Posts in Case Studies
Reimagining #Defund the Police

By framing it not as we're going to lose or they're going to win or anything like that, we see these people are just loud and irrelevant. Our goal is to make the trustees feel comfortable. We were able to reframe the conversation and actually utilize a lot of their terminology against them, right?

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Stories of Survival in the Diaspora

This work started by doing a deep interrogation of societal beliefs around sexual violence. The pervasiveness of sexual violence exists because society enables and supports it. We spent most of our time while crafting the strategy to understand what people, structures, and systems uphold and are complicit in this mindset.

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Work Worlds: Imagining our way out of burnout with H Kapp-Klote

As I began to become aware of my own burnout, I noticed organizers all around me burning out, too. I have been using futurism as a way to heal from my burnout and I wanted to bring that same energy to other burnt out organizers. There are too few of us to let each other stay burned out! That’s how Working 2050 came to be born, from me dreaming about my own future and the future of my own work.

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Making Strategy Interactive: Kedar Reddy is using story-based strategy to build better digital campaign tools

I became an organizer because I wanted to end caste, the system of oppression that’s rooted in Hinduism. I started Organiz to help with my anti-caste work. In the long term I want to play a role in designing and building equitable tools to enable marginalized, oppressed people to build their cultural power, and take back their narratives online.

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Case StudiesKedar Reddy
Grappling with Contradiction: Mariana Mendoza moves to Decolonize Climbing

I have had the opportunity to work and share in various spaces and with wonderful people who have helped me grow politically, spiritually, and in movement work. Friends and family introduced me to questions, thoughts, and actions that made me more politically conscious growing up. I was part of anti-corruption/violence, land rights, and gender rights campaigns in Mexico…

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Case StudiesMariana Mendoza
Conjuring Magic with Black Girls in Oakland

I'm a Southern Black queer writer and editor, youth advocate, and communications strategist who believes in the transformative power of storytelling to uproot racist systems and change culture. My journalistic practice is a love of language, a pirouette with Black Queer Feminist (BQF) praxis, and a forever connection to Black womxn and girls who channel generational struggle into generational healing, wisdom, and truth…

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Case StudiesZakiya Scott
A Cage as Container of Meaning

In terms of imagination building power, this was the first and only action I’ve done where the police arrived on scene, saw what was happening, and then left.  The whole scene was incredibly haunting. Everybody, and I mean everybody, stopped what they were doing and fell silent. And I believe it was in part because people were imagining themselves, their kids, their family, in the cage. 

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Case StudiesLJ Amsterdam
Imagination Builds Power: Erin O’Brien takes us from concept to final product

I was asked to put together a short 3-minute animated video to introduce story-based strategy. Originally it was going to be one of those graphic note-taking type videos. Through the process of making the video the concept and design of the project changed dramatically and the final result was a stop motion animation short film. This project is a bit meta, we are using story-based strategy to explain what is story-based strategy and then within the animation itself, the storyline is that of a community using story-based strategy to win.

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