Over the last year, Race Forward and Harmony Labs have been participants in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Mindset Consortium, a community of practice convened to advance more effective, aligned, and coordinated efforts to understand, address, and shift mindsets that prevent racial and health equity in America. One early, essential part of this work has been to establish a narrative goal that will allow for long-term alignment towards a shared vision for the future.

A narrative goal as a unifying vision

Today, new (and old) narratives that prevent healing historic inequities are still prominent and are actively being used to justify policy at levels of government and society. The recent attacks on “DEI” are just one example.

As rapidly changing policies threaten to undermine progress, organizations working toward systemic equality find themselves at a critical juncture. What is needed are inspiring stories—not merely more messages—that show us all how we can be healed and flourish together. But without a unifying vision that can serve as a common narrative goal for these stories, action across many different groups risks being uncoordinated and ineffective, and is unlikely to lead to the deep, urgent systemic changes we are trying to achieve with this work.

The future is (still) equality

When we set out to synthesize literature, advocacy, and diverse points of view into a single narrative goal that all our work should contribute to, we imagined that it might be difficult to find alignment or that the results might feel new, challenging, or like a tough sell. What we found was the opposite. The narrative goal that we’re all working toward hasn’t changed: the future must be equal.

A new tool for inspiring many types of action

Setting a measurable narrative goal is the first step toward knowing whether we are making progress. This goal, at its most effective, can inspire thousands of stories that work together to reach many people at scale to meaningfully shift public perceptions. In an effort to identify a goal that inspires many different types of action, we undertook a collaborative process that involved all of the organizations convened by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of the Mindset Consortium—Berkeley Media Studies Group, Frameworks Institute, Harmony Labs, Narrative Initiative, Race Forward, and RadComms. We also engaged a panel of advisors who are subject matter experts on narrative and racial and health equity.

The resulting strategic research synthesis is not intended as a comprehensive literature review of systemic racism, but rather a representation of all the psychological constructs associated with narratives about race and thriving so that we might identify the necessary elements of transformative change. It also defines the narrative goal needed to end systemic racism—the minimum set of narrative elements that, if believed and acted upon by everyone, would represent progress toward systemic equality.

What we learned

As we consulted with dozens of advisors and stakeholders along the way to find alignment, some key questions and considerations arose as we attempted to create a set of specific, clear metrics for success:

Equality means equal flourishing
The concept of flourishing emerged as an important qualifier of “equality.” Advisors rejected the idea that we should all have equal ability to “realize potential” which implies we need utility or usefulness. There’s a reason that equality is the first line in a famous document about independence. The equality we want—the equality America has always dreamed of—is not equality of utility; it is equality of liberty, of agency, of choice. The justice-rooted flourishing that is useful in this work should represent an overarching equality in living the “good life,” grounded in everyday connection, positivity, resilience, and power.

All of us contribute to making an equal future
The process made clear that we not only need a new vision, but also one that could be shared to align movements, strategy, and people.

Equity will drive healing toward equality
While racial equity has always been the north star for this work, our process raised the question as to whether racial equality was the ultimate narrative goal. This destination requires intentional healing of those historical inequities as part of the journey or, as one advisor described:

“equity represents steps along the way, while true equality and justice represent the ultimate destination we seek.“

We will maintain equality by measuring equality
We created this resource to help us understand what we measure to know when we’ve solved the problem. However, it is critical that we acknowledge cyclical relationships between individuals—the people creating, consuming, and sharing the stories—and the systems they are reinforcing. Because people program, and are programmed by, systems, we must be vigilant even after we have healed to prevent ourselves from inadvertently recreating biases, and the best way to do that is to hold ourselves accountable through ongoing measurement.

Telling the right stories to the right people, at scale

While there may be many ways of measuring progress along this journey, our hope is that the strategic research synthesis that emerged from this process, and the narrative goal it defines, can support the field in better imagining the future we are working together to create.

By establishing a shared vision and clear metrics, we can take steps that measurably bring us closer to that future, tracking our collective impact rather than many uncoordinated individual efforts.

No single organization or initiative will achieve this goal alone, but by aligning our approaches and destinations, we can start to tell better stories to the right people, have those stories work together to create the type of narratives that can transform broken systems, and find solidarity in a shared vision for the future. If you would like to learn more about our narrative goal and how it was developed, or just want to get involved in this work, get in touch.