As Liz said, I’m Bridget Antoinette Evans and I have spent the bulk of my career working at the intersection of art, pop culture and social change. I’m a theater, actor and producer fascinated with the question of how a play could fundamentally change the way that a person related to the world. And more recently, as a culture change strategy designer working deeply embedded within social justice movements to shift how people think and feel about a whole range of issues from human trafficking to genocide, intervention, domestic worker rights to police violence. I work with a lot of communications professionals and there’s a lot of interest right now in culture change strategy. But mostly what people want to know and want me to tell them is what culture change strategy is. So here’s my take and it’s a work in progress. Culture change strategy is a long-term, multi-layered approach designed over time to create profound shifts in the narratives, values, beliefs and behaviors of people, often mass audiences. Each of us has a rational mind and an irrational self. The rational mind thinks things, has opinions, attitudes, mostly that we are willing to admit in public. The irrational self contradicts itself at every turn. It’s impulsive, it’s radical, it’s messy. My rational mind says, Bridget, you can’t control everything, let it go. My irrational self says, Bridget, if you can’t control every aspect of your life, you’re a failure and very, very bad things will happen to you. A basic premise of culture change strategy is that if you want to change the deeply held beliefs and values in a person around injustice or anything at all, you have to dig underneath the rational mind and speak to the emotional, messy, irrational self. And this is the realm that I work in. I have to admit, I didn’t actually come to Frank to talk to you about how I’ve used culture change strategy to shift the values and beliefs of mass audiences. I came to tell you about how I inadvertently used culture change strategy to change myself. You see, for years I had drifted farther and farther away from who I really was at my core and it began very subtly, you know, a story design session happening in a board room instead of a rehearsal room. But over time, I somehow morphed into a person who was far more comfortable in a strategy session than I was working inside of the messy, mysterious process of creating stories. I had lost touch with the thing that I believed to be truly magical in all of us, which is the imagination. And by that I mean that wild space in us that harbors our curiosity and the bravery that it takes to leap into the void in search of revelation, that mad scientist in us that believes with absolute faith that we can take fragmented thoughts and emotions and memory and turn them into truly new ideas and pathways in our work. But if I’m being really, really precise and honest with you, I felt like somebody had taken a spoon and carved out my insides. I felt that hollow in my work. And that’s really very difficult for me to say out loud in front of you because I deeply believe in my work and I deeply believe in the leaders, the brilliant leaders and organizations that I work with. But I was struggling to get out of bed in the morning so afraid that although I was working, my mind was working 80 hours a week, my body, my heart was dragging behind me like a listless child desperately in need of a playmate. Toni Morrison in her novel Sula said, and by the way you cannot quote Toni Morrison without adopting a deep voice so bear with me. She wrote and like an artist without an art form, she became dangerous. And I felt dangerous. I felt dangerously close to shutting down, burning out, blending in. If not for making plays, what was my new art form? Did I have one? What if I didn’t have one? Who am I then? And then it arrived. A simple email inviting me to take part in a voice and storytelling workshop led by Kristen Linklater, one of the world’s greatest master teachers of voice and Shakespeare. Kristen was my favorite teacher in drama school and she had recently retired to a small island called Orkney off the coast of her native Scotland. I felt it immediately, this deep and visceral sense that I needed to fly and travel for 17 hours across open seas to study with Kristen. I felt that my survival depended on it. I was going to investigate how the human body conspires with a voice and breath to tell truly resonant stories. Oh yeah, I needed this. I arrived in Orkney in the dead of winter and immediately wanted to go home. Not because it’s not beautiful. It’s actually magical, really. Gorgeous. No, I was terrified. Maybe it was the dawning reality that there was virtually no self-service or Wi-Fi on the island. Or maybe I had a tiny inkling that my utter creative undoing was upon me. Two days later, I found myself curled in a ball in the middle of the studio in Orkney, balling like a baby, you know, the big Oprah ugly cry, tears streaming, snot flying, all because I couldn’t say a single word in the sonnet I was rehearsing. I couldn’t say the word hope. Now to be fair, hope is a deceptively simple word, right? Intellectually, hope sounds kind of piffy. Hope. Hope. See, it’s sweet, short, straightforward, hope. Say it. Hope. Yeah. When you start to break it down, as Kristen has a habit of doing, a very different story begins to unfold. So think about when we most often say the word