// Blog
Orienting Together: Mapping your Narrative Landscape
Imagine your roommate asks you to plan a road trip. Logically, you ask them where you’ll depart from and where you’re headed. In response, you hear “I don’t know.” At this point, you weigh your options – you could just throw a couple of darts at a map and find the most efficient line that…
Rural Pre-conference at 22nd Century Initiative in Minneapolis
In organizing, many progressives fall into traps that cast rural Americans as antagonists to progress writ large. This erases both rural people who are working towards racial, gender, economic, and migrant justice and the particular concerns, realities, and assets of rural communities. At our best, our many movements have shown that we can coalesce around…
On Mourning as a Motive Force: Grief and Black-Palestinian Solidarity
There is so much on my mind. My thoughts, like my feelings and even the sensations in my body are tangled, the emotion I have felt most recently is terrified. What a season of extreme loss, and this – a moment of heightened visible brutality. What the Palestinian people have been experiencing as a matter…
“Money is Medicine”
Back in June, I moderated a panel at Alight, Align, Arise, the inaugural conference on reparations hosted by Decolonizing Wealth. The panel focused on the narrative history of reparations, a history that began well before the end of the Civil War as keynote speaker and author Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed during his opening night fireside chat…
Innovations in Disaster Response After the Almeda Fire
Wildfires across the West Coast have become more severe in the ongoing climate crisis. Half of California’s 20 deadliest wildfires ever recorded occurred in the last two decades and among these, five of the six largest wildfires occurred throughout the 2020 wildfire season alone. I was in Oakland at the time, living under prolonged exposure…
From Rural America with Love
Three weeks ago, the usually remote Narrative Initiative team convened in Minneapolis for the inaugural 22nd Century Conference: Forging a People-Powered Democracy. This would mark the first time I would meet my teammates in person, the first time I would attend a conference, and my first time in Minneapolis. As I reflect back on the…
Imagining Liberation
The Changemaker Authors Cohort, a partnership with the Unicorn Authors Club, is a new, yearlong intensive coaching program supporting full-time movement activists and social justice practitioners to complete books that create deep, durable narrative change, restructuring the way people feel, think, and respond to the world. This interview series features participants in the inaugural cohort….
Finding the Freedom to Love Through Faith
While faith is not often considered a hallmark of progressive values, you can be a person of faith and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. As historian Blair Imani noted in her TED Talk, these identities are neither mutually exclusive nor do they need to be reconciled. However, hardline readings of religious texts – be…
Weaving the opposite of fascism: Narrative organizing to build narrative power
I have myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) from Long Covid, formerly called chronic fatigue syndrome. I first shared these thoughts while standing on a stage at Frank 2023. I ask for care on that stage as I figure out my new brain and body. A statistic I’ve thought about a lot in the past year is: 75%…
Ecosystem for a New American Narrative
The field of documentary impact has officially entered its maturation phase. For over two decades, the documentary film sector has developed tools and methodologies – even professional strategists – in an effort to maximize the impact of powerful nonfiction work. Though relegated to a corner of the broader field of cultural strategy, the practice of…