Centering asset-based approaches in our storytelling and narrative practice is essential to strengthening our capacity to address complex social challenges, advance social justice, and facilitate healing.
Introduction
We move in the direction of the stories we tell. Over the years, as a facilitator, strategist, researcher, and community organizer, I’ve learned this truth time and again. We live in a time marked by rising othering, disinformation, and scarcity-driven narratives. Across institutions and media, dominant stories too often emphasize deficiency, crisis, hate, and fear. But what if we told different stories? What if we pivoted from storytelling as a practice of resistance to freedom and healing? What if we told stories that move us toward possibility, belonging, and critical hope?
I began asking these questions 15 years ago when I launched Storytellers for Change. Asset-based storytelling is one of the frameworks that emerged in response to my ongoing engagement with these inquiries. This article is the first in a series dedicated to unpacking this framework — a narrative approach that centers community strengths, aspirations, agency, cultural assets, and lived experiences to move us toward justice, healing, and systemic change. In this opening article, I’ll introduce the foundational elements of the framework, reflect on why this work matters in today’s social and political climate, and share the purpose behind our course, Crafting Asset-Based Stories.
A Tale of Two Narratives
In his work on systems transformation, MIT scholar Otto Scharmer invites us to consider the two narratives shaping our current moment. “One is a story of destruction — of planet, people, and ourselves,” he writes. “The other is a story of regeneration, healing, and deep personal and systemic transition.” These stories are not abstract. These stories show up in our organizations, movements, and how we narrate change. They shape what we believe is possible and how we construct our future.
In The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, Dr. Shawn Ginwright calls for a critical shift he terms the “third pivot” — moving from a problem-saturated lens to one grounded in possibility. This pivot doesn’t dismiss harm or injustice; instead, it challenges us to recognize that focusing solely on what’s broken can limit our imagination and erode our agency. In other words, focusing on diagnosing the problem is not the same as solving it. Then, to move forward, we need stories (and research, strategy, messaging, and more) that name the injustice and affirm our power. Drawing from the work of critical scholar and educator Jeff Duncan-Andrade, I see this as a storytelling practice rooted in critical hope. That is sharing stories that expose systems of inequity while uplifting our capacity to transform them. These stories move beyond critique, inviting us to imagine and build what is possible.
We must embody and commit to a process that generates these critically hopeful and possibility-focused stories within ourselves, our organizations, and our systems. At Storytellers for Change, we refer to this narrative practice as asset-based storytelling.
Asset-based storytelling is a methodology that centers the strengths, agency, cultural assets, aspirations, and lived experiences of individuals and communities, especially those who have been systematically marginalized and oppressed.
Watch this webinar to learn more about asset-based storytelling.
As Trabian Shorters powerfully argues, the social sector has often relied on deficit-based language — terms like “at-risk,” “underprivileged,” or “disadvantaged” — which reinforce harmful stereotypes. Similarly, in her TED Talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us how language can be used to construct dangerous “single stories” — simplified portrayals that flatten the complexity of people’s lives — that malign and dehumanize. Shorters argues that asset-framing, by contrast, begins by defining people through their aspirations and contributions, and only then addresses the barriers they face. This shift in language and framing affirms dignity, builds trust, and reorients our collective attention toward aspirations.
However, asset-based storytelling is not just about the content or framing of our stories. It is about changing how stories are constructed, by whom, and for what purpose. While strength-based language is an important entry point, meaningful narrative change demands deeper inquiry. We must examine the systems, power structures, and processes that shape the stories we tell. We must ask: Who defines how we engage with language? Whose voices are centered? Whose truths are erased?
Drawing from Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory, we understand that stories are never neutral. They are created, circulated, and interpreted through cultural and institutional lenses. Every story has a positionality. Every story has a history, a teller, and a system behind its creation — what I call storytelling systems. These systems are shaped by organizational cultures, historical narratives, and the unspoken rules that determine what kinds of stories are seen as legitimate, fundable, worthy, ethical, or authentic. And collectively, these storytelling systems shape how we perceive and act within the world.
