Storytelling to Strategic Narrative
If you’ve spent time on RISE’s social media channels, you’ve probably seen posts with the hashtag #MuslimSheroesMN. Or maybe you’ve been lucky enough, while flipping through channels, to catch a glimpse of local Muslim women on public television.
These campaigns are part of a project called Muslim Sheroes of Minnesota, referring to the powerful women we’ve been profiling since 2016. The year before, a group of sisters had come together to discuss the leadership, engagement, and representation of Muslim women. One of the themes to emerge from their conversation was the problematic narrative surrounding their identities.
With the founding of RISE and the creation of a platform dedicated to their voices, there came an opportunity for Muslim women to tell their stories themselves.
We started with written narratives about a few women who were well-known and loved locally but whose many accomplishments remained unacknowledged by the wider Minnesota community, including Anse Dr. Tamara Gray, Dr. Mona Minkara, and Rabia Mumtaz. These stories were published on our website paired with portraits taken by the talented Hannan Wazwaz.
Around the same time, our founder Nausheena Hussain attended a tour of the Twin Cities Public Television studios. The up-and-coming Sheroes project caught the attention of producer Ariel Tilson, who wanted to turn the written narratives into short videos, featuring a day in the life of each Shero. The new videos were aired on TPT, reaching Minnesotans across the state, some of who had never even met a Muslim woman. The story of Valerie Shirley, whose Deaf son inspired her to start a career as a Deaf education teacher, touched the hearts of many. And many, many told us that they wanted to get to know their Sheroes better.
Throughout the following years, our team responded to this feedback by embracing a multimedia platform. We added a podcast that allowed for more intimate stories from Sheroes, as well as a set of illustrations that featured portraits of women with hand-drawn symbols and motifs representing their work. Each medium was an opportunity for the community to learn about a different part of their Shero’s journey, and each multimedia story became an even deeper, more multidimensional peak into her life.
In 2020, production for the Sheroes project came to a screeching halt with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We took the opportunity to evaluate our work by interviewing women who had been featured.
Surprisingly, we discovered that while our original intent was to reach a broader Minnesota audience, the most immediate impact of each Shero’s story was on herself and her own family.
One Shero shared that her father, who had previously dismissed his daughter’s work, had come to understand and appreciate her accomplishments through her profile. After reading/watching/listening to her story, he became her biggest advocate, often amplifying (and bragging about!) her latest achievements to the rest of the family and the community.
Our evaluation efforts also helped us better understand how this evolving project fit alongside the rest of RISE’s programming. We realized that while civic engagement and leadership development positioned women with the skills that they need to succeed, it was storytelling that primed them with the confidence and the inspiration to actually step up in their communities.
After all, we kept asking ourselves, how can I be what I cannot see? If I am not exposed to empowered imagery of people who share my identities, why would I believe that I belong in a position of power?
Shifting the narrative from Muslim women as victims or villains to Muslim women as changemakers and trailblazers opened possibilities and cleared pathways for every sister who had never seen an authentic, empowered story about herself.
A recent conference that our team attended taught us the name for this type of program: strategic narrative change. “Narrative” refers to a collection of stories that come together to communicate a common understanding of the world. Since the beginning of human history, we have held meaning in stories. When our stories feature similar characters, follow similar arcs, and convey the same themes, they inform our cultural values.
A narrative can also inform our policy decisions. One of the most prominent examples of narrative change that led to policy change is the movement for marriage equality, culminating in the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. While the issue at hand was a legal one, advocates understood that change had to begin with individual hearts and minds and culminate in a major cultural shift.
Stories such as “Richard and John” which emphasized long-term commitment and love, were critical in changing minds about the cultural significance of LGBTQ+ marriage. One viewer commented: “This just made me cry, warmed my cold, cold heart, and made me see that real love is out there for anyone brave enough to accept it. [...] Let's get these two crazy kids married already!” Over the course of a couple decades, dominant discourse around marriage equality shifted from something totally unthinkable to something increasingly acceptable, until it became widely popular and enshrined in public policy. Richard and John, by telling their own story themselves, became part of a new, more inclusive, more authentic narrative.
A narrative may reflect an individual’s experience of the world, or it may consist of stories that diverge wildly from how everyday people actually lead their lives.
Reflecting on dominant discourse around Muslim women, we realized that the narrative did not reflect our realities. Stories about our sisters amounted to stereotypes of Muslim women as victims or Muslim women as villians and terrorists. Why did the headlines read “Terrorists hiding in hijabs” and not “Dr. Mona Minkara becomes first blind Muslim woman chemist in U.S.”?
We decided if mainstream media would not tell the real stories, we would give it a try. By telling our stories ourselves, we embarked on a strategic endeavor to transform the Muslim woman’s narrative. And since we started this storytelling journey in 2016, we’ve seen some meaningful shifts in the media landscape. In the past six years, Muslim women have become more visible and more positively represented—a change that has sparked, in turn, increased participation and civic engagement of Muslim women in our own communities.
Now, Sheroes like labor organizer Nimo Omar are not just spotlighted on our platform—they’re featured on the cover of local publications like Minnesota Women’s Press and even major magazines like Wired. And they’re warming hearts, changing minds, and building power: “Her personal testimony brought me to tears,” one viewer wrote about Nimo’s video. “I have personally seen the leadership and dedication of Somali Muslim women in our local area grassroots union organizing movement. I am SO thankful for my Muslim sisters in the struggle.”
As I think about the power and the potential of strategic narrative work, I start to imagine a future where our Sheroes don’t need their own series to be spotlighted.
I hope for a future where Muslim women are celebrated every day, on every platform, for their contributions to our world. And in the meantime, I’ll keep amplifying the voices of my Sheroes.
Sarah Gruidl is a writer and storyteller whose passion is strategic narrative change. As Storytelling Director at Reviving Sisterhood, she leads Muslim Sheroes of Minnesota, manages our Expressions Narrative Project, and supports our communications. She graduated fourth in her class at St. Olaf College with a major in English and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. With her background in nonprofit communications, composition studies, and feminist theory, Sarah believes in the power of narrative change to plant the seed for radical social change. She is a proud cat parent, an avid reader, and an amateur backpacker.