Continued from the August 2025 Finding Your Voice newsletter …
You can have sun-warmed cherry tomatoes eaten straight from the vine. You can have golden-headed, brown-eyed susans swaying in the warm wind and the distant buzz of your neighbor’s lawn mower mingling with the cicadas’ song.
You can have bug bites and tan lines and bare feet sticking to the humid hardwood floor as you wander from the backyard to the dining room. You can spend an unexpectedly autumnal evening under the string lights on the deck, sipping dry red wine with a friend.
You can find yourself on a white sand beach as the sun pops out on an otherwise gray, rainy day. You can get so excited for Lake Michigan white caps that you urge your friends to join you in stripping off your clothes and racing into the waves. You can have the water wash over you again and again, reminding you there are forces in this world bigger than your grief.
You can have the perfect s’more toasted over a fire that crackles orange against the luminous blue backdrop of a rare sunset over Lake Huron, which typically marks the “sunrise side” of Michigan.
You can sit shotgun in your youngest brother’s truck on the way home from your middle brother’s birthday dinner at the only bar-and-grill in “town” on the remote northern Michigan island. You can still taste the salty greasiness of deep-fried perch cheeks blended with the citrusy Oberon you’d raised for a celebratory cheers with your parents, husband, and siblings.
You can joke with your middle brother that “birthday shots” take on a different meaning this year, when it’s the type delivered by syringe into the thigh of his 19-month-old son. Two weeks out from your nephew’s diabetes diagnosis, your sister-in-law said she didn’t want to think of herself as devastated because while Type 1 is chronic, it’s also manageable. You can think — but stop yourself from saying out loud — that it doesn’t look that manageable in this moment. But you can trust that it will be in time, that your brother and sister-in-law will figure it out, because they always do.
You can talk about your own recent grieving, how you’re trying to allow yourself moments to give into the sadness. You can cry and cry and cry, and it still doesn’t take the edge off. And even though the pain of the loss seems to have seeped so deeply into your bones that you can’t imagine it ever lifting, you can trust that it will in time.
As the truck turns down the winding single-lane gravel road back to the cottage, you can have the bluegrass song on the stereo fill you with its wholesome nostalgic strumming. You can admire the way the evening sun glistens through the rain drops spattering the windshield.
You can cautiously let your mind wander to the thing it’s trying to avoid: Remembering that within the same 24 hours as your nephew’s cross-state, overnight ambulance ride that ushered in his new reality, you said your final good-bye to the beloved dog Randy who had been by your side for the past 10 years. You can gingerly think back on the moment of holding Randy on the floor of the vet’s office, locking eyes with your husband, and making the impossible decision to initiate the final breaths of this dog who had given his whole heart freely to you. Your uncomplicated gift. You’d given your whole heart to him in return, and you can feel it shatter as you whisper the last “I love you” into his soft floppy ear.
You can have a rainbow shimmer over the pointy green pine trees as the truck pulls into the driveway. You can head into the cottage for homemade apple crisp with ice-cream, and you can help your nephew scatter sunflower seeds across the deck for the birds.
You can marvel that over the course of your 35 years, your heart has grown the capacity to hold so much grief and still have space for gratitude. You can soak in the August abundance of being together. You can’t change the realities of loss, disease, severed relationships, and disappointment for each other, but you can find the burdens are a little easier to bear when you carry them together.
I wanted to share some of my favorite pieces I wrote in 2023. These eight vignettes touch on themes that continually came up in my writing this year and offer snapshots of what’s been going on in my world. I hope you find bits and pieces that you relate to or maybe a line that puts into words something you’ve been trying to articulate. And if not, that’s fine too 🙂
I made it up – this community centered around writing, this space for strangers to come together to put words to their experiences and share little pieces of themselves with others.
Won’t you celebrate with me that we are here? That we all have something to give and we all have something to learn.
Won’t you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?
I made up this life built on words. No one told me I couldn’t, or if they did, I didn’t listen. I just went on writing. Went on and married a writer, because who needs money and who needs stability when you could build a life out of words? Well, now I’ve got the money and stability – a reality that continues to surprise me – and still I crave the words.
I made it up, this life with my love and a mutt dog in this quirky old house built into a hill, surrounded by tall trees that make me feel at home.
