Witness to Innocence: Changing Minds with Stories
Kurt Rosenberg, director of Witness to Innocence, just emailed me a link to a short video featuring some of the folks I had the privilege of working with last spring and fall.
Here’s a remarkable statistic: when a Witness to Innocence speaker appears before a group, Kurt always does a simple survey of the audience, asking them to write their position on the death penalty before hearing the speaker and then after hearing the speaker. In this way, he has a non-scientific way of tracking how many minds are changed.
Knowing how deeply held beliefs in favor of the death penalty are, what percentage of pro-death-penalty listeners would you expect would change their positions after one speaking event?
1%? 5%? 10%?
Actually, 20% of the listeners who came to the event convinced of the rightness of the death penalty change their minds. One in five!
The right story, told sincerely by the right person at the right time and place, can, indeed, change the world.
Here’s the clip from ABC News, covering an Alabama conference featuring Witness to Innocence members, some of whom I have coached:
