The Art of Social Change: Community Narratives as Resources for Individual and Collective Identity

Rappaport argues that community narratives—stories shared among a group and communicated through texts, rituals, images, and performances—are the primary resources through which individuals construct identity and through which communities achieve empowerment. The chapter rejects what Rappaport elsewhere calls 'professional centrism': the assumption that community psychologists should impose their own frameworks and narratives onto marginalized groups. Instead, the psychologist's role is to help people discover, create, and circulate their own stories, and to build settings where such storytelling is possible. The mechanism is identification: people act on the stories available to them, so expanding available narratives expands possible selves. Social change, on this account, is fundamentally narrative change—replacing stories of deficit and exclusion with stories of agency and belonging.

The first case involves the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, where a new research building was constructed with no entrance facing the adjacent African American neighborhood and a promotional poster depicted only soybean fields, effectively erasing the Black community from the institution's self-representation. Rappaport reads this as a dominant cultural narrative that renders a community invisible. The second case involves South Africa, where communities under apartheid created resistance art—murals, sculptures, community gardens—that narrated their own experience of oppression and aspirations for liberation. Rappaport cites this as an example of communities creating alternative narratives that sustain collective identity and mobilize action. Together, the cases demonstrate the contrast between narratives imposed by institutions and narratives generated by communities themselves.

Rappaport distinguishes between stories, which are individual cognitive representations of events organized temporally and thematically, and narratives, which are stories common among a group and shared through interaction, texts, performances, and rituals. A community narrative is not merely a collection of individual stories but a shared resource that a group uses to constitute itself as a community, independent of physical proximity. Personal stories are shaped by the narratives available in one's social environment; individuals adopt community narratives into their own life stories, and vice versa. The relationship is reciprocal: community narratives make certain personal stories possible, and when individuals tell their stories, they may reinforce, revise, or resist the available narratives.

The chapter extends the empowerment framework Rappaport introduced in his 1981 article by specifying narrative as the medium through which empowerment operates. In the earlier work, empowerment was defined as a process through which people lacking an equal share of resources gain greater access to and control over those resources. The 1998 chapter answers the question of how this process works: empowerment happens through narrative, because stories are resources that shape identity, possibility, and collective action. Rappaport explicitly defines narratives as resources, echoing the earlier emphasis on access and control. The shift is from a structural account of empowerment to a cultural and psychological one, without abandoning the structural concerns—the cases address institutional racism and apartheid, showing that narrative empowerment engages directly with material power relations.

Dominant cultural narratives, or 'mass narratives,' are stories communicated through institutions like mass media, schools, churches, and gossip that are known to most members of a society. Rappaport argues that these narratives serve as an influential backdrop against which local community narratives and personal stories are told. For marginalized groups, dominant narratives can be so powerful that they make alternative stories difficult to find or sustain; the Beckman Institute poster that depicted only soybean fields is an example of a dominant narrative that erases a community. Social change, on this account, requires creating and circulating alternative narratives that challenge and supplement dominant ones. The chapter's South African case shows communities doing exactly this: using art to tell stories that the dominant culture had suppressed.

The chapter's narrative framework provided the theoretical foundation for Rappaport's subsequent studies of mutual help organizations, particularly his research on GROW, a self-help group for people with histories of serious mental illness. In those studies, Rappaport documented how mutual help groups offer members alternative narratives of identity that replace the stigmatizing stories prevalent in mainstream mental health settings. The 1998 chapter generalizes this insight: what mutual help organizations do for individuals, communities can do collectively—create settings where new stories can be told and adopted. The concept of 'tales of terror and joy' that Rappaport developed in his 2000 article, describing the mission of community psychology as helping turn one into the other, is a direct extension of the framework articulated here.