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| | What is “Ethical Storytelling?” |
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| “Khost” by Mélissa Cornet, from the CARE News feature “Art is Another Way to Reach People” |
| | The spectre of starvation and famine stalking Gaza is once again in the news. When the United Nations first wrestled with whether or not to “officially” declare famine, it led the CARE News & Stories team to try to find a way to convey what the declaration might mean on a human-level to the people of Gaza. Where we ended up is an interesting object lesson in how we approached “ethical storytelling.” |
| | | | Earlier this month, the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts honored “What Famine Feels Like” by Dalmar Ainashe and Hillol Sobhan with a Communicator Award for General Excellence in Feature Writing.
The piece is a first person narrative in which Dalmar traces his journey from surviving famine as a child in 1970’s Somalia to his current work as a hunger expert at CARE.
Here’s an excerpt:
I know now that what kills people is not actually hunger. Hunger doesn’t kill. It’s because the body becomes so weak and anything, any small disease that attacks it, kills it. That’s how people die.
But I didn’t know that then.
The drought had become very severe. Everything completely dried up. Even the wells where we were moving to so we could save ourselves during the dry season had dried up. The animals — starting with the cows and goats — they started dying. The camels were last to die.
You have to understand, in this culture, until the last camel dies, the pastoralists don’t leave. That’s their life. If only this one camel can survive, they think, maybe rain is going to come tomorrow.
But when the place itself started dying, when the camels started dying, the men finally said, Now we have to go back. So, we had to trek back to the community to see where we left the women and children, if there’s anything there.
When we got back home, we realized half of the people were already dead. Because of the drought, because of hunger, because of disease. Then, the few that were left, they gathered, and they said, What are we supposed to do?
We knew we had to move to the nearest camp, but we didn’t know where the camps were. These are not places where you could go, where we’d been before, that we knew. There’s only word of mouth – that the few people who survived went to such and such a place in such and such direction. Guesses, really . . . my parents faced an impossible choice.
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So why share this?
First, it’s one of the pieces I’m most proud of from my time at CARE. And if you haven’t read it yet, I hope you will.
But more than that, it serves as a useful example of what an ethical storytelling culture can produce. |
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A little background: CARE is a worldwide humanitarian relief organization with operations in more than 100 countries. The marketing team supports this work with content — features, photo essays, short films, social posts, etc. — that shows how CARE’s impact plays out in people’s lives.
I find this kind of work fulfilling because I believe stories are a basic human need.
People use stories to form social connections, take agency over their lives, and to make meaning out of trauma.
(I also believe people use luminous images, the lacunae between utterances, and networked sounds to do those same things, but for our purposes here we’ll stick with stories).
For the less woo-woo, more data-driven among us, stories are also motivation — people are 20 times more likely to remember facts if those facts are part of a story, and people are more likely to act if they think their actions will affect a story’s outcome.
The CARE marketing team’s ethical storytelling culture was built by the practice of the writers, filmmakers, photographers, and content creators who consciously prioritize the lived experiences of the people they work with.
The idea is to not report on people in crises, but to create stories with them.
The team works to center the voices of communities often sidelined in the rush to report facts. The goal is to co-create public narratives with those most affected — and to help those stories reach audiences ready to help.
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| From Jacky Habib’s story, “Take my baby, mama. I’m going to die.” Photo by Josh Estey/CARE |
| | Flashback to early 2024. On a global staff call, Dalmar said the United Nations was considering formally declaring a famine in Gaza. But, he added, these official declarations often come after the best opportunities to intervene. Then, he said, almost offhand, that he knew from experience, growing up in Somalia in the 70s.
“I know,” he said. “What famine feels like.”
Then he moved on.
Mary Kate Wilson, CARE’s director of content and creative, didn’t move on, though. She asked the CARE News team to pursue what Dalmar was hinting at.
I had been working on a number of first-person projects around that same time, including a collective telling of how communities celebrated Ramadan in the shadow of the war in Gaza, and an oral history of Greenpeace hanging a giant RESIST banner over the first Trump White House.
I’d also been exploring how to turn the glut of interview transcripts we had coming in from country offices into first-person narratives, rather than just lifting quotes for press releases or extracting biographical information for photo captions.
I’d been inspired by Eli Saslow’s work at the Washington Post and the New York Times—particularly how he shaped interviews from the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises into compelling, emotionally resonant narratives that kept the speakers’ distinct voices intact.
With all that in mind, the team (Reid Davis, Hillol, and me) worked together to develop a set of questions for Hillol to ask Dalmar over Zoom.
The final transcript of that Zoom call was long – close to 14 pages, if I remember right – and it was clear from the first read how personal and, at times, painful it was for Dalmar.
He hadn’t told many of these stories before, and it clearly took great courage and trust for him to be so open with a colleague over Zoom.
