Our Vision, Mission, Approach, Method, Services, and Results
Our vision is a world that works for all.
To achieve that, we in the United States must regain control of our democracy and create a new national consensus about how our country behaves at home and abroad. These are big goals, and achieving them will depend on effective communication, along with other important organizing tacmtics. To be widely accessible, progressive messages must be framed in a way that can reach a majority of Americans. To this end, The Metaphor Project (MP) has been building the capacity of cutting edge American progressive and liberal activists to ‘speak American’ since 1997.
Our Mission
Our particular mission is helping progressive activists learn how to frame their messages to reach the mainstream American public and their political representatives.
We do this by teaching people how to do “American Framing.” That means we show people how to use the colorful metaphors, images, catch phrases, and memes that are an ongoing part of our national political dialogue. Adapting phrases like “play by the rules,” or other “American” frames for use in our own messages is a natural way to evoke the best values we all share. American phrases like these tell a familiar story about our ideal identity as Americans, one that everyone understands. Because we only use them to evoke our own ideals, progressives can “speak American” with complete integrity. (For more information about these points, see What is American Political Framing?.
Our Approach
The Metaphor Project’s approach is interdisciplinary. It rests on theoretical insights and documented research from a wide range of disciplines: American studies, American political communication, framing and cognitive science, studies of metaphor in culture and social change, and a number of other subject areas such as political science, sociology, American history, psychology, cultural anthropology, ecological economics, evolutionary biology, and peace studies. For more information, see our book, Move Our Message: How to Get America’s Ear, and Selected Sources .
Our Method
Providing Reminders of Ideal American Values, Themes, and Evocative Language
Since the beginning of speech, we humans have been spontaneously creating new language. Our collective cultural stories tend to last much longer. A great deal of hard evidence exists that most Americans hold a common set of core ideal American values and American cultural ideas. They recognize them by the everyday language that evokes them in political communication.
Progressive activists also recall these core values and cultural stories if reminded of such key phrases as ‘can do’ or ‘new’ or ‘the future.’ For this reason, the Metaphor Project has assembled sample lists of the language of American cultural stories and common metaphor categories. American Story Elements and American Metaphor Categories help progressive activists remember this very familiar language and set of themes as they work. For more information about our sources for these and other Metaphor Project tools, see Selected Sources. For more information about this part of our method, see Frequently Asked Questions.
Teaching Ways to Express Progressive Messages by “American Framing”
The MP’s American Framing Steps provide a proven step-by-step guide to framing our messages as part of the best American story, using methods that match the latest research in cognitive science. The MP’s Criteria for Successful Mainstream Framing help people quickly check the effectiveness of the new frames they create this way. See Resources for more information.
Our Services
In addition to the many free resources on this site, we also offer workshops, talks, and coaching on a sliding scale that can even include pro bono, if appropriate.
Our Results
As a result of our work over the years, many important “early adopter” activist leaders have learned how to “speak American,” on a wide range of issues. We believe that many more are now ready to move into “speaking American.” For more information about our results, see Some Groups Served , Metaphor Project History, and What People Say about The Metaphor Project.