The Shared Prosperity Narrative

It’s possible to create a system where all families have a fair shot at prosperity.

A new narrative shifts from individual wealth to collective prosperity, building support for bold economic change.

All families deserve to prosper every day and build the future they want. But our economy was created to benefit a few and exclude many. It’s held in place by harmful wealth narratives based on individualism, deservingness, and scarcity. Use this new narrative to shift to shared prosperity and build support for bold economic change. Go right to the flexible narrative playbook or explore the research behind it. Take what works, add your stories, and build support for shared prosperity.

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Go right to the flexible playbook for this new narrative, or explore the research and testing behind it. Take what works, add your stories, and build support for your actions—and many others’—to build prosperity for children and families.

Why a New Narrative?

We need more pathways to family prosperity.

Many efforts to close the racial wealth gap and boost family economic wellbeing build individual wealth within existing systems — homeownership, higher education, entrepreneurship, and retirement savings. This benefits many people. And, say economists and economic justice practitioners, to go beyond the limits of these traditional approaches we also need new ways to build assets. Expanding public goods, including caregiving, will create stability beyond individual wealth. And major systemic shifts can build collective prosperity—including financial security as well as the wealth of time, freedom, health, and more.

We talked with people working for change to explore what stands in the way of these big shifts. Narratives about wealth emerged as one major barrier. This project aims to shift from current narratives of individualism, deservingness, and scarcity, to a new shared prosperity narrative.

What are narratives?

Changing the narrative around wealth has potential to create a different future for children and families. It can:

  • Help shift the dominant narrative of wealth from purely individual to collective
  • Build new expectations, definitions, and assumptions about wealth
  • Increase awareness, curiosity, and support for transformative changes for children and families
  • Broaden, unite, and activate the diverse audience of people—including those who vote, respond to opinion polls, donate, and make financial, economic and wealth decisions in their daily life and work—who are dissatisfied with the status quo and ready for different approaches
  • Ultimately, help people become more open to new ideas and motivated to act in ways that can shift systems to create better opportunities for economic well-being for children and families.

This resource is for anyone who wants to build economic equity and opportunity for families, including:

  • Organizations in economic and family justice working to strengthen communities and expand opportunity.
  • Advocates and practitioners expanding access to income, assets, and capital, and ready to go farther.
  • Funders and philanthropic partners supporting shifts in long-term wellbeing and economic equity.
  • Storytellers and media professionals telling stories that reflect real experiences as well as innovative ideas.

Take what you need and make it your own. The narrative is intended to be highly flexible, for people to use (or not) as they see fit.

  • Explore the elements of the new narrative—values, messages, and stories. Learn about the audiences most open to shifting their views.
  • Dig into the background research that brought us here, including a map of current harmful narratives, plus insights from collaborative design sessions, focus groups, surveys, and real-world experiments in poetry, news media, theater, and union organizing.
  • If you like what you find, please share it with your collaborators.

Reach out with questions or ideas.

The Shared Prosperity Narrative Playbook

“It’s possible to create a system where all families have a fair shot at prosperity.”

The shared prosperity narrative shifts from individual wealth to collective wellbeing. The narrative playbook includes core narrative themes, shared values, tested messages, guidelines for storytelling and examples, and more.

Download the narrative playbook

Narrative themes and messages

Testing identified four themes that, shared in this order, make the narrative resonate.

Values at the root of the new prosperity narrative

Family

Family, however defined, and children are priorities

Fairness and equity

Everyone has a fair shot, gets what they need

Interconnectivity

Reciprocity, solidarity, care and love

Hope

Generations, future thinking

Freedom

Agency, opportunity, choice, dignity

Prosperity

Well-being, purpose, safety, economic security

Read the full narrative

Here are the tested messages for each of the narrative themes, color coded to show where the values appear. See the playbook for more message ideas. You can use these as-is, or adapt for your audiences and solutions. The key is to convey the big ideas and use all four themes.

  1. Vision: All people and families should share the prosperity we build together. This includes financial security so they can enjoy today and plan for the future. And it includes thriving together through public resources like clean air and water, great schools and childcare, safe neighborhoods, and quality healthcare.

  2. Shared experience: But the current system is built to help people in power gain excessive wealth at the expense of everyone else. For most people, chasing prosperity has gotten too hard. Families are struggling today and deferring their plans for the future. They should not have to.

  3. Agency and action: Most people know the economic system doesn’t work for most families, and they want it to change. It will take all of us—people, business, government— to create a system where all families and children have economic well-being, now and for generations to come.

  4. Evidence and hope: Big changes are possible. Around the country, people are reinventing the economy. They are increasing living wage jobs and affordable housing. They are making banking and taxes more fair. They are building employee-owned businesses, creating debt-free education and healthcare, and more. They are creating a system where all families and children have a fair shot at prosperity.

NOTE: Examples are key here to show that prosperity solutions are happening, supported, and effective. See the playbook for tips on identifying and framing these examples—including both proven approaches that feel familiar to many, and promising and transformative ideas that people may not know about yet.

Audiences for the shared prosperity narrative

A national survey of 1,000 adults identified two audiences who are moved by this new narrative and ready to reject old stories of individual hard work in favor of shared prosperity.

Potential champions (27.5 percent of U.S. population).

  • Say the current economic system should be replaced AND that it does not allow most people and families to prosper.
  • More likely to do their own research on what they’ve read about in the survey; strongly support both narratives; and strongly support most of the actions (e.g. fair taxes, employee-owned businesses) we tested.

Most likely to be:

  • Age 18-34 (GenZ + Millennial)
  • Identify as female
  • Not be registered to vote
  • Be African American or Black
  • Earn < $50K
  • Not have a college degree
  • Identify as Democrat

The narrative can activate them and give them language to rally others.

  • Say the current economic system should be preserved, reformed, or replaced AND that it does not allow most people and families to prosper OR they are not sure.
  • More than a quarter (28%) move towards saying the system does not allow most people and families to prosper, from pre- to post- narrative exposure. More than half support the actions we tested.

Most likely to be:

  • GenX (44-60)
  • Identify as female
  • Not have a college degree
  • Without children age<18
  • Single
  • Identify as Independent

By leading them from what they know to the new possibilities you offer, you can shift them from accepting current narratives to seeing and demanding something new.

You will have insights about people within your audiences who need a “dialed up” or ‘dialed down” message. Three groups for consideration, based on discussions in focus groups and rapid testing, include:

  • Your committed champions. If you are talking with people who are already champions for your specific work, use the framing and language that engaged them initially. If your champions struggle to engage others, they might find the narrative a helpful place to start.
  • People who are struggling to survive in the broken system. In the survey, people who earn less than $50,000/year are more likely to be potential champions. But focus groups and rapid teasers were concerned about creating shame and self-blame by talking about prosperity with people experiencing poverty.
  • People who hold or influence significant wealth. People working for economic opportunity — in banks, economic development institutions, investment firms, and philanthropy — battle intentional, fiercely reinforced individual and meritocracy wealth narratives. This narrative can help disrupt that and create openings for innovative, transformative actions.
Download the narrative playbook

The Research

Listening, Collaborating, and Testing New Ideas

CARDS ARE STILL WIP, I NEED TO WORK ON THE STYLING, YOU CAN REVIEW CONTENT

We EXPLORED how wealth is currently framed, and who shapes the conversation, in news and social media, entertainment, podcasts, and political discourse. This let us see the landscape of dominant wealth narratives.

ILLUSTRATION TO BE UPDATED WITH NEW COLORS.

We BUILT two draft narratives to reframe wealth and prosperity.
Together with a group of family and economic wellbeing advocates we created two possible NEW narratives that bridge from the current harmful narratives to reimagine wealth and economic prosperity. Tap or hover the illustrations below to see each full tested narrative.

