How to Write About People Who Don’t Share Your Values

If part of your work involves dealing with people who oppose the values of your mission, it can be difficult to talk about them without implying judgment of them and their choices and behaviors that you strongly feel to be wrong. Yet, allowing those judgments to show can cause problems. Here are some thoughts and tips for addressing this tricky topic.

Let’s start with a fictional example:

Area business owners generally do not want to hire and make concessions for people with disabilities, so staff from The Strong Disabled try to change their minds with free consultation and research about the benefits of hiring people with disabilities.

This paints the business owners as selfish, uncompassionate, and even prejudiced… which some of them might actually be. Yet, describing them this way could earn their distrust or even animosity if they ever found out. Even if you can be certain they will never know, this description does not serve the nonprofit in the reader’s eyes either, for it does not give the reader confidence that the nonprofit can understand and persuade these business owners. In fact, the business owners just sound like bad people, and readers may feel that people with disabilities are better off without the possibility of having to work for such employers.

 

So what is the solution?

Even if you believe someone’s thinking to be absolutely wrong, you can still write in a way that shows compassion for the reasons behind their thinking.

Here are two fictional examples:

Many area business owners fear that they cannot afford to make the concessions needed to hire people with disabilities. The Strong Disabled eases their fears by offering researched data about the economic benefits of hiring people with disabilities and providing free consultation on cost-efficient ways create a disability-friendly workplace, including how to obtain funding for the process.

Many area business owners have absorbed cultural notions of what people with disabilities can and cannot do, leading them to believe that hiring people with disabilities would not benefit their businesses. The Strong Disabled corrects these misperceptions with free consultation and research about the many excellent benefits of hiring people with disabilities.

What may seem at first like unconscionable selfishness or prejudice can actually be seen and addressed as issues like fear and misinformation. If the business owners saw these examples, they would likely feel heard and understood and would not take offense. This way of addressing the problem also shows readers that the business owners are not just innately bad people, but people like anyone else, who can make misinformed decisions, then correct those mistakes. It also gives the reader confidence that the nonprofit understands how the business owners think and how to meet them where they are and give them the guidance and tools they need to learn and grow.

There may certainly be times when you do want to make someone else look bad, like when you are calling out a government for human rights abuse or a policy advocacy group for promoting a bill that would harm the poor to help the rich get richer. However, it is generally important to avoid saying anything negative about those you are working with or alongside. Fortunately, it is possible to express your values while also expressing compassion for and understanding of people whose actions go against those values.