The workshop "Hope- based communication: How changing the narrative transforms social change work?" was held on Wednesday, 16 December 2020, under the facilitation of Krizna Gomez. The workshop aimed to improve the communication capacities of individuals and institutions engaged in the field of hate speech, discrimination and human rights. Non-governmental organizations, public institutions, private sector and media employees attended the workshop.
Gomez emphasized how to come up with powerful narratives that can win hearts and minds on complex and polarizing issues. Using insights from neuroscience, she stated that the human mind has a tendency to remember the negative statements. Hence, in human rights activism, Gomez expressed that creating a positive narrative based on personal stories would convey a more powerful message than reinforcing the messages of our opponents.
After walking through the hope-based communications by giving examples around the world on stories that changed people's hardened views on controversial topics, hands-on practice of the tools was executed. During the group activity, a social media post was created by emphasizing the articulation of values, definition of the audience, and formulation of the message.
About Krizna Gomez
Krizna Gomez is an impact strategist whose small dream is for social change organizations to become rockstars in engineering (not just adapting) change. A certified foresight practitioner and trained as a human rights lawyer, Kriz has been working with NGOs around the world, especially in countries where civil society has been experiencing a crackdown, to help them magnify their impact through the use of design thinking, foresight, contemplative practices and other innovation methods. She began her work doing community organizing in provinces in the Philippines with the highest number of cases of extralegal killings and enforced disappearances, while also doing regional coalition building among NGOs in Asia around access to justice. She taught international criminal law at the Ateneo Law School in the Philippines and Gender Studies at the Paññāsāstra University of Cambodia. In 2013, Kriz was granted a Presidential Fellowship at the Open Society Foundations in New York, where she focused on donor policies affecting the security of their grantees. In Ghana, Papua New Guinea, and Uganda, she worked on issues of gender-based violence, education, and the protection of human rights defenders. She then worked at Dejusticia, a think-do tank based in Colombia, where she led the organization's international research and advocacy on civil society space and its solidarity support for defenders at risk in different regions of the world. Kriz has a Master of Laws (LL.M) with a concentration in International Human Rights Law from Harvard, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Juris Doctor from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Until recently, she was Director of Programs and the lead facilitator at JustLabs, a global innovation space for social change actors. In 2019, Kriz was granted the Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Award (Humanitarian Special Award) by the School of International Futures for her project establishing a Change School for the next Greta Thunberg's of the world.
