“This is the year our babies stop playing with police cars and instead use their hands to plant seeds 🌱.” Participants in the 2020 Advanced Practitioner’s Training closed the week together by composing a “This is the Year” poem. Here it is.
Read MoreAs we decided to shift the Advanced Training (AT), our regular offering to our movement communities, to online, we wanted to lean into the visionary opportunities. We mourned the loss of all the in-person parts of the training and then moved into radical imagination.
Read MoreOnce upon a time a group of strangers sat together in a dimly lit room to share stories, struggles and heartbeats. After a week of spending more time listening than speaking, all these amazing folks came to the realization that they were not really strangers but just friends who hadn’t met yet...
Read MoreFree tools available now to boost your imagination! Step into #the4thBox in a game on your phone, in an online course, and with downloadable PDF tools. We're making these resources free to our movement community to better support our ability to dream big in this critical moment. We can only go where we’ve first imagined.
Read MoreAs a queer women of color led organization, we know that frontline leadership looks different for each issue and in each place. We acknowledge the expertise — and look to the leadership of — those who have already been coming together to survive, that is: organizing in the current economy that invisibilizes and ignores them
Read More“I picked up Pleasure Activism because I’ve long been a fan of and been a learner from adrienne’s writing - and was really curious about the book because so many people were talking about it, especially at this past year’s CSS Advanced Practitioners’ Training. I was also drawn to it because I’ve long been interested in how we stay in movement work for the long haul given the enormous and intensifying political conditions we live in.”
Read MoreOur annual Top Social Justice Memes considers memes used or created by our movements to challenge the status quo and shape politics and pop culture.
Read MoreIt's an annual Center for Story-based Strategy tradition to create a list of the Top Social Justice Memes for the year!
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreI'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…
Read MoreWe find that fitting the right warm-ups, ice breakers and check-in questions to the topics of meetings can help frame and inspire the coming conversation and help get everyone in the mood and mindset for the group work ahead in the agenda.
Read MoreParticipants in the 2019 Advanced Practitioner’s Training closed the week together by composing a “This is the Year” poem together.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreLearning a new language means rediscovering how your mouth and your voice work together. Earlier that year, I felt cut off from both. I had always considered myself an activist and a writer. But I noticed a shift. I had stopped writing, and focused solely on activism work. I was leading campaigns against corporations and corrupt politicians – and some of them were even working – but I was burning out.
Read More“When you’re trying to do organising work, if you don’t address those underlying narratives and work to both shift them – shift away towards more liberation – but also to create alternative narratives that are really about liberation, then it’s going to be really difficult to do that work. That’s really why we got started.“
Read MoreThe dominant narratives are asking the wrong questions. Our analysis and our solutions will depend on the questions we ask ourselves. Why are there more than 10,000 people leaving their homes, their families? Why are they going to the US? It is a complex situation and there are no easy answers, no easy solutions.
Read MoreWith this list, our goal is to build the capacity of change agents, ourselves included, for understanding what memes travel far and wide with the most impact. If we know our work is to #changethestory, how do we deploy increasingly-effective memes that shape politics and culture towards the justice we all so desperately need?
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