Thinking Long-Term: What 2025 Taught Us About Narrative Power

In January of this year, we opened our guidance, Narrative Power in Crisis: How to Narrate Toward Action, with the following:

A key element of the Trump administration’s strategy is to convince the public that the MAGA movement is unstoppable. They will broadcast the message that “No one can beat us” with each advance, whether the arena is legal, journalistic, educational or civic. They will be doing this on multiple issues simultaneously, hoping to send community, labor and cultural groups into panic mode. When everyday people, without whom mass movement is impossible, absorb the idea that something is unstoppable, they lose the political will to organize and act. We can narrate in a way that inspires action, rather than contributes to its depression.

We have now seen a year of federal cuts to critical public and digital infrastructure, relentless attacks on civil rights. Our democracy is lurching towards authoritarianism on all levels of government. While we mobilize our communities and movements towards action, we must keep an eye on the long-term. Durable social change moves in proportion to 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.

A Four-Part Framework for Measuring Narrative Change by Yewande O. Addie, David Hanson, Emily Melnick, Melody Mohebi & Annie Neimand. For a deeper dive into the HEART program, check out Yewande O. Addie’s article, “How a Durham-based Crisis Response Team is Reimagining Public Safety“

Funding Narrative Change: How Communities are Shaping and Wielding Narrative Power by Mik Moore and the Convergence Partnership. An in-depth look at two case studies of community-based narrative change initiatives.

Edited by Shanelle Matthews, founder of the Radical Communicators Network, and Marzena Zukowska, co-founder of the immigrant rights organization POMOC, Liberation Stories offers lessons, tactics, and insights from communicators, organizers, and movement veterans across the progressive field.

Scott Warren, a Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and Julia Roig, Founder of the Horizons Project, discuss the utility and limitations of the pervasive “big tent” metaphor.

What Is Narrative and Solidarity Infrastructure—and Why Are We Building It? From the BLIS (Black Liberation-Indigenous Sovereignty) Collective is the first of six reports on their groundbreaking initiative to make the world ripe for durable narrative transformation. Here is an excerpt: While the term narrative change has helped shift organizations away from a narrow focus on messaging toward a broader understanding of how societal perceptions, values, and ideologies shape our cultural and political reality, it has also, at times, produced a reformist orientation, one that seeks to adjust or soften dominant narratives rooted in our oppression, rather than dismantle and rebuild them. We believe that this moment demands more of us, and have begun using the term ’narrative transformation’ – because our charge isn’t just to chip away at the stories that uphold inequality, but to fundamentally transform them. What is Narrative Infrastructure and Why Does it Matter? is a great companion piece by Trevor Smith and Emi Aguilar.