This was quite a year for memes and stories. Our initial list of memes was noticably longer than previous years. Thanks to our trusty criteria, we managed to narrow it down to 10 Top Memes for 2016. It is also important to note that for the last three years Black Lives Matter has been on our Top Memes list. This year we found ourselves noticing that while BLM did not make it directly on the list, its influence and message can be seen throughout it.
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tiny whisper of a voice was trying to make its way towards me. It was hard to hear much less move over the 20 million voices that were suddenly yelling and questioning:
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It can feel like the world is falling apart at the seams. Rising sea levels threaten entire communities, and the 1% get richer while the rest of us struggle more and more just to get by. Donald Trump has all but sewn up a Presidential nomination, riding a wave of racism and anti-immigrant hatred. It seems like nothing can stop the world from collapsing around us. But there is another world rising up in the place of the old one. It’s this new world that the Center for Story-Based Strategy (CSS) helps others to imagine every day.
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Earlier this month our CSS Imagination staff teamed up with our friends at the Interaction Institute for Social Change to do some Imagin-action work that we called #The4thBox. Our goal was to spark imagination and conversation with a blank box that anyone could fill in.
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Recently at the Center For Story-based Strategy we have been playing with different ways to use images in order to help explain some of our narrative strategy concepts. Specifically, we have been struck with the importance of training people to challenge the underlying assumptions in organizing work and creating moments that trigger what we call "psychic breaks."
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The time is coming, once again, to gather social movement leaders, change-agents, and communications practitioners in beautiful Corbett, Oregon (Menucha Retreat and Conference Center) for 5 days of hands-on training and creative strategy-development: that's right, it's almost time for CSS's 2016 Advanced Training!
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Last November CSS co-founder Patrick Reinsborough travelled to Berlin to attend a convening of the European SmartCSOs Lab. Smart CSOs is an international network of campaigners, activists, researchers and funders exploring how civil society organizations can be more effective drivers of systemic change.
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I was that little girl who sat up front during reading time in the school library, and borrowed the maximum amount of books at least once a week. I would try to read books at the dinner table (Sorry, Mom!) and at parties when I couldn't leave my friends - I mean, characters - and their adventures behind.
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As the climate movement grows, the limited vision of the climate crisis as a siloed, single “environmental” issue has been replaced by a growing recognition that climate destabilization is a symptom of deeper flaws in our economic and political system.
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Greenpeace has been designing and implementing high impact, headline grabbing campaigns for over 40 years. Our work at the Center for Story-based Strategy has been greatly influenced by the original Greenpeace ideas around using media spectacle to create “mind bombs”.
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Every year at the Advanced Training (AT), CSS gathers together change agents from all parts of the country to learn, collaborate and to immerse themselves with their peers in story-based strategy. A huge part of the AT is the ever-popular campaign lab, where participants are divided into small groups to apply story-based strategy to a real world campaign of one of the participants.
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From the silly to the serious, 2014 was another year filled with viral videos and twitter conversations gone global. In our annual installment of Top Memes, CSS has collected and analyzed the Top 14 Memes of 2014 that made waves throughout the movements for social and environmental justice (and a couple that just rippled through the interwebs).
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