Read more about our agency as storytellers to decode language.
This is why it’s critical to interrogate the origins of our storytelling practices and the harms they often reproduce. Over the years, in working alongside movements, organizations, and communities, I’ve observed recurring patterns that reflect extractive, performative, or deficit-based approaches to storytelling. These are some examples:
Equal Opportunity Stories: Narratives that invoke “equal opportunity” and justify colorblindness, ignore racialized experiences, gaslight impacted communities, and maintain the appearance of fairness while sustaining systemic inequity.
Fundraising Stories: Fundraising narratives and practices built on bootstrap myths, tokenizing practices, and savior complexes.
Audience-First Stories: Social-impact storytelling that centers emotional appeal, donors, and funders over community dignity and agency.
Leadership Stories: Leadership and social entrepreneurship stories that glamorize “fast and scalable change” and “working up the ladder,” while reinforcing dominant culture, grind mentality, hierarchical structures, and individualism.
Research & Data Stories: Storytelling practices that reduce lived experience to data points, claim “valid” knowledge at the expense of community wisdom, and offer no systemic redress or impact.
Resilience Stories: Narratives that celebrate and weaponize “resilience” stories, particularly of marginalized communities, to deflect attention from structural injustice.
Solidarity Stories: Polished solidarity statements crafted to signal inclusion but ultimately designed to protect institutional comfort rather than challenge white supremacy, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of systemic oppression.
Inspiring Campaign Stories: Inspirational campaigns that tokenize identity, prioritizing visibility and representation as long as they are aligned with a dominant cultural perspective.
Problem-Only Stories: Program and strategy narratives focused solely on deficits, ignoring strengths and pathways for transformation.
Performing Progress Stories: Performative use of terms like agency, resilience, and lived experience, frequently cited in messaging but unsupported by internal policies, practices, feedback loops, or accountability mechanisms.
What’s the common thread in these narratives? They are fundamentally rooted in a deficit-based, problem-focused paradigm shaped by dominant cultural norms. In this paradigm, communities are reduced to what they lack. Stories become ornaments, property, and tools — instruments to decorate reports, drive donations, or justify impact strategies — rather than honored for their power, agency, and knowledge. Narratives rooted in problem-focused and deficit-based paradigms perpetuate harm, sustain inequity, dehumanize, and withhold our potential by centering problems over possibilities, individual effort over collective power, and boot-strap success stories over structural change.
We need a radical shift in how we tell stories. We need a different narrative paradigm — one that is relational, driven by care, centered in justice, and focused on regeneration. Asset-based storytelling is our contribution to this shift.
What is Asset-Based Storytelling?
Asset-based storytelling is the practice of examining, crafting, and sharing stories by centering individuals’ and communities’ strengths, agency, cultural assets, aspirations, and lived experiences. Furthermore, it is a narrative-building approach that moves us towards possibility, belonging, and critical hope.
Let’s unpack asset-based storytelling and this definition by first grounding ourselves in the deeper function of storytelling itself. Storytelling is, above all, a meaning-making process. Our identities, values, and possibilities are shaped through the stories we inherit, resist, and create. In her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, Toni Morrison says, “Narrative is radical. It is radical because it creates us at the very moment it is being created.” In other words, since time immemorial, storytelling has been the mechanism through which we come to know and create ourselves and one another. Over time, the channels and technologies through which stories are created and disseminated have changed. However, the core function of storytelling has remained constant: to create meaning.
Now, let’s discuss asset-based methodologies. Grounded in critical pedagogy and cultural wealth frameworks — drawing on the work of bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Bettina Love, and Tara Yosso — our approach is rooted in honoring lived knowledge, imagination, and collective wisdom. When practiced with intention and care, asset-based storytelling becomes more than a communications strategy. It becomes a methodology for narrative change, a practice of relationship-building, a process for personal and systemic transformation, and a path toward healing and justice.
