How Narrative Strategy Can Build Inclusive Communities
When I was a child growing up in Koreatown, I remember a smattering of restaurant and corner store signs in my neighborhood in a language unknown to me. I saw people going in and out of stores that sold food and items from their home country. In the 1980s, these signs were early indicators of the flourishing Bangladeshi community starting to call the neighborhood home.
Seeing this activity was a familiar and comforting sight because my immigrant parents, too, went to the many Korean markets and stores to bring home food and household goods that were unique to Korean American families. I knew that my neighborhood was a place where immigrants - Koreans, Bangladeshi, Salvadoran, and many others - made their first stop in the U.S. to create a sense of home in this sliver of dense, urban LA.
This story is one of many stories about Koreatown.
In 2010, controversy erupted when a Korean American organization in Los Angeles blocked the city’s recognition of Little Bangladesh as a neighborhood. At the time, Little Bangladesh overlapped with what many considered to be Koreatown, and some advocated for the area to remain undivided as Koreatown instead.
Questions arose: how would the community retain its political power? How do we demonstrate that these four blocks belong to one ethnic community over another? At the root of the conflict was a power struggle over limited funding and resources for two working class communities whose elected leaders failed to recognize the many stories emerging from this ever-evolving neighborhood.
I often wonder if the stories from my childhood growing up in Koreatown could have persuaded civic leaders in the controversy to take a different approach. Perhaps the community would have been invited to create solutions to address the systemic inequities baked into the built environment of the neighborhood. Perhaps, as my friend Roxana Martinez always reminds me, we could have grown the pie, instead of fighting over one slice.
Stories about our communities - who lives, works, and plays there - can influence the look and feel of a neighborhood. Today, we increasingly see the importance of shaping these stories.
These collective stories become narratives about who belongs and the shared vision for the neighborhood. In place-based work, where community stakeholders come together to build thriving communities, these narratives influence who is invited to the table where decisions are made. These decisions affect community infrastructure investments and development. By building a bigger, more inclusive table and inviting the community to participate, we can unlock our collective imagination for what the built environment can look like — and ultimately, what outcomes community stakeholders want for those who live and work here.
Narrative change is an emerging strategy and practice that puts community leaders, organizers, and changemakers at the center of telling stories.
Narrative change is rooted in long-term planning, community engagement, and communication efforts that promote key values and diminish others to disrupt harmful narratives and establish new ones. It offers yet another tool to challenge the status quo and create a paradigm shift that centers right relationships with communities as true partners and beneficiaries.
When civic and community leaders share narratives about communities, they use data to describe community characteristics — what they look like, what they speak, what challenges they face. These characteristics can reinforce perceptions of the community and impact the resources that flow in and out. It can even impact the resources that flow within the local economy of the community because residents’ perception of their neighbors influences how they spend their dollars. And just like Little Bangladesh in Koreatown, it can also influence how community members come together to build power for shared priorities.
What can Little Bangladesh teach us about narrative strategy?
In the case of Little Bangladesh’s recognition in Koreatown, narrative strategy would have provided a framework that ensured the stories being told about Koreatown were in true alignment with the goals of residents who lived and worked there – such as creating a safe, inclusive neighborhood of cultural and socio-economic significance for immigrants in the U.S.
Little Bangladesh eventually received its official designation in 2010, after neighborhood leaders organized residents for more than a year to lobby the Los Angeles City Council. Signage marking the area was installed in 2011. Eventually, narrative change was used to help shift public perception and give visibility to these two communities. Despite this outcome, I can’t help but wonder what would have been possible had stakeholders of Koreatown been engaged in narrative change sooner. Perhaps, we would have seen a stronger, more united movement for Koreatown — inclusive of the many diverse residents and businesses — that could have secured greater resources to advance neighborhood priorities.
While we will never know for certain what would have been possible, we can learn from our past to ensure that the narratives about our communities reflect our values and vision.