Opportunity knocks for social change, even in divided times

Last week, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, announced an exciting series of grants to fund stories that can ‘combat the false narratives about the causes of poverty in America’. This is a huge opportunity to use culture, through storytelling, to boost public understanding, shift attitudes and build support for action on poverty.

We know the way the public thinks about people trapped in poverty is a barrier to getting the policy changes needed — a subject which will be explored in depth by Mary O’Hara in her upcoming book: The Shame Game: Overturning the Toxic Poverty Narrative.

When we are up against dominant, inauthentic and damaging narratives, campaigners for social change in the UK must also think creatively about how our messages can be heard.

Using culture to shift attitudes

In Selina Todd’s fascinating biography of the working-class playwright Shelagh Delaney (Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution), Todd celebrates Delaney’s role in driving a social revolution for working-class women through culture:

“…she is a reminder that dissent is more widespread than we might think… Clothes, cosmetics, music, storytelling, romance, comics, novels, films and plays are the tools by which working-class women can fashion those different futures. Rarely do they find a national stage and an audience. This is the story of one who did.”

At a book reading a few years ago in Leeds Town Hall, another working-class writer, Caitlin Moran, also extolled the power of culture to generate shifts in thinking: “Culture marches every day” she told a packed audience of Northern feminists. While demonstrations and placard-waving are an important part of political protest, Moran talked about the power of literature, films, TV and other cultural collateral to posit new realities and represent the views and experiences of people often overlooked, and worse still, ignored by the mainstream.

From Anna Friel’s lesbian kiss on Brookside in the 1980s, to Beyonce’s Super Bowl perfomance a couple of years ago, our cultural landscape has helped to bring the ‘other’ into the mainstream, challenge perceptions and, crucially, normalise what previously has been seen as either weird or, worse still, morally and socially unacceptable. Our culture can interrupt the norms of thinking in ways that are imperceptible to audiences. Which is why its potency cannot be ignored by campaigners for social change.

For this very reason, we are putting resource into influencing our cultural fabric — the way stories are told and the people who tell them — as part of our ambition to build public will to solve poverty in the UK.

Last year I outlined some of the initiatives and partnerships we were undertaking as a means to engaging new public audiences and seeding new ways of thinking about people in poverty.

Engaging new audiences through entertainment

But we are ambitious to reach new and bigger public audiences. This is unchartered territory, long-term and potentially risky work for JRF, but we are learning from and connecting with others.

We are inspired by the work of US funders like Unbound Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, and now the Gates Foundation, who are committed to using popular culture as a catalyst for social change. Initiatives such as the Pop Culture Collaboration are testing new and innovative approaches to boosting representation of marginalised groups in entertainment, as well as influencing the way stories are told, in a bid to shift thinking. I highly recommend reading Alice Sachrajda’s and Esme Peach’s brilliant report exploring the UK context: Riding the Waves: How Pop Culture has the Potential to Catalyse Social Change in the UK.

Here in the UK, The Wellcome Trust has spent the last decade collaborating with the entertainment industry to help engage the public with the value of science. Mainstream programmes such as the Secret Life of Four Year Olds and the game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice are the results of such collaboration and have successfully engaged new audiences on the issue of health and science, through content that is both critically and popularly successful.

We will be working with The Wellcome Trust to explore how we can collaborate with entertainment creators to generate create new and original content that reaches mass audiences. Our ambition is to normalise the ideas and concepts that, over time, can boost a better understanding of the systems and structures that lock people in poverty, as well as demonstrate that change is possible, and indeed, beneficial to all of us.

And indeed, if Bill or Melinda Gates reads this, we would love to explore how we can collaborate to shift the narrative on poverty through culture — we think we could help!

On February 20th we’ll be launching a new photography exhibition, Picture Britain: Our People, Our Poverty which aims to re-frame the picture of people trapped in poverty.

Keep an eye on our social media channels for updates or sign up to our newsletter to stay in the loop about the launch and touring locations.

If you want to join in the conversation then join me over on Twitter @abigailspaul #cultureforsocialchange