Stories of Change: Inside The Moth and Ford’s Storytelling Training for Nonprofits
Zivanai MatangiAt the Ford Foundation, we invest in individuals, ideas, and institutions—each with their own stories and strategies focused on ending inequality and creating a more just world. Our Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) program, in particular, believes in supporting long-term narratives of change, working with social justice organizations to become stronger and more resilient over time. And we believe in the power of narrative storytelling itself to amplify their organizations’ impact, fuel their advocacy and influence, engage stakeholders, and catalyze new funding opportunities.
As a longtime member of the BUILD team and its current director, I witnessed the power of personal storytelling firsthand in June 2024, in the auditorium of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York. I watched as Mbongiseni Buthelezi—then the executive director of the Public Affairs Research Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa—took his place alone on the stage, under a bright spotlight. And I held my breath, along with his rapt audience, as he told his story.
“April 27, 1994: The first democratic elections were held in South Africa. My parents woke up early to go and vote. They could vote for the first time, after 300 years of colonialism and apartheid,” he said. “They voted for a better life for us, their children. They wanted us to have the education that they never had.”
This evening—a storytelling performance of five social justice leaders sharing their personal journeys of leadership and purpose—was the culmination of a series of workshops that Buthelezi took with The Moth, a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting the art of storytelling and celebrating the commonality of the human experience. The initiative, held in partnership with BUILD, focused on training leaders from nonprofits and civil society how to harness the power of their own personal narratives in order to create clearer messaging, stronger fundraising, and greater impact.
Ford’s BUILD program invests holistically in our grantee nonprofits and civil society organizations by providing general operating support, combined with organizational strengthening support. Through our partnership with The Moth, we added a tool to the toolbox of our grantee partner leaders: the power of true personal storytelling.
When nonprofit leaders have the skills to communicate their missions and purpose quickly and clearly, they can engage audiences, shift mindsets, and connect with funders and stakeholders in new and compelling ways. When people share their humanity, listeners connect with it deeply and memorably. This storytelling can complement all the other metrics nonprofits use to communicate their work—reports, numbers served, theories of change, log frames—and communicate their human impact and nuances. We also believe that, as with so many other facets of leadership, narrative storytelling is a skillset that can be studied and honed—and that for nonprofit leaders who have spent their lives elevating others, working outside the spotlight, the benefits can be tremendous.
For Buthelezi, The Moth’s training meant sharing insights about his personal challenges and setbacks in his social justice career, which he had not shared readily with audiences before. As he learned, sharing these details can help listeners find new ways to connect with the complex issues and sectors he works in.
“It’s about the deeper you can reach into your experiences, the more you can talk about the little things that happened along your journey,” said Buthelezi. “The conversation you have with your kid or your partner when you get home, the frustrations you feel while trying to make an organization run or the world a better place: Those are the things that become really relatable for other people.”
Buthelezi, who now serves as CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, also attended The Moth and Ford’s second storytelling Mainstage in Johannesburg. As with the New York City event, the South Africa event performers took The Moth and Ford’s training before telling their stories to an audience of funders, civil society leaders, and media.
Since its founding in New York in 1997, The Moth has hosted storytelling slams in 28 cities and expanded to several books and a popular podcast. Throughout the years, it has presented personal stories from acclaimed writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Elizabeth Gilbert, but most of the people on Moth stages have been everyday people with extraordinary and surprising stories to tell. In addition to its 600 worldwide events each year, The Moth has also produced storytelling workshops and curated storytelling events that addressed gender rights and food justice, setting the rubric for our collaboration to explore the long, non-linear journeys of nonprofit organizations and leaders.
The Moth and Ford’s initiative encouraged social justice leaders to focus their stories on turning points in their lives—a challenge encountered, an opportunity presented—and distill their experiences into 10-minute personal stories, told from memory onstage with no scripts or notes. Workshops were held over three days in April 2024 in New York City and Johannesburg; during them, Moth instructors taught participants key principles of narrative storytelling, strategies for honing on their most compelling themes, and ways their personal narratives can be adapted to enact change in their communities. The instructors also guided them through how to distill their stories into 60- and 90-second versions to share in funder conversations, boardrooms, staff meetings, and other opportunities.
Sarah Austin Jenness, The Moth’s executive producer and co-director of The Moth and Ford’s initiative, said all the stories told by its participants—and on all of The Moth’s stages—unfold from a single inflection point in the storyteller’s life.
“These stories are always about a decision that you made and something that was at stake for you,” said Jenness. “When you’re using your personal stories in your work, it helps people listening feel like these larger critical world issues are in their own backyard as well. These stories have universal human emotions, and you can’t look away.”
Transcript
BUILDing a Just Future: Stories of Strength and Discovery
This story told by Bianca Agustin was recorded at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice on June 3, 2024.
