Framing Matters
5 lessons from PCC’s 2025 storytelling show
by Stephanie Narayanan, Director of Development and External Relations
What do you get from a storytelling show besides a great evening and a YouTube video? If it’s PCC’s 2025 storytelling show, the answer just may be a timely primer for navigating into the new year. Consider these thematic highlights as the reminders we all need right now:
The things we once saw as as strengths may become challenges
Being an early reader like Razia Alizada sounds phenomenal…until you start failing third grade because deciphering words isn’t the same as understanding them. The bilingual care managers in our Montgomery Cares Behavioral Health Program are an important community resource—and they’re incredibly difficult to replace when natural turnover happens. What has always felt like a program strength can feel like a risk area now. But it remains a challenge worth facing because offering patients the care they need is worth it.
Accept setbacks as part of the process.
Not having the right answer right now doesn’t mean we won’t get there. As Corey Smedley and Wenjing Zhang reminded us, we need the humility—and the courage—to fail and learn from it. Dr. Kisha Davis rightly told the Montgomery County Council that our local safety net cannot backfill for all the resources we are losing to changing federal healthcare policy. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. The ongoing Access to Care Sessions we’re co-leading with our County partners—and PCC’s work in general—is about staring down fear and uncertainty and asking, “How can I help?”
Not having the answers within ourselves, individually, is not a failing.
Dr. Nina Ashford’s best efforts at implementing all the wellness tools were no match for post-partum depression, and that’s the strength of her story. There’s a parable we often use when talking about PCC: the elephant and the blind men. Each has a vastly different description of the same animal based on the one part he can feel. And in my mind, that’s just describing the contours of the problem, not designing the solution. If we’re intent on solving just for the things we as individuals can see, we will miss the possibilities of our collective vision.
The community we’re building benefits us all.
Bridget Howe told her story about the kind of people you meet volunteering—both the delightful seniors she served and her peers over the years—and our intrepid leader has repeated Eleanor Roosevelt’s line that “When it’s better for everyone, it’s better for everyone.” If we value living in a community that cares for each other, that’s the investment we should make.
The power of our storytelling show is not (just) to brag about our incredible team and partners. It is to remind us all that none of this is possible in isolation. That, in fact, as last year’s storyteller Edwin Rich shared, disconnection can be a kind of disease.
Yet, as simple as all that sounds—be brave, work together, community is everything—none of it is easy. And for all its philosophical simplicity, operationalizing it is incredibly complex. It involves creating enough structure and muscle to keep a movement, well, moving, without creating outsized burdens or new breaking points from overdone rigidity.
As we reflect on the year (almost) behind us and prepare for the year to come, let’s remember how much we need a diversity of roles and gifts and voices. To borrow from politics—and a past storytelling show—we really are stronger together.
Please also keep that in mind this giving season, and don’t give from a place of charity. Supporting community-based organizations is important, but it’s not really a gift.
It’s an investment. In our communities, our values, our collective vision.
More importantly, as County Councilmembers Balcombe and Friedson observed in a November hearing, the helpers and the ones being helped are often the same. Or, as we’ve said before, the storytelling show tends to remind us that we all move between places of need and strength. Vulnerability touches us all, but it doesn’t have to trap us. Donate your dollars (#MontgomeryGivesLocal) as an investment in our collective future. The return is real.