Celebrate that I have found love in comfortable silences, in knowing looks shared across the table, in a well-timed hug in the dark corner of the kitchen.
Celebrate that I come from women who read me books and taught me the names of wildflowers that grow in the ditch in northern Michigan and showed me how to create family – an art of welcoming not exclusive to blood.
Celebrate that I am delighted at becoming an aunt and feel sure I do not want to be a mom. I made up this idea that I can contribute in ways other than having kids.
Won’t you celebrate with me that we made it this far? I made up a compass of love and acceptance to guide me. And somewhere in the fits and starts, the chaos and the detours, I scraped together a bit of wisdom. Somewhere along the way, I found a little more of myself and figured out how to be in this world. This world we made up, made ours.
Inspired by “Won’t You Celebrate With Me” by Lucille Clifton
You Can Try to Connect
You can’t have it all, but you can have a group of women gathered in an apartment living room, talking through their own personal brands of being overwhelmed. You can lean on each other and laugh as the cats who live there run through the room.
You can’t have it all but you can have a gathering of another group of friends – some you’ve gotten to know over the past year and some who are new to town. You can wonder what you all really have in common, but you can keep showing up wholeheartedly.
You can remember how in the midst of lockdown, isolation felt so hard and you would have given anything for simple human contact. It turns out community is hard too, in a different way, and maybe it always was or maybe you all have forgotten how to be together. But you are together now and you have to make it work.
You can’t have it all, but you can recognize when you need to step back and let someone else take the lead. You can know when your perspective is not the perspective that needs to take up the most space in the room. You can listen when someone explains that “you guys” is not gender inclusive, and you can stop yourself from replying that this phrase is baked into the marrow of your Midwest bones, so if you let your guard down it might escape from your lips from time to time.
You can try to be helpful.
You can’t have it all, but you can make small talk over lunch in the office common space. You can go to happy hour even though you’re not drinking. You can ask “what did you do this weekend?” and “what gives you hope?” and “can you say more about that?” and “what do you think we should do next?”
You can try to connect.
Inspired by “You Can’t Have It All” by Barbara Ras
On Serving Tacos
Bear with me, I want to tell you something about community.
Community tastes like homemade guacamole and sweet watermelon. It looks like refried beans spilled on the floor of the car en route to the group dinner. It sounds like the clink of silverware as we set out 40 place settings on folding tables in the church gym; napkins folded on the left side of the plate, stemmed water glasses placed on the right.
Community gathers with friends in the kitchen to pray before lining up to serve tacos. It says “How have you been?” and “Would you like mild or medium salsa?” and “What’s in the rhubarb surprise?” Community smiles, jokes, and offers thank yous as it fills its plate. It scoops up broken taco shells from the floor while its hands sweat inside crinkly plastic gloves.
Community is the warm gratitude filling my chest as I watch these two spheres of my life intersect over dinner. My friends showing up because I asked them to, because I told them about the important work this group does and wanted them to be part of it. And this group showing up to welcome and appreciate my friends.
Community moves to a meeting room after the meal. It feels like a dry erase marker gliding across a whiteboard, listing event goals and advocacy priorities. Can we work with food pantries to center people’s dignity in how food is distributed? How do we encourage more landlords to accept Section 8 vouchers? Why aren’t more people talking about Black maternal mortality?
Community means no individual has to face these issues alone.
Community is trying not to talk over each other as the energy builds in the room. It asks the quiet ones to speak up.
Community insists that we – a dozen people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, professional backgrounds, life stages, races, and genders – can get on the same page about the type of difference we want to make. Community sounds like a round of applause for ourselves when we finally reach consensus. And now the real work begins.
Inspired by “Coconut” by Paul Hostovsky
What We Owe Each Other
This is what they do: Stand at the median between four lanes of traffic, sit at a downtown intersection, pace the sidewalks. Holding signs, selling newspapers. Notice their skin worn by long days in the sun, long nights exposed to the elements.
Sometimes I awkwardly try to avoid eye contact. Sometimes I smile, and sometimes I hand over whatever few bills I have on hand. I’ve written with some of these folks I see on the downtown street corners. I’ve asked them what’s on their minds and what call to action they’d want to deliver to their city. They talk a lot about basic decency, small kindnesses, the difference a smile from a stranger makes. Notice that the subtext is how dehumanizing their time on the streets has been.
