Featured Story
We Won’t Always Have a Mamdani: Funders Must Invest In Civic Engagement To Sustain Voter Turnout Among Marginalized Communities.
To build consistent voter turnout beyond star candidates, funders must shift from late-cycle spam to early, year-round investments in community-based civic education, trusted messengers, and leadership development. It seems counterintuitive to focus on voter turnout in New York City, given...
Narrative Power Today for a Radical Tomorrow
Invitation to 21st-century Orators, Griots, Futurists
In the face of fascism’s “death cult,” radical communicators must forge a powerful “narrative solidarity,” using shared grief and belonging to build bridges and win. Ase! In West African traditions, ase means “and so it is.” It is “the power...
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For the Record: How Social Media Users are Highlighting Media Bias and Reframing the Narrative
Social media users are exposing how major news headlines manipulate language to sanitize violence in Gaza—proving that a simple annotation can be a means of resistance. Language Is Never Neutral The best way to communicate something is usually the simplest...
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Building Community Power to Take Back Our Data
To fight tech giants and law enforcement, organizers must adopt “data defense” as a core strategy—learning to collectively refuse data extraction, expose biased narratives, and reclaim personal and community information as a new frontier of political power. Unprecedented abuses of...
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Inspiring Radical Optimism Through Solidarity Economy Storytelling: Narrative Power & The Fight Against the Mainstream
While mainstream media pushes narratives of scarcity and inevitability, frontline communities practicing “Solidarity Economics” demonstrate that “resist and build” is a proven path. It forges collective power and creates a radical, livable future. One of the most powerful roles of...
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Moral Messaging When It’s Raining Cats and Dogs
When a racist lie transformed Springfield, Ohio into a national flashpoint, this story reveals how a local network fought back not with outrage, but by asking a radical, actionable question: What does it mean to ‘Love Your Neighbor’ when the...
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Winning the Reality War against Fascism and Ecological Collapse: Lessons from the Right’s Narrative Strategy
If the Right has the “Great Replacement,” what’s our equivalent story to win the reality war? This article argues the Left must master the art of narrative warfare to counter MAGA’s assault on reality. From the Overton Window to the...
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On the Importance of Building Narrative Infrastructure
This article is a field manual for building the four essential narrative infrastructures needed to dismantle authoritarianism, arguing that movements must construct them urgently to survive and wield transformative power. Crises are paradoxical. They are urgent and immediate and demand...
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Shades of Discourse: Bridging Culture, Scholarship, and Organizing
In a digital age designed to breed distrust and flatten dialogue, this article reveals how an in-person Black creative and activist salon is pioneering the very kind of trusting, imaginative community our movements need to survive and win Back in...
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Power, Not Panic: Why Organizers Must Engage with AI to Build the Future We Deserve
Arguing that disengagement from AI is not a strategy but a surrender, this piece challenges progressive organizers and funders to reclaim the technology, using frameworks like Afrofuturism to build people power instead of ceding the future to billionaires and autocrats....
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Hasbara v Irreplaceable
As Israel’s genocide in Gaza rages for two years, this is how propaganda warps U.S. media and our conscience, and how we must fight back. Two years of bearing witness to Palestinians’ genocide raises the moral question that lies at...
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Rebuilding Our Narrative Home: A Movement’s Journey Through the Immigration Divide
This article argues that to counter the well-funded, agile anti-immigrant narrative, the immigrant justice movement must fundamentally overhaul its own fractured infrastructure, abandon siloed “messaging” for a cohesive “narrative surround-sound,” and build the collective power to shift national consciousness. This...
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The Summer Everybody Wanted to be Puerto Rican: Cultural Strategy for Decolonial Narrative Power
Despite colonial policies pushing Puerto Ricans out, this article chronicles how organizers are fighting back by fusing mutual aid, political campaigns, and cultural joy into a powerful, people-led narrative: that privatization has failed and the archipelago’s future belongs to its...
