Too often strategies to address SDOH narrowly focus on community problems or challenges. When we only see what's broken or missing, we overlook existing strengths, resources, and capabilities already present in the community, and we trigger defensiveness, reducing engagement and willingness to participate. Instead, we want to encourage and supercharge the ingenuity that exists within communities that comes from their wisdom, norms, and lived experiences. In this session, we'll use a national initiative as an example to show how storytelling—done ethically and in partnership with communities—can shift focus from problems to the conditions that support health and well-being. By amplifying community voices and stories, we can help communities shape narratives that drive the changes they want to see in policies, practices, norms, and beliefs.

Learning Question:  How can collective impact initiatives ethically apply asset-based framing and community-led storytelling to disrupt systems-level narratives and drive equitable outcomes?