BIANCA AGUSTIN: In the summer of 2011, I was working for a large local of the Service Employees International Union. On this particular day, I was at the union headquarter office in lower Manhattan for a big meeting called by our executive vice president. I was so excited. My heart was pounding with anticipation. I was expecting a huge announcement that I had been working toward for quite some time. I’d spent the last five years of my life coordinating a campaign to win union recognition for food service workers employed by a French multinational corporation called Sodexo. My team—you all know and love them. My team of organizers, researchers, and worker leaders had waged a passionate and creative public campaign, and I was convinced we had finally gotten the company to the bargaining table. Word around the office was that Sodexo had signed a national recognition agreement, and there was talk of promotions for all of the staff who’d worked on the campaign. So I took a deep breath as I approached the conference doors to calm my nerves and to force myself to tone down the big, fat grin I had on my face. All of the department directors were already in the room when I arrived, and they were sitting around the table, oddly quiet. Kevin, our usually boisterous executive vice president, was looking rather sullen and serious. I knew before they even said a word that this was not the celebratory occasion I was looking forward to. “Good morning,” I struggled as I entered the room. I forced a smile that I feared was no longer warranted. As I sank into my seat, Kevin started the meeting. “I’ve invited you all here to share an important update regarding Sodexo. We wanted to tell the senior staff before it hit the press later this week.” My entire body perked up at the mention of Sodexo and a update worthy of press coverage. I had poured my heart and soul into that campaign, living in hotels and out of my car for months at a time. I deprioritized my health and my personal relationships to ensure success. Kevin went on, he explained that SEIU leadership had made the difficult decision of entering into a settlement agreement with Sodexo, and that under the terms of that settlement agreement, Sodexo would withdraw the lawsuit they had filed against the union, and the union would stop the organizing campaign. His words hit me like a punch in the gut. “Stop the organizing campaign?” I kept whispering to myself in disbelief. Kevin continued to talk, but at this point I was barely absorbing what he was saying. He finally stopped talking and asked if anyone had questions. In my state of shock, I mistakenly asked aloud, “How can we just stop the campaign?” The question immediately provoked awkward, tense glances among the directors, and a death stare from my director, who told me—very sternly—that he would answer any questions I had separately. I nodded and sat through the rest of the meeting in silence. As I walked slowly back to my department, the numbness started to recede, and once I was in my office behind that closed door, the weight of what Kevin had just said to us hit me hard. I was heartbroken. I was angry. And I was, like, totally destroyed. It was a devastating loss for my staff and for the workers, but this one affected me on a deeply personal, like surprisingly personal, level. And I think when I, in retrospect, it’s because I’ve always had a hard time with failure. Especially my own. I stopped playing the cello in middle school when I didn’t make first chair, and I gave up playing softball in high school when I didn’t make the all-star team. I like to be good at what I put my time and energy into, and I had a track record of winning campaigns at SEIU, and I had given the Sodexo campaign my all. And I just, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, I didn’t accept that we had lost. But it was my responsibility, as the campaign coordinator, to talk to the other staff and the worker leaders about the settlement agreement. And so I went around to all of the impacted work sites with the lead organizer, and we had extremely emotional, tearful conversations with our worker leaders. Those were probably among the hardest conversations I’ve ever had in my life. And when we were done, I returned to New York and my supervisor asked me to give a presentation about the Sodexo settlement at the next all-staff meeting, and he instructed me to talk about it as a path toward winning, not a loss. I was offended that he would even ask me to do such a thing. I couldn’t understand how he could see this agreement as a win in any way, shape, or form. It was a loss, pure and simple, and I couldn’t stand in front of my peers and say otherwise. I didn’t give the presentation that day. In fact, I didn’t attend the staff meeting. I took a week off to continue to grieve, to cry in the shower at my leisure, and just to think about what I wanted to do. I was in crisis. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in the movement. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay working with SEIU. And over the course of those seven days, I spoke to family and friends and all of the staff that I had worked so closely with on that campaign, including Jan, the lead organizer. Jan was struggling with all of the same emotions I was, and Jan was seriously considering quitting. And so that thought surfaced in my head. “Do I want to leave? Is this really the right place for me?” And when my week of leave was up, Jan had made up her mind to leave. And so we met in front of the office building one morning and grabbed a cup of coffee, and we sat on a park bench—way too close to the office, in retrospect—and we just started reminiscing, and talking, and trying to remember the highlights and the lowlights of the campaign. We were crying, we were laughing, and I was telling her how much I was going to miss working with her, when Kevin walked out of the building. We were sitting in his line of sight, so he spotted us easily and he started walking in our direction. Jan calmly collected her things and stood up and walked past him back into the office. I stayed sitting. Kevin was an officer that I had worked with for almost a decade at this point in my career, and I loved and respected him as a labor leader, and I was willing to sit and talk to him even though I was struggling. Now, Kevin, people in this room may know him is not a warm and fuzzy guy. He’s this fiery, loud Irishman, and this day he was out of character. He walked up and sat down right next to me without saying a word, and he just leaned in and put his arms around me. I started bawling in his arms, and when he let me go, I looked up into his face and I could see tears welling up into the corners of his eyes, and he said to me, “I hear you’re thinking about leaving.” And I nodded. “I am.” He asked, “Why?” And I immediately respond, “Because we failed. I failed.” And with no hint of irony, Kevin said to me, “No you didn’t, Bianca.” I was so fucking pissed. I could not believe he had said this to me. “Kevin, we lost. We didn’t win the union. I had to walk away from those workers.” He stared at me for a few seconds. Awkward silence. And with noticeable exasperation in his voice, said to me, “Yes. In that way we lost, Bianca. But you’re forgetting the significant thing we achieved.” I’m really caught off guard by that comment. I’m starting to listen to him in a real way, as he reminded me that our campaign developed a group of worker leaders that organized across race, language, immigration status. They took on the boss together, over and over. They went on strike three times during that campaign. And Kevin concluded, “Those workers don’t need a collective bargaining agreement to exercise their collective power. They’re already doing that. And your campaign made that possible. Your work made that possible.” And in that moment, something clicked for me, and I realized that Kevin wasn’t just trying to retain me because I was a workhorse. He was actually trying to convey a complicated truth, one that I had refused to accept all my life: that some things simply can’t be measured as a win or a loss. And me and my team had actually achieved something beautiful, something far from failure. Thank you.