While our work is informed by theory, we are, first and foremost, practitioners, facilitators, and strategists. Above all, asset-based storytelling is a practice. It is not just a framework, but a commitment to how we show up in relationship with stories and each other. As I mentioned at the outset of this article, we move in the direction of the stories we tell. So, imagine what becomes possible when we commit to co-crafting and sharing stories that are rooted in:
Belonging: Stories that affirm our humanity, place in community, and well-being.
Abundance: Stories that celebrate collective resources, knowledge, and care.
Healing: Stories that hold pain without being defined by it, and that offer space for truth, reconciliation, and nourishment.
Flourishing: Stories that honor joy, creativity, and the right to thrive — not just survive.
Reciprocity: Stories rooted in our interconnectedness with each other and nature.
Collectivism: Stories that center a loving, expansive, all-inclusive “WE” and emphasize interdependence.
Justice: Stories that allow us to co-build just relationships with ourselves, each other, and imagine just futures.
These are the stories we need now. Stories that expand what’s possible and affirm our humanity. Stories that move us, and move us forward together.
Crafting Asset-Based Stories
To support the field of narrative change and storytelling for justice, we’ve created a series of storytelling courses rooted in the principles and practice of asset-based storytelling. Crafting Asset-Based Stories is the latest of these offerings. I designed the course to support practitioners, educators, communicators, organizers, and storytellers in moving from theory to action. To craft asset-based stories. To shift narratives. To write, imagine, and amplify stories to nourish, mobilize, and contribute to social justice movements. Beyond offering storytelling tools and frameworks rooted in asset-based methodologies, I intend for the course to also serve as a site for relationship building and collaboration.
Learn more about the course content here.
Our course framework comprises three essential dimensions: principles, processes, and practices. The principles ground our work in values such as acknowledgement, agency, and accountability. Most importantly, we invite you to interrogate what principles and storytelling systems shape your narrative practice. And to reflect on and co-create your principles as you continue to engage in asset-based storytelling. The processes help participants examine how stories are sourced, developed, and shared in ways that resist extraction and uplift agency. Furthermore, we also engage in a step-by-step story-crafting process. Lastly, we facilitate dialogues to share, uplift, and co-create promising practices to sustain this storytelling work. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution or static definitions, this course invites participants to co-create a community of practice that learns together, discusses the challenges and tensions that emerge within this framework, and commits to evolving with care.
A Practice and a Commitment
This work requires space and time for deep listening, reflection, dialogue, and daydreaming. It calls on us to resist the urge for tidy narratives and make room for complex and emergent stories. Stories that don’t just inform, but transform. Stories that don’t simply inspire, but disrupt. Stories that don’t only expose problems, but activate our agency. That don’t extract, but restore.
Asset-based storytelling is more than a communication strategy — it is a justice-oriented practice. It asks us to engage with stories not as fixed scripts, but as dynamic spaces for emergence. It reminds us that storytelling can be both a mirror and a compass — reflecting who we are and guiding us toward who we might become.
In this time of uncertainty and transformation, we are invited to tell stories that restore humanity, honor our relationship with nature, embrace complexity, and cultivate hope. Asset-based storytelling is one such path, one grounded in the belief that our stories can hold the power to repair, to resist, and to reimagine the world.
Our commitment is to be alongside the community in this work—to support and learn with you and continue reflecting, interrogating, and evolving together. Always rooted in justice, that is the promise—and the practice—of asset-based storytelling.
References
Adichie, C. N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
Baldwin, J. (1985). The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985. St. Martin’s Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
Ginwright, S. (2022). The four pivots: Reimagining justice, reimagining ourselves. North Atlantic Books.
Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79 (pp. 128–138). London: Hutchinson.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Morrison, T. (1993). Nobel Lecture. The Nobel Prize.
Scharmer, C. O., & Kaufer, K. (2025). Presencing: 7 practices for transforming self, society, and business. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Shorters, T. (2019, June 26). You can’t lift people up by putting them down: How to talk about tough issues of race, poverty, and more. The Chronicle of Philanthropy. National Council of Nonprofits+2The Chronicle of Philanthropy+2Na
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.