// Category: Frameworks
“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…
Storytelling Can Move Mountains
In 2011, Tania Mattos started working with filmmaker Christina Antonakos-Wallace when she was a leader in the fight for the New York Dream Act. Mattos expected filming to take a day or two. It took eight years and followed her through a pivotal time in her personal life and the immigrant rights movement as a…
Changing the Conversation Around Reproductive Justice
“Reproductive justice” was first coined in 1994 by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice and defined in 1997 by Sister Song (a formal outgrowth of that group) as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” To…
Amy Zhang on the AAPI Narrative Studio
From creating a show about Asian women in America in a small New York City theater to producing TV episodes for Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, I’ve always worked at the intersection of storytelling and impact. But, I yearned to be in community with other creators to think through persistent questions: How does narrative change…
Creating Systems of Support
Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. An organizer for more than twenty years, Silky has worked on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice. Her book project contends that the prison industrial…
We Have Always Existed
Emily Ramirez is a queer Dominican woman, born and raised in NYCHA housing in Brooklyn, and is currently contracting with the United Nations as a social media specialist. She holds a Bachelor’s in creative writing and comparative literature, and has published works in Huizache, Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories From Young Female…
Busting the “Post-Patriarchy” Myth
Ellen Bravo is a long-time activist and author who’s spent decades organizing among low-wage women from a social justice feminist framework. She’s the Co-Founder of Family Values At Work, a network of state coalitions that advocate for paid sick days and paid family medical leave. Previously, Ellen served as the longtime director of 9to5. She’s…
Mapping the Beaches of Black America
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….
Wielding Grief to Enact Change
Malkia Devich Cyril, is a writer, public speaker and award winning activist on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief. Their book, Radical Loss: Black Grief Can Change the World, combines personal storytelling and political essays to reframe grief as a powerful driver for movements, rather than a private experience. The…
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…