When I moved to Vermont, one of the things I most wanted was to befriend the crows. I’d learned that you can genuinely have a relationship with this animal, that they’re smart and funny and have an actual sense of humor. A few years in, that friendship is real. So it felt right to close out this series with them: lucky number seven, and truly one of the coolest species in the world.

We’ve covered so much ground together. The circulating of bees, the web building of orb weaver spiders, the reciprocity of the Three Sisters, the engineering of beavers, the rooting of cedar, the invisible labor of mushrooms. And all of it requires trust.

Trust is something I talk about constantly, because it’s so central to the work health and justice organizations are doing. And trust is, in part, about memory. Communities remember. They remember the organization that did the listening and never came back. They remember the survey that went nowhere, the story that got taken and used without consent. And they remember who follows through, who was there for their grandmother and for the generations before her. All of that lives in community and individual memory.

Which brings me to the crows.

Keepers of knowledge

In many Indigenous traditions, crows and ravens are messengers, observers, and keepers of knowledge, associated with memory and with communication between worlds. And the more I’ve learned about them, the more amazed I am.

Crows recognize individual human faces and remember whether a specific person was kind. Researchers who trapped and banded crows have been scolded by those same birds years later. They came back and gave them a talking to. And crows who were never trapped but watched the interaction learned to scold the researchers too. The memory spreads.

That spreading reminds me of gossip. Gossip gets such a bad rap, but it’s also a tool that has kept people safe for so long, a protective and connective thing. We need that in community: sharing our learnings, sharing what’s safe and what isn’t, sharing what’s going on. Word spreads, and trust spreads with it. Or mistrust does.

Crows pass threat information to other crows and to their offspring. A grudge held by one crow becomes a grudge held by the whole flock, and then by the next generation. And the important other side: crows also remember kindness. People who consistently feed crows have been brought gifts in return. Buttons, bits of glass, small shiny objects left at feeding spots. There’s reciprocity in that, and real delight, a sharing in abundance.

They fashion tools from sticks and leaves to extract insects. They solve multi-step puzzles. They hold what researchers call funerals: when a crow dies, others gather around the body, make loud calls, and study what happened so they can avoid the same fate. They learn from loss collectively. When there’s a threat, they call in reinforcements and protect each other as a group. And they thrive in complex, changing environments, reading situations and making strategic decisions about when to act and when to wait.

Listening fatigue is memory doing its job

I see this all the time with clients. I’ll come into a community to lay the groundwork, to do community mapping before a strategy gets built, and some communities are just done talking to organizations. They’ve talked before and nothing changed. That fatigue makes so much sense. None of us are down to give and give and see nothing change.

Better messaging won’t solve this. Listening fatigue is a signal that the community’s memory is one of broken trust and overextraction. When communities stop engaging with organizational outreach, they haven’t stopped caring. Everybody cares about the organization responsible for their health, their social services, the justice system in their community. Listening fatigue is the community’s memory protecting them from repeated extraction. That’s smart. If there have been instances of extraction over and over, withholding trust is the intelligent response. We want to honor that, and then take the time to rebuild.

Becoming the face the crow trusts

This is why, when I’m working with clients, I ask about the trusted people in their communities. That word has changed meaning in recent years, but truly: who are the influencers? Who operates the food shelf everyone relies on? Who are the religious leaders people go to in celebration and in grief? Who’s the hairstylist who knows everything and everyone and is a hub of community information and trust? Those are the people our organizations need to engage authentically to begin the path of deep listening and trust building, whether we’re repairing a breach or strengthening what’s already going well.

A better survey won’t rebuild a trust deficit, and a flashier engagement event won’t either. What rebuilds it is showing up where people already are, making it as easy and as genuine as possible for them, and following through over time. Crows don’t bring gifts after one feeding. They bring them after consistency. Reciprocity begets more reciprocity, and it’s never a one-off. It’s continued building, continued ebb and flow, continued repair. When our work itself returns value to the community, trust begins to grow. And when we have that trust, we get the insights and connections and community wisdom we can build reliable, impactful strategy from, strategy in the highest service of community because it’s based on what we’ve actually heard.

Context is everything

Crows adjust their behavior based on the situation. They aren’t running the same strategies for safety and wellness in every environment, and neither should we. We can learn from the data and research coming out of other places, and then we need to contextualize it through Story Lab Sessions, through listening, through learning where we are and who’s there. You can’t take a finding from an urban health department, shrink it down, and expect it to work at a rural Federally Qualified Health Center. Story-driven strategy is the context rebalancer. It takes all of our public health and social justice knowledge and shows us where and how to apply it, rooted in actual lived experience rather than assumed experience. Our communities are the brilliant forces behind the work we do. They hold the intelligence and wisdom about what they need to be well, and they brilliantly can’t be fooled by half-hearted efforts or continually dropped balls. We are accountable, as we should be.

What does the community remember about you?

I find this question really key in my work with birthing centers, because birth is so central to people. Where they gave birth. Where they were given birth to. Where their grandmother gave birth. When birthing centers disappear, people lose so much trust, because what they remember is the origin of their family in that place. The same is true of small hospitals, large hospitals, and social justice organizations with long histories. We need to know what’s remembered about our organizations and what’s been passed down. Even if the extraction or harm wasn’t you specifically, the memory may still arrive before you do. The question is what steps you need to take to move forward.

And for organizations that already hold a fair amount of community trust: what are you learning from loss? Crows gather around loss and study it together. When something in your work doesn’t land, are you doing the same? Are you alchemizing it, using all of the lessons learned? Because when we don’t learn from what didn’t work, we repeat it. Moving on to the next thing and hoping nobody remembers won’t work either. The crow always remembers, the community remembers, and that remembrance is passed down. Our job is to pay attention to what the memory is telling us.

The crows around my home have this “prove it” energy that I love. Prove you’re going to keep showing up. Prove we should trust you. That’s exactly the kind of intelligence we want our communities to have, protecting themselves and each other. And I’m grateful we get to learn this lesson from a species that does it with such humor.

Thank you for coming along with me through these seven species. It’s been such a joy.

One more thing

Something I don’t talk about a ton: the Center for Story and Strategy has a suite of 16 trainings, all about community engagement, deep listening, storytelling, how to share stories, how to keep a healthy story bank, and so much more. You can purchase the trainings as a unit on their own, or pair them with office hours twice a month, where I help you implement what you’re learning in your own context and with whatever your organization is navigating. Office hours are also a great addition to the end of a Story Lab Session for that implementation support. It’s a lighter touch than a retainer engagement, with consistent one-on-one time. If you’re curious, book a call and we can chat about where you’re at, what you’re thinking about, what you want to make possible, and how we can do that together.

M ☁️

Entangled Health can be in your ears, too! Listen to the show wherever you tune into podcasts.

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