Recently I received the exciting invitation to be a delegate at the United Nations for the Media For Social Impact Summit, which took place on April 11.
There was clearly a Wow factor spending the day in one of the legendary meeting halls where world leaders have come together over the years to work on international solutions to our most pressing issues. And hearing the stories behind some of the campaigns we have come to admire was highly inspiring. We were treated to the case studies of #Giving Tuesday, Rainforest Alliance’s award-winning Follow the Frog campaign, The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and Become a Drug Dealer, among others.
What caught me by surprise, however, and gave me a jolt of energy was the optimism of the U.N. leaders with whom we met. They had incredibly clear solutions envisioned in their minds — solutions to such complex and widespread challenges like poverty and hunger that many world citizens have long ago dismissed as insurmountable.
If the experts are optimistic, then why can’t we all be?! This is where storytelling and dissemination of those stories comes in. It takes compelling storytelling and smart media distribution to translate the visions that are crystal clear in the minds of the brilliant experts into paths of possibility that the citizens of the world will want to join in on. We spent the afternoon starting to set the stage for how we would tackle this.
Even though they have some of the best stories to be told, storytelling has not been the expertise of the U.N. (as is the case with too many social innovators). This summit offered the opportunity to work on changing that and to forge an understanding that impact communications has just as important a role to play as the actual innovations in social change.
I am grateful to the UN Office for Partnerships and to PVBLIC Foundation for the chance to be a part of this.
