Narrative as Infrastructure Across Community, Practice, and Policy

I’ve learned that when people ask about a program, they’re rarely just asking for information. They’re asking what it means for them, for their role, and for the communities they care about.

Every strong program eventually faces the same challenge: it must be understood by people who are listening for very different reasons and making very different decisions based on what they hear.

People come into the story from different places:

• Community members want to know how the work will affect their daily lives and whether it will endure.

• Practitioners are looking for clarity on how the program operates and whether they have the tools and support to implement it well.

• Funders are assessing outcomes, accountability, and return on mission.

• Policymakers are considering scale, systems impact, and alignment with broader priorities.

The facts of the program may be the same in every room, but the questions being asked are not. This is where communications moves beyond producing updates and becomes a strategic function rooted in framing, translation, and alignment.

The work is not simply to disseminate information. It is to help each audience locate themselves inside the story of the work and understand what it means for their role in advancing it.

When the same language is used for all audiences, the message often lands unevenly—not because it is incorrect, but because it is incomplete for the decision each group is trying to make. Effective communication holds one core truth and learns how to express it in multiple ways without losing integrity.

This is why narrative development and message mapping are not communications exercises alone. They are leadership disciplines.

When communications is treated as strategy, it becomes connective tissue. It links programs to purpose, data to meaning, and lived experience to systems-level goals. It allows a story of change to travel across community meetings, board rooms, funder briefings, and policy tables without becoming fragmented or distorted.

The goal is not to tell different truths to different people. It is to tell one true story in ways that each audience can clearly understand and act on. That is the difference between information sharing and shared understanding, and it is why framing is not a tactical function, but a core responsibility of leadership.