716. Stories to Fill The Hope Gap: How Story Becomes the Strategy to Shift Culture - Ai-jen Poo, Caring Across Generations
Stories That Fill the Hope Gap is a 10-part limited series bringing you eight extraordinary changemakers who are using story to cut through noise, build connection, shift culture, and move people to action.
From Sesame Workshop storytelling around the globe to a hyper-local hip-hop therapy program helping kids navigate mental health in the Bronx to the Center for Countering Digital Hate taking on the most haunting issues of our time, every single conversation left us feeling more hopeful. That is the invitation.
New episodes drop every Wednesday. Share your own story at weareforgood.com/hopegap.
Episode 4: How Story Becomes the Strategy to Shift Culture
Meet Ai-jen: The Organizer Who Turned Story Into a Movement
Ai-jen Poo is the Co-Founder of Caring Across Generations and President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, two of the most influential organizations in the care economy movement. A MacArthur Fellow, Time 100 honoree, and author of The Age of Dignity, Ai-jen has spent three decades organizing at the intersection of labor, caregiving, and culture change. She is one of the most practiced voices in the country on why emotional truth — not just data — is what moves people to act, and her work offers a masterclass in how nonprofits can use story to make invisible issues impossible to ignore.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
Why culture change has to come before policy change, and what that means for how nonprofits sequence their work
How Caring Across Generations built an entire media strategy — including a new production company, Give Not Take Media, to tell their story at scale
What the 1 Million Care Conversations campaign looks like in practice, and how your organization can plug your community into it right now
Episode Transcript
Powerful Quotes
"You can't value what you can't see, and you can't support what you can't name." -Ai-jen
"Care should be in modern American life almost like infrastructure — the enabling force that makes everything else possible." -Ai-jen
"People are essentially emotional beings. There's what's factually true and what's emotionally true — and it's not the same. Both equally shape our behaviors and the choices we make." — Ai-jen
"There are 130 million of us engaged in caregiving in some way in this country every day. That's a third of us. It's 75% of every workforce in America." -Ai-jen
"I believe we are the generation that is going to fundamentally change how we treat and support caregiving in our country — and we need your voice so that we do it right." -Ai-jen
Resources Mentioned
Caring Across Generations: Ai-jen's organization working to change policy and culture around caregiving
National Domestic Workers Alliance: Labor organization supporting nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers
Take Me Home: Film directed by Liz Sargent, starring Anna Sargent; a story about care reversal in a family living in suburban Orlando
The Age of Dignity by Ai-jen Poo: Book on aging, care, and what America owes its elders and caregivers
1 Million Care Conversations Campaign: Caring Across Generations' 2024 effort to collect caregiver stories and amplify them; volunteers welcome
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