My Christian friends ask me how I think we should respond to people living on the streets. I guess because I spend my days copy editing poverty research reports and my free time volunteering with anti-poverty advocacy efforts, they think I might have an answer. But I’m not sure that I do. It feels like a big question – a question about what we owe each other, wrapped in religious ethics. And sometimes I hear in the question a hint of assumption that those of us who are middle class and more affluent inherently know best how to help those of us who are poor.
I find that people tend to ask the question in one of two ways. One is: Will my money harm them in some way? What if they spend it on vices? I say it’s up to you how you respond if you feel called to be generous. I politely suggest that how the person spends the money is actually none of their business. I gently nudge them to consider why they feel so sure that their judgment of how the money should be spent is better than someone else’s.
The other way people ask that question is: Is it enough to give a few dollars? Should I get them groceries or book them a hotel room for the night? WWJD, right? I say it’s up to you how you respond if you feel called to be generous. I tell them they’re not single-handedly responsible for moving people off the street, but if they want to do more than give a few dollars, there are lots of ways to get involved.
I don’t know if these are good answers. So over after-work drinks one day, I asked my co-worker – a religion and ethics professor – what he makes of all this. He said what the money means to the person giving it and to the person receiving it are two separate things. He said sometimes it’s good for me to give $20 to someone on the street, regardless of what it means to them or how they use it.
His words were still in my ears a few days later when I was at the grocery store and the man behind me in the checkout line asked if I could help him out because he was out of money. He had a gift card in his hand, and I asked how much he wanted on it. Twenty dollars, he said. So I paid for the gift card, because that’s what he said he needed and it was good for me to give it.
Inspired by “Touch the Earth (once again)” by Juan Felipe Herrera
Survival
A woman can’t survive by her own breath alone. She needs to put her bare feet in the soft dirt and let the cornstalks swallow her up as she runs between the rows.
She needs to wade into the water, to throw herself chest first into the waves and give herself over to the boundless blue. She needs to soak in this glimpse of eternity; the waves’ constant motion and unchanging tides.
A woman needs to linger in the woods, to listen to the whispered wisdom of the towering pines, to let the quiet fill her.
A woman needs to look down from the mountaintop, to know that she is small and vast and she can make her way around and over jagged obstacles and steep climbs.
A woman needs to lie back in the grass and look up at the sky, to merge with this endless expanse and know she’s enough to cover it all.
Inspired by “Fire” by Joy Harjo
A 26.2-mile Path of Love
The question: Is this the path of love? 4:30 a.m. alarm. Coffee in mug. Water bottle full. Toast with peanut butter, banana, and honey – the perfect race day breakfast. LFG!
Is this the path of love? Me and my brother’s wife shivering in the predawn dark in downtown Detroit on our way to the starting line. The man who works at the transit center telling us we can use the bathrooms inside, instead of waiting in the long line of runners vying for the porta-potties on the street.
Is it this? The first few steps in this journey of over 26 miles, the culmination of months of training. People lining the streets early on this October Sunday morning, shouting at strangers: “I’m proud of you” and “looking strong.”
Watching the sun rise over the Detroit skyline from the Ambassador Bridge as we cross the Detroit River to enter Canada. Waving to the Canadians gathered to cheer us on, and laughing with the border security guard who welcomes us back to the USA when we emerge from the underwater tunnel.
This is the long, sometimes grueling, sometimes empowering, sometimes heart-tugging path of love. One foot in front of the other, mile after mile. Checking our pace, popping energy gummies into our mouths every few miles, pumping our fists in time to the music playing along the course. Drawing momentum from the spectators and other runners to keep us moving forward.
Reminding each other of our whys. I am running this for her – using my experience with three previous marathons to guide her through her first, setting aside my obsession with performance metrics and my hyper-competitiveness with myself to focus on supporting her. That’s my path of love.
Latching on to a pace group in the final miles when the going gets really tough. “That was our 20-mile warm up,” I tell her. “The real race is these last 6.2 miles.”
Is this the path of love? I ask myself the question when she goes silent toward the end – no more energy for jokes or stories – and falls a stride or two behind. I turn to tell her she’s stronger than this marathon, that this is her postpartum victory lap, that we can do hard things. LFG!
