Moved to Act: Why People Really Join Movements
A few years ago, I was playing around with book ideas, when I fixated on Eat, Pray, Love. The title was the best part of that book, and I wondered what the “eat, pray, love” of organizing would be. I settled on “think, feel, act.” I started writing about how a person could go about […]
Thinking Long-Term: What 2025 Taught Us About Narrative Power
We want to end the year with this reading list, featuring some of the best thinking in the field on power building, narrative infrastructure, and resource organizing for narrative change.
Fire and ICE: A Close Look at the Narratives that Emerge When Immigration Enforcement and Disaster Relief Collide
ICE’s detention of firefighters responding to the Bear Gulch Fire – the largest wild fire recorded in the Olympic Peninsula – ignites a powerful conversation on immigration enforcement and its cost to all of us.
Teaching to Regress: On the Compact for Academic Excellence for Universities
A collection of lessons for organizers working in higher education
Connecting with Our Narrative Power: The LGBT Movement
It is no secret we are in the midst of the most intense and sustained rollback of basic rights, protections, and access to care. Some of us are already burnt out and on the verge of despair, and others are joining the fight for the first time. The strategies of the authoritarian playbook should now […]
Narrative Power is Movement Power: Reflections from the Narrative Power Summit
Listening to the Second Line parade serenade a room full of dancing people in the French Quarter of New Orleans, I felt the energy of radical change. Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the Narrative Power Summit (NPS) hosted by the Radical Communications Network and ReFrame in New Orleans, Louisiana. Social justice communicators […]
Narrating Toward a Bigger “We”: How We Build a Model Majority
But the flip side: the Model Minority Myth is a myth. We know Asian American communities are far from a monolith and Asian American histories are deeply interwoven in the histories of Black Americans, immigrants, people living with disabilities, rural people, and working people. So why haven’t we been able to “debunk” the myth of the Model Minority?
Fighting for Birthing People in an Uncertain Future
We are living in a time when “a broad anti-sexual and reproductive rights agenda” is being implemented at the direction of a new administration. As daily damage unfolds, doulas and other advocates do what they can to support birthing people as a matrix of legislation threatens their well-being, and the rights of many are on the […]
Today’s Doulas Support Birthing Parents, But Aren’t the Solution to a Broken System
Looking at doulas from a global health perspective In 2022, 817 women* died of maternal causes in the United States. Admittedly, that’s a decrease from the 1,205 maternal deaths in 2021. But despite a gradual decrease in annual maternal deaths nationally, a few things remain unchanged. First, the majority of these deaths (80 percent) are preventable. Second, […]
Where Somebody Says Doula, We Say “Auntie”
It’s nearly impossible to discuss solutions for the maternal health crisis— one that leaves Black and Native women 3 – 4 times more likely to die in childbirth— without hearing the word “doula,” a birth worker who nurtures birthing people as they navigate pregnancy and postpartum. Advocates like Ericka Dorsey, a health and lactation educator, and Co-Founder of […]
Friends in Struggle
In 1967, less than three years after receiving the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood at a lectern in Riverside Church in New York City. There, he delivered a paradigm-altering speech called “Beyond Vietnam.” “My conscience leaves me no other choice,” he said. “I knew that I could never again raise […]
How storytelling preserves traditions of reciprocity, resilience, and hope
When was the last time you asked someone their story? Stories preserve memory, pass on tradition, convey wisdom, and offer a glimpse of hope. In this way, asking someone about their story is not unlike asking them about what values they use to navigate their daily lives. Recently, Narrative Initiative partnered with the Decolonizing Wealth […]