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What We’ve Learned from State Organizers Building Narrative Power
By showcasing victories in Tennessee and Florida, this piece offers a concrete blueprint for building narrative power, showing that the antidote to fascist distraction is seizing the moral high ground and making narrative “everybody’s job” within a coalition. In 2018,...
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Death of the Messenger
As Israel kills the storytellers of Gaza, this article is a powerful call for global witnesses to pick up the pen, reclaim narrative power, and become the collective keepers of a truth that empires are trying to erase. More than...
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Looking Forward: Narrative Power Today for a Radical Tomorrow
To stop losing the story to authoritarians, the Left must stop treating comms as an afterthought and start building a shared narrative infrastructure—here’s the radical strategy to do it. Right now, we have an opportunity to define a compelling story...
Right to a Roof: On Climate, Crises, and Care
The Climate Movement Must Be A Movement Against Fascism
The era of “holding our lane” is over: we must now choose between building a single-issue movement or preserving the democracy necessary for any movement to survive. In America and around the world, fascism is on the rise. From...
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As Climate Collapse Inches Closer, The Tenant Union Is The Best Chance We’ve Got
The hallways of apartment buildings have become a new front in the climate fight, where tenant unions are battling for survival against the twin threats of negligent landlords and rising heat. Kansas City was hot and humid this summer,...
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What We’ve Cultivated Still Remains: Black Home, Black Memory, and Collective Resilience in a Burning World
The same systemic forces that steal Black communities’ cultural harvest are being met with an unbreakable resilience, as neighbors build solidarity networks, reclaim land, and seed a future where their culture can thrive. At the start of this year...
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Using Participatory-Action Research to Explore New Campaign Strategies in Red-Trifecta Florida
In the face of a hostile legislature and stalled policies, Miami tenants have stopped asking politicians for help and started building their own power—by turning corporate landlords’ financial records into weapons. The housing crisis in Florida has only worsened...
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Lessons From Helene: An Organized Community is a Safe Community
When floodwaters consumed the only roads into their Appalachian town, the community’s survival hinged on the deep trust and organizing muscle built by a local group over years, proving that true disaster resilience is forged long before the storm ever...
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Tenant Power and Protections on the Frontlines of Climate Crisis
In California, disaster-triggered renter protections are a crucial victory that contributes to a just recovery for working-class people facing the climate crisis. Just north of the San Francisco Bay, dense urban centers give way to rolling oak woodland hills and...
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Putting Housing on the High Road
This is a republish of part of a series of CCI substack posts and a policy brief exploring why the United States needs a Green Industrial Policy for Housing. The United States is in the midst of a decades-long housing crisis that has...
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Frontline Communities Lead the Way on Housing and Climate Justice Panel
In this panel, housing organizers have identified our most vital source of resilience as climate disasters intensify: the trust between neighbors, which they are forging into a powerful force for collective survival and justice. Tony Samara: Welcome everyone. I’m...
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Razing Liberty Square with Valencia Gunder
This interview was conducted in Fall 2025 with Valencia Gunder of The Smile Trust, about Razing Liberty Square, a documentary about the Black community of Liberty City and how they’re resisting climate gentrification. Misk Noor: Thank you for sending...
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Solidarity is the Solution
The same public subsidies that fund Memphis’s slumlords now bankroll Elon Musk’s pollution, revealing a single, profitable system that organizers are challenging by uniting the struggles for housing and environmental justice. In late 2022, residents at a HUD-subsidized complex...
Latest Stories
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Our Prescription for Winning: Give Organizers What They Need to Thrive
The organizing sector is immersed in a critical debate over what it takes to win. In a political climate in which our vision for the future seems further out of reach than ever, we’ve seen calls to refocus on community...
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The Coming Storm In New York
5 Lessons Learned for Mamdani From 40 Years of Building Independent Politics in Chicago. In 1983, Harold Washington was the first Black man to be elected mayor of Chicago. He was elected by a grassroots movement of community organizations, progressive...
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Updated Insights for More Effective Coalitions
The Climate Advocacy Lab’s Blueprint for Multiracial, Cross-Class Climate Movement is an updated report and workbook providing tools to build healthier, more effective climate coalitions through strategic culture, governance, and conflict management. Back in 2022, we noticed that there were...