Then this path of love takes us through a screaming crowd of spectators who insist we’re almost done. And there’s my parents and my husband cheering us on. I tell her she’s going to see her beautiful baby soon and this will be the last hard thing she has to do for the rest of her life. And then there’s my brother and the baby and the finish line.
And somehow we’ve got a final burst of energy to cross that finish line smiling and I wrap my arm around her at the end as my legs disintegrate into jello and I’m so glad the path of love has led me here.
Inspired by “The Question” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
On Being Together
Everywhere we turn, there is an entrance. The joke he’s made a million times, but I still respond with at least a smile because he still makes the effort of trying to get me to laugh.
The way we finish each other’s sentences sometimes. Or a friend makes a comment and it reminds us both of the same thing at the same time and our eyes meet across the table, and that’s an entrance too.
There’s reaching across the bed to lay my hand on his chest in that moment in the middle of the night between rolling over and falling back asleep.
There’s the way he lays out half a dozen records on the carpeted floor of the upstairs home office and asks me to pick one to listen to. He describes them as scuzzy and fun, rhythmic and a little distorted and modern. There’s an entrance in the adjectives he plucks from the air. I pick an album for our “close listening session,” and he settles into the worn leather chair we snagged off the curb outside our neighbor’s house and wheeled home together, laughing. I lean back in the desk chair opposite him, look out the window and find another entrance in the tree branches dancing in the day’s fading light.
There’s the way he attaches stories to songs and the way I’ve started to do that too. So when I hear The Magnetic Fields’ “Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” I’m caught up in the story of how we met at that small-town newspaper where I fell in love with him and the news and the reporters we worked with, all at the same time. In this story, I’m driving on a sunny afternoon, listening to that song on the first burned CD he made for me. That’s an entrance too.
There’s the way I want the butter kept on the counter and he wants it kept in the fridge. The entrances we both leave scribbled on scraps of paper all over the house: to-do lists, phone numbers, grocery lists, the lede of a story, a travel wishlist, what we’re grateful for, and what we need from each other. It’s all written down somewhere.
The way we start each morning sitting side-by-side in the breakfast nook, sipping coffee and petting the dog after he’s finished his kibble.
Everywhere we turn, there’s an entrance, a door we can walk through to be together.
Inspired by “An Entrance” by Malena Morling
A Cento to Self
You are not the broker of peace between people so hurt by each other they cannot even have a conversation. You are not responsible for his sobriety. You are not his stress relief or diffuser of his anger. You are not going to decide the fate of his relationship and what it might look like to start over.
You are not in control, so go ahead and surrender that illusion. Take some weight off your shoulders – weight that’s not helping anyone and no one asked you to carry in the first place.
You are the tall grass grazing sun-kissed skin as we follow a narrow trail across the field.
You are the string of lights softly glowing on the roofline of the back deck as the sun sets and the trees fade into the growing shadows.
You are a pendulum swinging, because there’s balance to be found in reaching for a wide range of experiences without getting too attached to any of it.
You are muddy running shoes and pink satin high heels with pink nail polish covering bruised runner’s toenails.
You are the woman at the punk rock show whose face breaks into a wide grin as soon as the drum beat starts, and you are the man on the bus singing to the driver.
You are learning again, as you’ve learned before, that your love cannot save anyone. But it’s worth it to go on loving them anyway.
You are the sweetness of a strawberry milkshake, because he’s trying to give himself a little present every day.
You are hot humid nights grasping for each other in search of connection and love and a moment of passion.
You are tender green shoots, nourished by the decay of what you let go of last season.
You are beads of sweat running down the spine and a rush of cool relief from wading into the waves.
You are a perfect summer drive back from the beach, the five of us filling the jeep with a little black-and-white dog stretched across our laps in the backseat.
You are selfish and generous, shy and forceful.
You are a mug of coffee gone cold and reheated and the hard green tomatoes forming on the vine.
You are dancing for hours that feel like minutes and watching dawn break from the night sky in time to the techno beat.
You are a swishy skirt against freshly shaven legs.
You are popcorn kernels stuck between the teeth and a sing-a-long to “Wagon Wheel” played on guitar and accordion in a cafe.
You could be content with what you are. You could stop striving. You could be at home here.
Inspired by “You Are Not” by Mona Arshi. A cento poem is a patchwork of lines from other poems; this is a patchwork of lines from other pieces I wrote this year.