[The Ford Foundation logo and the Moth logo appear on screen.]
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Bianca Agustin, co-director of United for Respect, a workers’ rights nonprofit, was another participant in The Moth and Ford’s initiative and the New York storytelling Moth Mainstage event. After rehearsing her story around 100 times, by her estimation, she told a story about a setback in a collective bargaining campaign she’d worked on for five years and how she came to a crossroads about continuing her life’s work. She said the training helped her appreciate the value of sharing her personal vulnerability amid discussion of widespread, structural challenges.
“I think often, when you talk about hot-button issues like police brutality or racism, it’s easy for people to discount it—because if they haven’t experienced it, it doesn’t seem real,” said Agustin. “But when you’re confronted with someone’s clear, personal stories of an experience, you can’t discount that.”
At The Moth’s storytelling event in Johannesburg, at The Lesedi at Joburg Theatre, Nomzamo Zondo, executive director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), told a story about entering social justice after working in law. She said the experience taught her that it is essential to infuse personal perspective into nonprofit work because so much of social justice change depends on furthering narratives that foreground clear, compelling solutions to big problems.
“It’s about influencing how people see the world. It’s about making sure, even for nonprofit leaders, that people see the logic behind the work that we do, and also that they understand how it connects with their lives,” she said.
During The Moth’s training, Zondo found it freeing to let her personality shine through in her storytelling, and said it made her reconsider boundaries she’d previously set in her life.
“I now understand that Nomzamo the lawyer, Nomzamo the executive director, Nomzamo the leader at SERI are all a product of Nomzamo the individual,” she said. “It is important to see how other people are formed by their personal backgrounds. Realizing this also allows me to show up genuinely and openly, without feeling the pressure to always act like a professional. The professional is a product of the personal.”
The Moth and Ford’s partnership emphasized increasing narrative opportunities for organizational leaders in the United States and the Global South, in our conviction that social justice storytelling can clarify big challenges by humanizing the people behind the progress, showing the day-to-day struggles and complexities that often go unrecognized in their work and illuminating the large and small impacts of their advocacy. They can give emotional urgency to the people who have been historically underrepresented—and within that attention is power. These leaders and their organizations do more than what can ever be explained in PowerPoint presentations or written reports.
In the BUILD initiative, we ask our grantees for the stories they want to tell: “Where do you want to go over the next five years? What’s your journey going to be? What kind of organization do you want to become, and what kind of investments will bring you there?” And as we work to help them fulfill this, we see how many opportunities exist for social justice leaders to share why their work matters to them and others, how they rise from setbacks and adversity and keep pushing forward every day. There are infinite stories to tell as we work together to create a more just world.
Tips for Stronger Narrative Storytelling
Sarah Austin Jenness, The Moth’s executive producer and co-director of The Moth and Ford’s storytelling initiative, offered these four tips for nonprofit leaders looking to strengthen their narrative storytelling skills:
- Challenge yourself to find the personal relationship you have to your work—and why it matters to you. “Stories are like fingerprints; you’re looking for something that’s very unique to you,” said Jenness. “Focus on scenes in your life that you can’t get out of your head, scenes that were integral that you just can’t shake. The tough scenes but the joyous scenes, too. If your life were a movie, what is one unforgettable scene from it?”
- Structure your storytelling in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. “I’ve seen a lot of stories just kind of trail off,” she said. “So make clear to your audiences: Where is the story going? What is the thing that you were surprised about? What is the resolution of the journey? Where do you end up? And make clear whatever is at stake for you. The beginning, middle, and end don’t necessarily need to be in that order and of equal length, but those three parts should be present.”
- Embrace personal storytelling as a way to grow your professional projects. “Facts and figures can only bring you so far,” said Jenness. “The heart of your story, and the journey you take your listeners on, can lead to deeper understanding. The heart of your story helps people understand that change is needed and necessary.”
- Offer different emotions to the audience. “Each one of these stories had a major personal lesson on leadership, on resilience, hope, and power—and the want for a better world,” she said. “There were also moments of levity and fun in a few of the stories. The audience laughed a little bit. Stories with moments of surprise can be most memorable to an audience.”
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