The Lost Boys Ethos Examples

Narrative stories utilizing ethos and pathos are essential for nonprofit organizations that are trying to gain a greater awareness. This essay will provide two examples of nonprofit organizations that directly use narratives, ethos, & pathos, and then explain the subsequent effects of using emotional appeals. The first example this essay will use is The Lost Boys Center for Leadership Development. The Lost Boys is a nonprofit that originally worked with refugees from Sudan to help them settle into their new lives in America. Currently, their purpose is to “work with individuals from the Sudanese community to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to become empowered global leaders who support South Sudan” (The Lost Boys Mission Statement,

For example, if someone who works at the organization, who wasn’t one of the refugees, had come to speak, the story would probably have been much different. Having the story come from Deng’s perspective allowed the audience to see a side of the story that we’ve never heard on the news or seen on the Internet, making it different and unsaturated. Ethos is seen as an appeal to credibility and the fact that Jany Deng survived escaping the civil war in South Sudan and was able to speak to others about it, definitely made his narrative more affective. Sometimes there are constraints regarding ethos especially in the case of narratives. If the narrative does not come from the direct source, there is no certain believability about it, making the impact of the narrative much weaker. At the end of his presentation, we were all wondering what we could do to help this cause, to which he responded “tell 2 people about The Lost Boys”. The effect of ethos and pathos working together in Deng’s narrative made the audience care about the cause and want to know more about what we could do, therefore fulfilling the desire for awareness of the cause and of The Lost Boys nonprofit

Because the article was about disaster relief, emotion obviously played a large role. The volunteer that the piece was written about had helped in many disaster relief projects including 9/11—a very emotional event for many people. Timing was also a large part of this emotional appeal because they released the article not even a week after one of the most devastating earthquakes our time has seen. Being able to do so little for Nepal is upsetting for many people, so giving them a place where they can help in their own country was exactly what the public was looking for. Subsequently, by relating this article to previous events (9/11, etc.) that could touch a broader audience, The Salvation Army used the combination of narratives, ethos, and pathos to not only gain greater awareness of what their organization does, but also to gain more