I write because there are parts of myself I don’t know how to express in any other way. I write to untangle my thoughts, to discover how I think and feel. I write because I like having space to arrange and rearrange my words until I’ve landed on precisely what I want to say.
I write because Professor Diane Rayor told me I’m good at it. Because Angel said I ask good questions and get good answers. I write because I have so many questions, and because I am a good messenger.
I write because the word “fearless” is tattooed on the inside of my ankle. Not that I have ever considered this an apt description of myself, but I wanted the constant reminder that I cannot allow my myriad fears to call the shots. I write to remember the little things that feel big but then fade away, unless I’ve put them on the page. To try and stay true.
I write because it’s a gift to spend time in someone else’s story. Because I want to leave a trail of words that could help another person find their way. I write to preserve the beautiful, the surprising, the heartbreaking, the joyful so someone in another place, another time can experience those moments too.
This piece was inspired by poet Anele Rubin’s writer’s bio. If you’d like to try this type of writing – using poetry as inspiration and leaning into your creative instincts without pausing to consider whether your words are “good enough” – the Finding Your Voice Writing Group is for you! We’re a community dedicated to freedom of expression, authentic self-discovery, and fostering empathy through the power of storytelling. Whether you’re a seasoned writer or don’t consider yourself a writer at all, everyone can grow from this practice. Learn more about upcoming small group, virtual writing classes.
It’s one thing to read a statistic that 50% of renters in a neighborhood are housing voucher recipients. It’s another thing to sit across a dining room table from one of those renters and hear her frustrations with the lack of viable housing options and how she felt trapped in this particular neighborhood where she worried about her kids’ safety.
Both pieces of information – the statistic and the woman’s story – ultimately pointed to the same broader issue: the housing voucher system was reinforcing segregation and contributing to pockets of concentrated poverty in neighborhoods that had already experienced significant disinvestment. As I reported in 2019 on the factors that fueled this trend and explored potential ways to balance the local housing market, I was struck by the importance of bringing together a variety of types of information in order to explain this complex situation well.
Personal narratives are a vital part of how we make sense of the world around us. Journalists often refer to this as “putting a face on an issue,” knowing that people relate to people more than facts and figures. And there’s more than conventional wisdom backing up this approach: A whole body of research points to what makes personal narratives an especially persuasive form of communication.
Research shows evidence alone can be persuasive, if a few key factors are in place: a credible messenger, citing sources of information perceived as unbiased, and tailored framing of the information to the audience to make the facts seem new and directly relevant to their money, time, and other resources.
But the path to persuasion changes when we shift from analytical, evidence-based claims to conveying information through narratives.
With narrative messaging, people don’t lead with the same degree of resistance they would bring to an analytical argument attempting to convince them of something – especially if they have preconceived opposition to the idea. When engrossed in a story, we’re more likely to accept the beliefs and themes subtly presented and allow those beliefs to shape our attitudes, compared to a case for or against a hot-button issue.
It’s hard to argue with someone’s personal experience.
The academic term for this persuasive effect is “narrative transportation,” the experience of being transported – mentally and emotionally – into the world of the story. All narratives are not created equal, and research offers insights into what elements make for an especially “transporting” story.
The story needs to have a relatable narrator or characters, a cohesive plot, vivid imagery so the audience can visualize what’s happening, and plausibility – the sense that these people and events could exist, even if we’re talking about a fictional story.
If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, these elements – character, plot, setting, descriptive details – probably sound familiar. Good storytelling is good storytelling, whether you’re a researcher trying to understand what type of messaging is most likely to persuade or a writer trying to hone your craft.
For me, there’s a certain magic that happens when the principles of persuasive communication meet good storytelling. It’s why I’m passionate about helping people tell their stories well and finding a platform for a diverse set of perspectives to guide how we approach complex issues.
Do you want support in shaping a personal narrative?
I offer one-on-one writing coaching and narrative building workshops, which help participants develop the skills to share their stories in meaningful ways as op-eds, personal essays, blog posts, or advocacy statements.
Hi, my name is Lauren. I’m a writing coach, strategic communications consultant, and founder of Lauren Slagter Strategic Communications and Stories from the Margins. I facilitate writing circles, provide editing support to create high-quality written content, and advise on communications strategy for organizations that serve marginalized groups.
