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As we celebrate 40 years of Headwaters, we’ve been exploring how Headwaters and our community are reimagining philanthropy through this special blog series. In this final installment, our Director of Communications, Ewan Scotto, invites us to reflect on the essential role storytelling plays in powering Headwaters’ work and driving forward the movements for justice we fund.  At Headwaters, storytelling is more than just sharing our work; it’s a strategy to shift philanthropy towards a liberated future for Minnesota. If you missed our previous blogs, check out our first three installments focused on the power of intentional giving, flipping the script on mainstream philanthropy, and how Indigenous values and solidarity show up in our community grantmaking process. Thank you for joining us on this journey of reflection and action as we continue to work towards a more just and equitable vision of Minnesota and philanthropy our communities thrive.

By Ewan Scotto | Director of Communications

If you’ve been following Headwaters for a while, you’ve likely seen one of our storytelling projects come across your inbox or social media feed.  

But why do we tell stories? Why invest this much time and energy into telling stories about what some might consider the minutiae of our work in philanthropy, the experience of being a Headwaters donor, or the work of our grantee partners? 

At Headwaters, telling stories – sharing a vision of a better, more just world – is core to our strategy to shift philanthropy and Minnesota towards a liberated future. Stories are a powerful tool in our fight toward justice – one that we must take up again and again to support our grantees, shift philanthropy towards equity and justice, and create the conditions for a more just Minnesota. 

Stories are everywhere in our lives 

I’ve been writing stories since I was seven. Creative writing was always my favorite part of the day in elementary school, I’ve loved reading as long as I can remember, and I was nearly an English major in college. All this to say, stories have always played a central role in my life. 

As I deepened my involvement in organizing as an adult, my interest in stories grew. 

Starting in 2017, I was embedded in police abolition organizing in Minneapolis – first through consciousness raising circles with other white people and then in a grassroots organization what would be my political home for the next four years, Reclaim the Block. 

During my years on the communications team with Reclaim the Block, I learned how the stories we tell shape the futures we can imagine. I joined that team because I had always enjoyed writing and was willing to help out on social media. During my four years on the team, I saw how organizing is so often about uplifting untold and undertold stories. It was through this work of community organizing and political education that I saw how stories were what consistently moved people. That stories are what allow us to imagine what else is possible. 

What do we believe is possible? 

Organizing is so often, at its core, storytelling. When Reclaim the Block organized our community to testify at City Council meetings starting in 2018, hundreds of people came to tell their stories. Our neighbors built power when they told previously untold stories about the harms of policing. Our individual and shared political imaginations expanded when people shared previously unheard stories about the ways that everyday people – neighbors, families, teachers and more – had the brilliance to prevent and interrupt harm and restore safety. 

We can’t take for granted the ways repeated, strategic storytelling built the narrative foundation we have today. Since the 2020 global uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, a whole new world of imagination has been opened for many people who had never thought deeply about policing before. But the movement didn’t start with them. Decades of Black-led abolitionist organizing and storytelling preceded the world suddenly paying attention. 

While we are witnessing a predictable political backlash to the whirlwind moment of 2020, the understanding that we need to build systems beyond policing has become common sense. This is not a victory to take lightly.  

Disrupting narratives of philanthropy and wealth 

So, what does this mean for Headwaters? 

Often, storytelling  gets neglected as a power-building tool by those of us fighting for justice. It takes the backseat to what some view as the more concrete work of changing laws, winning back wages, or making the most grants we can in a fiscal year. While all our strategies are vitally important, if we neglect storytelling and narrative, we concede the ability to define what is seen as true, obvious, or tangible to those who seek to maintain the oppressive systems we’re fighting against. 

When we tell stories of grantees doing work to advance justice throughout Minnesota, uplift our donors who are young, queer, people of color, or from low or no-wealth backgrounds or share the stories of how our community grant makers collectively select our grantees – we are not simply describing how our work gets done. 

We are disrupting the narrative of the philanthropic field that tell us that those who have wealth earned it, are entitled to it, and  deserve to control it; that the people who control amassed wealth are those best positioned to assess how it should be used and, once it’s been granted out, whether it was used well; that tell us that communities – especially communities of color, low income communities, disabled communities, queer communities and more – can’t be trusted to make good decisions about where and how to spend money; that only rich, white, highly educated people have the desire, wealth, and will to participate in philanthropy. 

If we believed in this collection of stories, Headwaters wouldn’t exist. If our community of donors and partners believed these stories, we wouldn’t have been able to move close to $4.5 million dollars this year to organizers fighting for collective liberation in Minnesota. 

A tool in our toolbox  

Telling the stories of our work – the stories of Headwaters, our donors, and our grantees – interrupts mainstream philanthropy’s narrative monopoly on how money should be held, spent, and distributed within our society and communities. By asserting the validity and power of our and our grantee’s approaches, these stories are deeply disruptive to the oppressive norms within philanthropy that we are organizing within our field to transform. 

By investing deeply into storytelling and inviting our community to consider these stories, we are building a future where these stories are normalized, not marginalized. And as these disruptive stories move closer to the center of our communities’ consciousness, we move closer to the world we are building alongside our grantees.  

I hope you’ll join us in continuing to consider and share stories of a more just Minnesota. Let them expand your imagination and fuel your action as you show up for movements alongside Headwaters. 

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40 Calls to Action for 40 Years of Headwaters

As we celebrate 40 years of Headwaters, we are sharing with you all the ins and outs of how we do our work – in the past and present. We’d also like to invite you to take action in your own way. With each blog, we will be sharing a list of “calls to action” that are actionable for you whether you are new to our work, someone working in philanthropy, a passive scroller, or someone who knows our work even better than we know ourselves! We invite you to consider the following actions:   

Storytelling work in action 

• Get to know some of our local organizations doing narrative and cultural organizing! (And consider them as you make your Give to the Max Day gifts?!) 
• Mizna creates a nurturing and liberatory space for artists, filmmakers, writers, and cultural workers. Learn more about the many arts events they host. 
• The Southeast Asian Diaspora (SEAD) Project is a community of creative and literary storytellers redefining what community development and cultural representation looks like for the Southeast Asian diaspora. Check out their programs here.
• New Native Theatre produces, commissions, and creates authentic Native American stories, bringing indigenous values center stage on all levels of theatre production. Keep an eye out for their next show! 
• Although they’ve since sun-setted, you can learn more about Reclaim the Block’s legacy by checking out their sunset statement here. Their letter also includes a list of abolitionist organizing in Minnesota to get connected to. 
• And, of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t plug our own stories! Check out our grantee stories and donor stories! 

Narrative change strategy 

• Curious about what narrative research looks like? The Decolonizing Wealth Project published “Solidarity By Design,” which includes more than 2 years of research! Complete their short form to access it.
• Movement work so often involves imagining a world we’ve never seen. Center for Story Based Strategy dives into Radical Imagination here and the way it can serve as an antidote to the extractive economic system we live under. 
• It’s happening in Minnesota! This is Reframe shared a case study that showcased how the Our Minnesota Future coalition worked together in shaping narratives around a Minnesota that is greater than fear. 

Finally, especially this month, don’t forget to fight the narratives of capitalism by resting 

• Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, provides a historical analysis of what rest means when we live under a capitalism derived from slavery and plantation labor, and when we are existing under white supremacy. Her podcast episode on For the Wild a great introduction to Rest as Resistance.
• Check out the Audre Lorde project’s guide to planning wellness. Because as Audre Lorde said: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”