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For the Record: How Social Media Users are Highlighting Media Bias and Reframing the Narrative
Social media users are exposing how major news headlines manipulate language to sanitize violence in Gaza—proving that a simple annotation can be a means of resistance. Language Is Never Neutral The best way to communicate something is usually the simplest...
-
Building Community Power to Take Back Our Data
To fight tech giants and law enforcement, organizers must adopt “data defense” as a core strategy—learning to collectively refuse data extraction, expose biased narratives, and reclaim personal and community information as a new frontier of political power. Unprecedented abuses of...
-
Inspiring Radical Optimism Through Solidarity Economy Storytelling: Narrative Power & The Fight Against the Mainstream
While mainstream media pushes narratives of scarcity and inevitability, frontline communities practicing “Solidarity Economics” demonstrate that “resist and build” is a proven path. It forges collective power and creates a radical, livable future. One of the most powerful roles of...
-
Inspiring Radical Optimism Through Solidarity Economy Storytelling: Narrative Power & The Fight Against the Mainstream
While mainstream media pushes narratives of scarcity and inevitability, frontline communities practicing “Solidarity Economics” demonstrate that “resist and build” is a proven path. It forges collective power and creates a radical, livable future. One of the most powerful roles of...
-
Moral Messaging When It’s Raining Cats and Dogs
When a racist lie transformed Springfield, Ohio into a national flashpoint, this story reveals how a local network fought back not with outrage, but by asking a radical, actionable question: What does it mean to ‘Love Your Neighbor’ when the...
-
Winning the Reality War against Fascism and Ecological Collapse: Lessons from the Right’s Narrative Strategy
If the Right has the “Great Replacement,” what’s our equivalent story to win the reality war? This article argues the Left must master the art of narrative warfare to counter MAGA’s assault on reality. From the Overton Window to the...
-
On the Importance of Building Narrative Infrastructure
This article is a field manual for building the four essential narrative infrastructures needed to dismantle authoritarianism, arguing that movements must construct them urgently to survive and wield transformative power. Crises are paradoxical. They are urgent and immediate and demand...
-
Shades of Discourse: Bridging Culture, Scholarship, and Organizing
In a digital age designed to breed distrust and flatten dialogue, this article reveals how an in-person Black creative and activist salon is pioneering the very kind of trusting, imaginative community our movements need to survive and win Back in...
-
Power, Not Panic: Why Organizers Must Engage with AI to Build the Future We Deserve
Arguing that disengagement from AI is not a strategy but a surrender, this piece challenges progressive organizers and funders to reclaim the technology, using frameworks like Afrofuturism to build people power instead of ceding the future to billionaires and autocrats....
-
Hasbara v Irreplaceable
As Israel’s genocide in Gaza rages for two years, this is how propaganda warps U.S. media and our conscience, and how we must fight back. Two years of bearing witness to Palestinians’ genocide raises the moral question that lies at...
-
Rebuilding Our Narrative Home: A Movement’s Journey Through the Immigration Divide
This article argues that to counter the well-funded, agile anti-immigrant narrative, the immigrant justice movement must fundamentally overhaul its own fractured infrastructure, abandon siloed “messaging” for a cohesive “narrative surround-sound,” and build the collective power to shift national consciousness. This...
-
The Summer Everybody Wanted to be Puerto Rican: Cultural Strategy for Decolonial Narrative Power
Despite colonial policies pushing Puerto Ricans out, this article chronicles how organizers are fighting back by fusing mutual aid, political campaigns, and cultural joy into a powerful, people-led narrative: that privatization has failed and the archipelago’s future belongs to its...
-
What We’ve Learned from State Organizers Building Narrative Power
By showcasing victories in Tennessee and Florida, this piece offers a concrete blueprint for building narrative power, showing that the antidote to fascist distraction is seizing the moral high ground and making narrative “everybody’s job” within a coalition. In 2018,...
