them.
After all, even the direct health impacts that music programs can deliver—say, reduced stress or social connection—exist within a story that has rendered stress and loneliness common rather than rare. That story wasn’t inevitable. It’s not immutable.
It takes an artist—a critical and creative thinker—to recognize the stories we’re living in as stories…and to reimagine and revise them.
James Baldwin wrote, “The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” This is the work: identifying the unquestioned, embedded narratives that are shaping decisions, opportunities, powers, inequities, and constraints; recognizing these narratives as changeable; and then leading the change.
Historically, when it comes to laws advancing civil rights, expanding who’s recognized as fully human, or improving justice and equity, evidence has played a critical role—but often after artists have reshaped what the broader culture believes is normal, acceptable, and possible. For example, Baldwin’s essays made it less tenable for white readers to maintain their story that racism was irrelevant to their lives, identities, patriotism, faith. The U.S. sitcom Will & Grace has been credited by researchers and politicians alike with shifting public opinion on same-sex relationships more effectively than years of policy argument, by putting a gay man at the center of an ordinary, lovable life. In both instances, art changed the stories people had about themselves and their world. Those new stories made the evidence for change visible and valuable. New legislation became possible. And now, more re-storying is needed.
The value of arts and culture for health and social change is not just that they help people cope and heal within the world as it is. Arts and culture have long been the vehicle by which humans change what we believe is possible, and then make the possible real. They can reveal and reimagine the narratives that determine whose wellbeing is seen as worth protecting, which futures feel imaginable, which evidence is considered, and what we do with it.
bell hooks said, “What cannot be imagined cannot come into being.” If we don’t imagine different premises, beliefs, norms, narratives, we’ll continue to live with the ones we have. And if artists aren’t doing that imagining, who will?
So alongside “How do we build an evidence base?” and “How do we tell our story well?”—the questions I’d love this field to be asking are: What narratives are shaping whether this evidence matters? Where did those narratives come from? What alternatives can we imagine? And: How will we, as artists and creatives, flesh out those alternatives—to ignite change?
Seeing the underlying stories that shape our reality, recognizing them as stories, knowing they’re rewritable, and creating alternatives: this is the work of artists. The specific stories we seek to tell about our work or programs will eventually hit the walls of the larger stories we’re speaking into. Those walls are movable. Moving them is some of the most powerful, creative work we get to do.
Learn more about Dr. Tasha Golden and her work here.
For more on the art of change, see Dr. Golden’s article in Psychology Today.
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