I believe when we’re tackling complex social issues, we need to draw from all available sources of expertise, including — and especially — people whose lived experience gives them a first-hand understanding of the systems that so many of us agree are broken. Stories from the Margins is an effort to ensure the stories of marginalized groups have a platform, and I want to share more about drew me to this work.
I’ve spent my whole life consuming, collecting, and creating stories. One of my earliest storytelling ventures involved pounding on the sticky keys of my grandparents’ typewriter, chronicling the adventures of a mouse named Molly who lived on the shore of Lake Huron and befriended animals in the woods. My literary influences at the time — I was probably 8 years old — included “Stuart Little” and “The Borrowers.”
I’m drawn to the power of stories to connect us, to help us make sense of the world around us, and to cultivate empathy by giving us a glimpse into what life has been like for someone else.
I’m fascinated by the mechanics of good stories, eager to deconstruct and try to reassemble them until I understand what makes them tick. And I’m drawn to the power of stories to connect us, to help us make sense of the world around us, and to cultivate empathy by giving us a glimpse into what life has been like for someone else.
Lauren Slagter
I studied journalism at Grand Valley State University and decided to make a career of writing other people’s stories. Upon embarking on my first reporting job at a small-town newspaper, I was surprised by the stories people wanted to tell me as long as I was holding my little reporter’s notebook. I was allowed to ask people about their finances, their kids, their health, their sexuality. I asked them about their dreams and challenges, what factors influenced the decisions they made, and whether they had any regrets about the outcomes of those decisions. I learned so much from listening to those stories, and I always took seriously the fact that people trusted me to be their messenger.
Journalism taught me storytelling could be a public service, and I worked hard to present people’s experiences in a way that contributed to our collective understanding of an issue.
I spent eight years as a journalist, winning public service and enterprise reporting awards from the Associated Press and Michigan and Indiana’s press associations for my coverage of education, housing, and poverty issues. Then I transitioned to a different style of storytelling, working in communications at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative. For the past three years, I’ve translated academic research on the causes and consequences of poverty into actionable steps for policymakers, journalists, service providers, and community organizers.
From watching how some of the nation’s leading poverty scholars approach their research, I gained a better understanding of the ways broad systems and public policies shape our individual and collective stories. I learned how decades-old stories continue to influence the education, housing, and job opportunities available to us today.
I learned evidence alone isn’t always persuasive. You need a savvy strategy to make your point relevant to the people who can do something about it.
I read the research on which interventions show the most promise, andI learned evidence alone isn’t always persuasive. You need a savvy strategy to make your point relevant to the people who can do something about it.
As I delved deeper into the world of strategic communications, marketing, and how to elevate experts’ opinions in public discussions, I realized there isn’t always a good mechanism for including the stories of marginalized groups in conversations with decision makers.
When tackling complex social issues, we need to draw from all available sources of expertise, including — and especially — people whose lived experience gives them a first-hand understanding of the systems that so many of us agree are broken.
With Stories from the Margins, writing circles are a first step in empowering people to develop their personal narratives and reflect on their experiences. In addition to facilitating writing circles, I provide writing coaching and editing support to prepare writing circle pieces for publication as op-eds, blog posts, or personal essays. And I offer strategic communications consulting on how to build personal narratives — which research shows are especially persuasive — into a broader campaign to raise awareness of an issue, advocate for change, or highlight your organization’s impact.
I’m not doing this work alone. I’m interested in collaborating with organizations that serve marginalized groups, communications strategists, journalists, activists, creatives, and storytellers of all kinds.
Here are four ways we can connect:
Email me at bylaurenslagter@gmail.com to set up a time to discuss your communications needs and project ideas.
Sign up for my newsletter for practical tips on storytelling, strategic communications, and working with journalists.
Often when I tell people I work in communications, their response is along the lines of “OK, so … what does that mean?” I get it. “Communications” is a broad term, and we all spend our days communicating with numerous people in a variety of ways. So what does it actually mean to specialize in communications work?
For me, it means I’m paying careful attention to messaging — word choice, framing, and calls to action. I’m thinking about the intended audience of the messaging: what is important to them, and where do they turn for trusted information? I draw from research on the types of messaging that are most persuasive and “sticky,” and I follow best practices for the most effective ways to deliver a message. Good communication is about ensuring impact matches intent and conveying information in a way that is useful to your audience.
