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Our Vision
Every region of the U.S. has a vibrant legacy of cross-racial movements for equity and justice. Every era has produced changemakers who have expanded democracy and civic participation. We celebrate the historic accomplishments of the movement to abolish slavery, the American Indian Movement, the feminist and LGBT movements, and immigrant justice movements. But we also recognize that the US has yet to become a truly just, fully multiracial democracy. History teaches us that people are the most important part of every movement and that social change moves in proportion to their narrative power.
The future of our country depends on millions of everyday narrators. Narrative reflects our people, our analysis, and our solutions, either supporting or weakening our ability to persuade more people to join us. Having more narrative power speeds up economic, cultural and political change.
WE BELIEVE
people have the right to create, shape, and change the narratives that affect their lives.
WE BELIEVE
everyone holds innate narrative power and that gathering and using that power is the work of organizing.
WE BELIEVE
narrative, combined with organizing, can shift political, cultural, and economic systems toward a truly just multiracial democracy and help our communities thrive.
How We Work
Culture, media, and movements make narrative. At Narrative Initiative, we partner with movements to build power. We choose projects that have the potential to move big ideas and connect communities in new, unexpected, and impactful ways.
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Recruit great changemakers
Recruit great changemakers (organizers, leaders and creatives working in multiple issue areas and disciplines) to the enterprise of narrative power-building by offering programs and projects for starting or deepening narrative practice.
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Develop practitioner leadership
Develop practitioner leadership, our own included, by studying current and historic narrative change efforts, and how they were generated by or embedded in social movements.
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Craft and support narrative interventions
Craft and support narrative interventions that lean into the power of connection and cooperation across racial boundaries.
Big Ideas In Your Inbox
Narratives inform the mental models that guide what laws we pass, what we deem as socially acceptable, and whose lives we value.
Trevor Smith, BLIS Collective
Durable narrative change is woven with networks, stories and structures that sense, speak with, and are able to be held by many voices.
Rachel Weidinger, "Polyvocal Narrative Strategy"
What the last decade has also shown us is that narrative is the level at which society moves – or is blocked from moving – toward a better, freer world. Narrative, like culture, moves before policy.
The Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy
Strategizing with movements to root multiracial democracy in equity and justice
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