hope, when we conjure it. It’s usually when we’re feeling vulnerable. It’s when we really aren’t sure things are going to work out for us. I hope that cancer doesn’t spread. I hope this IVF treatment finally works. I hope you’ll call me sometime. Hope. So let’s break it down. Just H. Try that. You feel that? It’s like panting, right? Like wanting. From the very start, hope will not let you retreat into yourself. Hope says, open yourself. And let air let the world in. And then oh. Oh. So here’s the thing about oh. Because of our Instagramming, texting, and mojing culture, we have managed to reduce some letters to their most embarrassing tragic mundane form. OMG. Oh my God. Right? Oh. It’s very small. It’s very contained. We can manage this oh. But when the sound was originally discovered millennia ago, it was designed to hold the deepest part of our emotional life. No, not my baby. Oh God. Oh God. Oh. Freedom. Oh. Freedom. Oh. Oh. Since the start of humankind, this sound was discovered by mothers and fathers, warriors and lovers to conjure all of the grief, the anger, the yearning, the pain of a people. Hope demands that you open yourself. And then it says, stay there. Open. And let all of this messy stuff that we normally keep batten down deep inside of us. Let it start to writhe and rattle and maybe start to travel up your chest closer and closer to your mouth. And just when you’re beginning to panic from all of this openness and the catastrophe that will clearly happen if what is in here gets out there. Hope allows you to re-close yourself. Let’s say the word again. Hope. So not such a simple word after all, right? So this is the journey that had reduced me to a balling mess of tears on the floor of this studio in Orkney. And I realized that my oh had lifted this big heavy boulder that was blocking the entrance to my deep imagination. I realized with great sadness that my collaborators, all of these brilliant leaders and activists and organizers, had probably never actually met me. They had no idea what my messy looked like because I was thoroughly convinced that messy, which is the raw ingredients of every great work of art, had no place in my movement work. I had also discovered that I was very, very afraid that I was dying inside of this invisibility. How else to explain a 40-something woman who felt like I was 80, literally aching from having spent so many years creating without relating to my full instrument? I arrived back in New York with a very different understanding of my work. I now understood my job to be to spark these kinds of soulful disruptions in myself, in my collaborators, and in people, millions of people. Because I now believe that these disruptions, these discoveries of new and ancient things about human nature, why we love, why we hate, what we yearn for. I believe these are the DNA of culture change strategy work. And it’s not about relying on all that we know. It’s about being willing to stay inside of the not knowing long enough to discover some new way of awakening people, sparking cathartic awakening in our audiences. Kristen once said that catharsis occurs when the blood and breath of the storyteller disrupts the blood and the breath of the audience. That. That’s what I wanted to do. That was my new art form. Since my time in Orkney, I’ve put some of these ideas into motion. Through a project, I call culture changes us. Because it does, right? When we engage in this kind of work, it should change us. Culture changes us is a coordinated learning system through which social justice leaders and advocates and artists can freely investigate from the inside out how stories and narratives create these cathartic awakenings in mass audiences. And how when these experiences are delivered inside of an intentionally constructed narrative system, we can actually create broad and lasting cultural change. There’s a question that’s sort of in my mind. How will we as a social justice sector change fundamentally as we begin to integrate narrative and culture change work into our movement building? What new talents will we need to cultivate in ourselves and our teams? I have to say that it feels clear to me, and I’ve heard it in other people’s talks today, that we are living in the most dramatic of times. Things that will eat the way we’ve always done things for breakfast. If we can’t speak powerfully and truthfully to the messy, emotional, irrational part of us, of millions of other people, and fundamentally change how we all feel about immigration, refugees, Muslims, black lives, women, children, democracy, the earth, people will continue to suffer. And our progressive vision, I don’t think it will survive. How are we preparing ourselves for the tough work ahead? For me, disruption compelled me to reconnect with my deep, fully embodied, imaginative self. Consider that disruption is a critical step for all of us in our work to change the world. A year ago, I broke open in the best sense of the word, and I wonder, might this time, this very painful, hopeful time, when America seems to be breaking open too, forced to confront and rebirth itself, might this be the perfect moment for all of us to discover new, radically new ways of working, of creating, of relating, of building community? What might your moment of breaking open look like? What do you need to do to change the culture of you? Imagine that. I really want you to imagine that. Thank you.