“Strategic communications” is the big picture version of this work. It refers to how your organization communicates its mission and positions itself as an actor in society. This high-level strategy brings alignment to your other communications activities — like internal communications, public relations, media relations, marketing, and social media — to ensure your efforts send a cohesive message that advances your organization’s mission.
This saves you time, money, and effort, because you only invest in communications projects that help you meet your goals.
A strategic communication plan includes an in-depth analysis of your target audiences, using market research to understand their existing attitudes about your work and what motivates them. These insights inform messaging that clearly conveys the value of your work to each group and motivates them to take action to support your cause.
If you’ve ever struggled to come up with content to fill your website and social media pages and wondered how to tell the story of the work you do, a strategic communication plan can be the roadmap that gives you direction.
Or maybe you’re sharing plenty of content, but you’re not sure if the pieces add up to a cohesive message or if your output is reaching the people you want and having the impact you intend. A strategic communication plan can help align your communication efforts, and the plan establishes clear communication objectives and identifies metrics to gauge whether your messaging is reaching the right people at the right time.
If you’re curious about what all goes into a communication plan, I can send you a template to get started.
Look for the communications plan template in your inbox.
I specialize in communicating about poverty issues, especially related to education and housing, and I’m interested in working with organizations that serve marginalized groups to help center their clients’ perspectives in their communication efforts. If you’re ready to talk about how a strategic communication plan can elevate your organization’s mission, advocacy campaign, research findings, or upcoming event, I’m here to help!
Pace the room and look out the windows. Watch spring’s warmth slowly green the grass and call buds from the barren tree branches. Greet birds on their northerly migration. Glare at the neighborhood cats making themselves at home in your flower beds.
Laugh with your partner, cook with your partner, fight with your partner. Wonder why you chose this person as your partner, because wouldn’t this captivity be more bearable if it was yours alone? Weep with gratitude for how safe you feel with your partner’s arms around you. Make love to your partner. Talk until you run out of things to say to each other then say them again.
Make lists: of meals for the week, movies to watch, books to read, things to buy on that distant day when you will venture to the store again, places to travel when the world becomes safe. Scraps of scribbled lists meant to bring order to the chaos and direction to the emptiness of the days will soon cover every surface of your home.
Reach for music, books, art in any form. Dance and sing and draw and write. Creativity is our link to an outside world that once contained something beautiful. Creativity is our only hope of returning to that place someday.
Wander around your yard. Dig your hands into the soil, dirt beneath your fingernails as you plant tomatoes and flowers whose names you’ve already forgotten. Take in deep lungfuls of the sweet air, fresh with the smell of the earth opening to receive the morning rain. Out here you can move instead of think.
Sit with your dog. The small weight of his soft head on your leg smooths your jagged edges. The simple pleasures he pursues in a day — a nap, a meal, a walk around the neighborhood— begin to seem profound.
Stare at the mirror for hours. Until you’ve memorized every mole and wrinkle on your face, every dark corner of your soul. Until you can’t stand to bear witness to the messiness of yourself anymore. There is nothing to do but be present.
This poem cannot reopen the restaurants and gyms so people can make a living.
It cannot deliver masks and keep us protected.
This poem cannot give you a hug, no matter how much you need to feel the weight and warmth of another being in your arms.
This poem will not post on Facebook to shame the people who don’t agree with it.
It will not show up at the capitol with a rifle to demand things be different.
This poem will not reopen the schools or supervise your children.
It cannot pass a relief package, send you a check, pay your rent, or extend your unemployment benefits.
It will not hord the toilet paper, and it doesn’t stand on the Xs in the grocery store checkout line.
This poem will not bomb your Zoom meeting or make an excellent point with its mic on mute.
This poem will not stay 6 feet away, no matter how wide a berth you give it or how many dirty looks.
It will not wash its hands and it refuses to thank healthcare workers.
This poem doesn’t play by the rules of our “new normal” or any normal.
This poem exists outside the pandemic. It rises from a path through the woods at dawn, as slices of sunlight filter through the trees and disperse little clouds of mist hovering around the highest branches, where solitude doesn’t feel like isolation.
We have to pass out the food on the sidewalk. People can’t congregate and share air in the community center, so we carry heavy boxes of food to the folding tables set up outside.
