Public Narrative: Self, Us, Now

*The need:* Facts don't move neighbors to act together. Shared values do — and values are carried in stories.

Public narrative is the leadership practice of telling a story that communicates why you care (Story of Self), what "we" share (Story of Us), and why we must act now (Story of Now). Ganz built it on Rabbi Hillel's three questions: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"

Each story runs on the same engine: a character faces a challenge, makes a choice, and experiences an outcome. That structure is what makes a story a story instead of a list of events — and what lets a listener feel the lesson rather than just understand it.

Story of Self — Find your choice points: When did I first care about being heard? When did I first experience injustice? What did I do? Pick one moment, and tell it with enough detail that listeners can see it.

Story of Us — The character becomes the community. What have we faced together? What did we choose? Don't only tell challenge stories; lift up successes. "Hope is one of the most precious gifts we can give each other."

Story of Now — The urgent challenge to our shared values, the nightmare if we don't act, the dream if we do — ending with a specific, concrete ask someone can say yes to tonight.

Emotion is the mechanism, not decoration: stories work when hope outweighs fear, urgency outweighs inertia, solidarity outweighs isolation, and people feel *you can make a difference*. And it's not speech-making — you practice public narrative in a kitchen, at a house meeting, in a 1:1, wherever someone asks "so why do you do this?"

Details

• ingredients: a choice point from your own life, your community's shared challenges and wins, an urgent ask, listeners
• source note: From 'Organizing: People, Power, Change' (2014), which includes full Self/Us/Now worksheets and a story-coaching guide, adapted from Marshall Ganz's Public Narrative framework.
• how it works: Story of Self: pick one choice point — challenge, choice, outcome — and tell it with sensory detail., Story of Us: tell the community's choice points; include a success that gives hope., Story of Now: name the urgent challenge, paint the fork in the road, end with a hard ask., Weave them: here's who I am, here's what we share, here's what we're going to do about it., Practice out loud and get coached — narrative is a practice, not a script.
• min resources: Free. A worksheet and a patient friend help.
• practice kind: recipe
• success signals: listeners retell your story to others, people say 'me too' and share their own, the ask gets a yes
• coaching questions: What values did the story convey, and what details carried them?, What was the challenge, the choice, and the outcome?, What is the speaker moving people to do?