The result wasn’t a linear story with a neat beginning, middle, and end – it was something less obvious, more honest.
I organized the transcript by theme and timeline using scissors and highlighters, then reassembled sections, read them, reshaped them with a glue stick, and then started over again until the structure held without compromising Dalmar’s voice. Hillol and Reid then worked with CARE’s Somali team to fact-check and add historical context.
After all that, we brought a draft back to Dalmar, making it clear he could revise, reject, or tell us to start over if he felt like it.
He graciously clarified terms and expanded some parts, though he admitted reading it was painful. Still, he gave his blessing to move ahead, so we moved into the final stage, where Mary Kate helped shape the narrative, and the country director gave final approval for publication.
From start to finish, the process took about four months.
By then, the Gaza famine had faded from global headlines, and CARE News itself had published roughly twenty other pieces about the war, focusing on what it’s like to get your period in Gaza, to deliver babies, to get medical supplies, to find shelter, and to have a child contract polio, and more.
The immediate spark for the story had passed. But we believed we had something rare — not just a compelling narrative, but something with real emotional depth. Instead of extracting a quote or single illustrative visual for a prefab dispatch, we had built a structure together where Dalmar’s experience had room to live more fully on its own terms.
With the words fixed, we now just had to figure out the visuals.
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| | We didn’t want to make the piece feel like just one more disaster post in readers’ feeds, or some kind of daily crisis tourism that would erase the proximity we’d managed to achieve through the narrative.
Because the story navigated personal memory and historical trauma, we didn’t think documentary photographs would hit the right note. We’d published powerful illustrated work from Mélissa Cornet in Afghanistan before, and we used that piece as a model to brainstorm with the social and design teams different approaches that might have a similar feel.
We’d also been testing different AI tools, and so we mocked up some ideas using various text-to-image generators. CARE’s creative director, Simon Duncan-Watt, used Midjourney to create torn-paper-style illustrations that added emotional depth without sensationalizing.
As a team, we felt like those were, weirdly, just right. Dalmar agreed. It was more human than human, I guess, though the question of whether or not it’s ethical to use an inhuman intelligence to illustrate a human story is a whole separate newsletter, or, rather, a seminar(sign up!).
When the story finally went live, it stood out. It was longform. It was visual. It wasn’t tied to a news peg or particular campaign moment – it stood on its own. But it was still deeply tied to Dalmar’s work and to the broader “why” behind CARE’s mission.
We didn’t submit it for a Pulitzer, or even a National Magazine Award, but we were psyched to learn it was rightly honored for excellence alongside Netflix, the Getty Museum, NASA, and MasterClass.
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| | | | “What Famine Feels Like” modeled CARE’s ongoing shift from reporting on someone to building a narrative with them.
Many humanitarian stories either flatten or sensationalize. They rush to make a point, often at someone else’s expense. This one didn’t. Instead, it slowed down. It centered one voice. It wasn’t simply about giving someone a platform – here’s the WordPress login, good luck! – but about using the skills we had at CARE to help Dalmar craft a story that our audiences would feel in their guts.
We worked from the belief that we had a CARE audience, that we knew how to reach them, and that we could use our tools to shape a first-person story that didn’t rely on what can feel like any of the hackneyed NGO story tropes – things are bad; NGO arrives; things are good!
This story wasn’t about making someone the face of a crisis. It was about voice, agency, trust.
I know most organizations won’t have the freedom to do something like this. Not because they don’t care – but because it’s hard. It takes time, coordination, and consent. It takes a lot of revision, ego-checks, and re-centering. But it is possible, and I think it is a better way to do things.
Working to develop an ethical storytelling culture that empowers the co-creation of stories and distribution instead of perpetuating extraction and dependence makes for work that can actually change – and maybe even save? – lives.
(Of course, Instrumental can help you figure this out. If you’re interested, mash that reply button!) |
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| | | Last week I finished Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese —> which got me listening to Italian disco sleaze king Giorgio Moroder and reminiscing about the early aughts —> which led me to picking up Homeland by Richard Beck —> which led me to listen to the audiobook of Thomas Pynchon’s eerily prescient turn of the century rabbit hole Bleeding Edge (read by Jeannie Berlin!?!) —> which led me to re-read Crying of Lot 49 —> which led me to scribble this in my notebook:
After finding traces of the Trystero secret society’s muted postal horn throughout various parts of her life, Oedipa Maas thinks to herself:
“Either you have stumbled onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream, onto a network by which a number of Americans are truly communicating—stumbled onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise, to the life that harrows the head of everybody—or you are hallucinating, or a plot has been mounted against you so expensive and elaborate, either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke.”
But now that same muted postal horn follows us around because we searched for it once on Amazon as a gag gift.
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