There are too many volunteers, armed with masks and plastic gloves. We breach our six-foot barriers as we mill around waiting to distribute meals and homework packets since the schools abruptly closed. We are eager to do anything that feels like helping or anything that interrupts our new state of lockdown. Mostly we can do nothing.
Cars line up before the distribution shift starts. Parents pull forward and roll down their windows, their voices muffled by masks as they tell us how many kids they need to feed that week. We count out the plastic grocery bags, each holding seven days’ worth of Pop-tarts, sandwiches, fruit cups, crackers and milk cartons.
The bags are much smaller than bags of seven days’ worth of my meals would be.
Hundreds of meals are gone in an hour. We pile the grocery bags into their cars, fill the lap of the kid buckled into the passenger seat, cover the floorboards in the backseat, and load up the trunk. “Thank you,” they say. “Have a blessed day,” we say.
The teachers helping pass out meals sometimes break the pandemic rules and lean into a car to hug a kid.
Fewer volunteers show up as the weeks pass, but there are still too many of us because fewer parents arrive at the new distribution times and locations. We duck behind the cement pillars in front of the high school to get out of the chilly April wind and wonder if there are hungry people who don’t know we are here or can’t get to us.
Between cars, we talk about podcasts we like and who’s been laid off by the shutdown. One woman debates whether to attend the funeral of a relative who died from COVID-19, knowing her loved ones could spread the virus when they gather to mourn.
People pull in with their back seats already piled high with meals from other pick-up sites, and they tell us they need more because they’re feeding a daycare or a neighborhood. We count out the bags. We are not supposed to ask questions. “Thank you,” they say. “Have a blessed day.”
You can’t have it all but you can have an afternoon of kayaking with your parents, paddling across the glass-flat blue water sparkling with the sunlight that finally broke through a hole in the clouds.
You can’t have it all, but you can have protesters fill the streets, children with small fists raised, crowds chanting for justice in the wake of another Black man killed by police.
You can’t have it all but you can sip wine in a chair pulled up by the bonfire with your brother and sister-in-law, watching the dogs chase each other down the sandy beach while the day’s last golden light fades into that distant line where the sky meets Lake Huron.
You can’t have it all, but you can have a president who condones white people marching with rifles to demand their right to a haircut and threatens military violence against Black people marching with bullhorns to demand their right to not be killed with impunity. You can have endless social media outrage and people more concerned about the rights of the murderer than the rights of the innocent.
You can’t have it all but you can listen to your grandmother tell stories from her childhood while she offers you snacks, and you can hug her extra tight when you tell her good-bye.
You can’t have it all but you can have a speechless broken heart for the pain, grief, unrest, division and racial strife in our country.
You can’t have it all but you can have all this in one day. You can pray for healing.
A string of lights wraps around the front porch railing of the house across the street, which has never been decorated for Christmas before, and we say thank you for dots of color and light in the darkness.
Death counts rise and hospitals fill to capacity as the virus continues to spread despite our best half-hearted efforts, and we say thank you to the exhausted nurses and doctors layering on PPE to check on the patients. We say thank you to the scientists who have discovered a vaccine to end all this.
Another police officer kills another unarmed Black man, and we say thank you to the weary folks who gather in the streets, petition the people in power and post on social media to remind us this is still a tragedy and this is still injustice, but we could choose another way.
Hang colorful bulbs on the Christmas tree, arrange the carved wooden Nativity set on the shelf, bake great-grandma’s cookie recipes, and wrap boxes of gifts for our loved ones in crinkly red paper. We say thank you for anchoring traditions and finally something to celebrate at the end of this endless year.
Spend quiet evening after quiet evening sinking deeper into the couch — reading, playing cards, watching TV, listening to music — and we say thank you for these ways to wait out the pandemic.
Headlines expose more lies and incompetence from our nation’s leader, and we say thank you to the voters who decided this man will soon be out of power.
Masks on at the grocery store, curbside service at the library and our favorite barbecue spot, and we say thank you for the chance to make brief eye contact with the people keeping our community running.
Days when we would give anything to know how much further to the finish line of this mandated stillness, and we say thank you for the revelation that we were never in control anyway.
Slow mornings of prayer and writing and coffee, and we say thank you for peace in the midst of this storm.
Waves of grief and morning tears, and we say thank you that this fresh loss we thought would overwhelm us has instead opened new spaces in our hearts.
Lauren Slagter 