Let’s Create More Ways to Reach to the American Dream

We all want to create and enjoy our lives and futures. That’s the promise of the American Dream. But chasing the American Dream has become a nightmare. For most people and families, working hard and saving isn’t enough anymore. The hard work of many leads to growing wealth for a few. It doesn’t have to be this way. Together, let’s create more ways to reach the American Dream* so every person, every family and every community prospers—now and for generations to come.

Together, Everyone Thrives

America has enough to meet the needs of every community, family and child. But, some people want us to believe that for each of us to succeed, others have to suffer. We know better. We know how they rig the system to make us feel alone, scared, and divided. It’s time to stop a greedy few from hoarding the wealth we all created. We can hold our leaders accountable to ensure that this is a country where everyone has what they need today and can build a better tomorrow. None of us has to go it alone. We can create shared prosperity, where everyone benefits from the wealth we all created. Together, everyone thrives.

Illustrations by Lisa Congdon, as part of the rapid testing.

We LISTENED to diverse voices and TESTED the draft narratives to discover what resonated and helped people see wealth in a new way.

Testing included:

  • Focus groups with family and economic wellbeing advocates
  • An online survey with 1,000+ adults across the U.S.
  • Interviews with people who influence the flow of wealth
  • Real-time tests with social influencers, theater makers, reporters, advocates, and youth poets.

Want to see how creators brought these narratives to life?

Explore Gallery

We IDENTIFIED INSIGHTS to shape the new narrative.

  1. A large audience is ready to support transformation.
  2. Testing points to core values and effective themes.
  3. “Prosperity” and “economic well-being” are more galvanizing than “wealth” and “American Dream” and can carry meaning beyond financial success.
  4. There is strong support for many of the actions we tested.
  5. Public resources need to be included in both the definition of prosperity and in changes to systems
  6. Showing how the system is broken, and the impact, is more compelling than blaming someone for building it unjustly or breaking it.
  7. Sharing examples of changes already happening is essential.
  8. There is opportunity for a new narrative to influence practices among people working on asset and wealth building in the financial and philanthropic sectors.

Want more info about the initial research, narrative scan, and narrative testing, and insights?

Download the research

Creative Field Tests

Narrative-makers get creative and see how their audiences respond

Narratives take shape and spread through many stories and experiences. To see how the draft narratives might play out, we collaborated with storytellers to see what they did and how their audiences responded.

Theater makers, a social media influencer, youth poets, reporters, and advocates played with the draft narratives in expressive, beautiful ways. Even though these tests feature the draft, not final, narratives, they can spark imagination about ways to bring the prosperity narrative to life.

View Full Gallery

Acknowledgements

The idea of this work sprang from curiosity around how to create economic inclusion for children and family wellbeing—a generational goal of our funder, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We are thankful for their investment, trust and partnership throughout this work, especially Trené Hawkins, Erissa Scalera, and Parita Patel.

We are sincerely thankful to the many experts in the field who shared their wisdom through one-on-one interviews, discussion groups, and reviews of drafts. These ongoing conversations were incredibly insightful as we shaped this work.

The following organizations brought their creativity and wisdom to the workshop where we created the two draft narratives for testing:

  • Charli Cooksey, WePower
  • Carlos David Garcia, Oregon Economic Justice Roundtable
  • Dr. Joseph-Emery Kouaho, Kindred Futures
  • Dr. Chrishana Lloyd, Child Trends
  • Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, Joy + Justice National Collaborative
  • Solana Rice, Liberation in a Generation
  • Tinselyn Simms, We Make the Future

Our rapid testers brought the narratives to life.

Metropolitan Group conceived and carried out this work—and are applying the new narrative across the social change issues we get to touch. MG is a social impact design and implementation firm that works at the intersection of public health, environment and sustainability, and social justice.

Thank you to our strong team of research partners:

  • Social Insights Research
  • Bellwether Research and Consulting
  • Prime Group

Contact Us!

If you’re interested in learning more about this project, collaborating on any future work we’re able to do, or have resources to share, the Metropolitan Group team would love to hear from you.

About Metropolitan Group: We are a social impact design and implementation firm that works at the intersection of public health, environment and sustainability, and social justice.