This post is part of our coverage of a convening of global health and communications experts at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this week, openly and creatively discussing the opportunities and challenges of promoting life-saving behavior change. Join the conversation on Twitter at #scaleimpact or leave a comment below!

We are by nature storytellers. Our brains are wired to tell stories.

Think for a moment about how many stories you’ve already told today: to your spouse or partner; to your children; to your colleagues; or to your friends. Stories are the currency of our lives, they are the measure of our days. We are nothing without our stories, because stories encapsulate our fears, our failures, our dreams, and our desires. We understand and make sense of our own lives by telling stories about ourselves and others. People who can’t tell stories, like those afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease, are lost to us.  

Stories are the touchstones for our emotions. Stories guide us; they are ways for us to make sense out of all the facts and figures and arguments we hear about improving global health.

If I told you that the U.N. estimates there are nearly twenty million AIDS orphans in Africa, your mind goes blank. How does one comprehend a number like that? But if I show you a documentary of one orphan’s journey to find a family after his parents died of AIDS, or photographs taken by orphans in Maputo that depict their lives and tell their own stories, you will never forget what it means to be an orphan struggling to care for one’s siblings, too often without any family or community support.

Facts and figures compiled in policy reports or academic journals organize the world in ways that make it possible for us to grapple with the complexity of social issues. But do these journals, that so often end up unread, piled on your desk, engage you emotionally and intellectually in the ways a good movie, novel, painting, song, or television show does?

A story, not data or facts, shake us up and make us see other points of view through characters we can identify with. And if a story is really captivating, we continue to think about it, turning it over in our minds, savoring it.  Maybe we even begin to think about things a little differently from the way we had thought about them before. Stories have the power to move us emotionally; stir us intellectually; and teach us, too.

The documents and reports, filled with numbers that empirically analyze the problems of global health, are made up of legions of stories. We must strive not only to tell those stories, which have the power to enlighten and move others to demand social justice, but also to put cameras, digital video, and yes, mobile phones, into the hands of those whose voices have not been heard.

We must hear their stories; the stories that make up the numbers. Those stories have the power to engage the public and policy makers to support social entrepreneurship and innovative financial transactions (such as attaching a small fee on airline tickets to pay for costly anti-retrovirals).

As a television writer and producer, I’ve been very fortunate to have a platform for telling stories about social justice. But you don’t have to be a TV writer to inspire someone.

All of us have stories to tell, stories that have gripped you, changed the way you’ve thought about the world, or moved you to tears. Take your stories about HIV, TB, malaria, access to health care, domestic and sexual violence, alcohol abuse, and more, and make them public. And encourage those who traditionally have not had a voice to tell their stories, because telling one’s own story is profoundly empowering. It means “I matter. I have a place in the world.”

We all can have an impact. We can write op-ed pieces; testify before legislatures; run for political office; teach; blog; tweet. We must take our stories and turn them into potent barbs to fight dogmatism and bigotry.

Our stories will change the world.