What 2025 asked of us—and what a decade of narrative power building is teaching us about the road ahead.
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What 2025 asked of us—and what a decade of narrative power building is teaching us about the road ahead.
In 2025, many of us returned to a familiar but urgent question:
How do we stay grounded when the ground itself keeps shifting?
For Team ReFrame, it was not just a question of speed or scale, but of posture. What shape did we need to be in to meet this moment—not only to respond, but to remain accountable to the long arc of narrative power-building we commit ourselves to every day?
The year unfolded under conditions that demanded steadiness, discipline, and care. Across movements and organizations, we navigated heightened repression, political volatility, and real threats to the people doing this work. These conditions were not abstract. They shaped how campaigns operated, how leaders communicated, and how communities experienced risk. Rather than chase every turn, we focused on building—deliberately and in relationship—the infrastructure, practices, and partnerships that help movements anticipate attacks, shift narratives, and hold ground over time.
2025 also marked an important milestone for ReFrame: our first full year operating independently after spinning out from fiscal sponsorship. This shift sharpened our responsibility—not only to deliver strong work, but to steward it with clarity, sustainability, and accountability to the field we serve.
Throughout the year, we held a real tension. On one hand, the moment required responsiveness. We supported partners navigating narrative flashpoints, moments of crisis, and urgent shifts in the political landscape—providing narrative strategy, advising, and rapid-response support across campaigns, coalitions, and state-based networks in multiple regions. This work mattered. It helped organizations respond with intention rather than panic and supported leaders and communities operating under pressure.
At the same time, the pace of an “everything, everywhere, all at once” era of crises made something else clear: we could not—and should not—be everywhere at once. Chasing every moment of rapid response risks reinforcing the very dynamics that keep movements reactive and mirrors the very conditions our opposition seeks to exploit. The deeper question became:
What shape do we need to be in to support hundreds of leaders and organizations, and the thousands of people coming into movement spaces, to sharpen and deepen their impact with narrative strategies both in the moment and over time?
Holding this contradiction shaped our choices throughout 2025—and will continue to shape choices over the coming years. We met immediate needs while staying oriented toward building capacity that could outlast any single moment. In practice, this meant deepening our commitment to narrative infrastructure.
In the spring, we convened—alongside the Radical Communicators Network—more than 700 strategists, communicators, artists and culture workers, and organizers at the Narrative Power Summit, creating space to step back from crisis and sharpen collective strategy.
We also launched our first Narrative Campaign Design Pilot with more than 30 power-building organizations from across the country, testing what it looks like to design narrative campaigns with rigor, shared frameworks, and intentional resourcing.
Together, this work informed the conceptual foundation for the Narrative Nerve Center, alongside a field-wide call to raise $100 million for narrative power-building infrastructure.
And over the past few weeks, we worked with The Opportunity Agenda—an organization that has helped shape the field for more than two decades through values-based messaging, rigorous research, and capacity building for social justice leaders, communicators, artists, and culture workers—to ensure that, as the organization closes, its narrative and training work carries forward. Beginning in 2026, this work will live within ReFrame—not as a departure, but as an extension of a shared lineage and a deepened investment in the field’s long-term narrative capacity.
Much of this work did not announce itself loudly. It took place inside active campaigns and state-based networks, through advising, design sprints, and ongoing accompaniment at the local, state, and national levels. It was the work of helping organizations clarify audiences, test frames, and align narrative strategy with real-world conditions. It was also the work of learning—often in real time—what holds, what breaks, and what evolves under pressure.
Holding this work also required care for the people doing it—making space for reflection, recalibration, and mutual support as part of sustaining the long haul. This care extended beyond our team to the leaders, organizers, communicators, artists and culture workers we support, recognizing that narrative power is built by people navigating real risk, grief, and responsibility.
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Along the way, we continued to sharpen the methodologies that underpin narrative power-building: how audiences and personas are developed, how narratives are distributed across platforms and messengers, and how narrative change and narrative power are assessed over time. Leadership development and capacity building remained central to this work—for individuals and for the organizations, networks, coalitions, and alliances carrying this work forward—particularly as new organizers and communicators came online seeking shared language, strategy, and grounding. At the same time, more senior leaders needed increased support to execute the promise of their strategies.
Our learning was not confined to the U.S. context. In 2025, members of Team ReFrame participated in the Global Artivism Conference, deepening our engagement with global artivists and movement practitioners working under sustained repression.
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Alongside lessons drawn from movements across the Global South and from communities organizing within right-wing strongholds in the United States, these exchanges reinforced a shared truth: narrative power is built through culture, creativity, and collective memory as much as through messaging and media strategy—and it is sustained over time through long-haul investment, discipline, rigor and care.
This understanding resonated across the field. We were honored to see this moment reflected in the recent Narrative Power issue of The Forge, including the piece “Invitation to 21st-century Orators, Griots, Futurists"”, alongside contributions from many of our collaborators and peers.
These conversations echoed themes lifted during the Narrative Power Summit, including our opening remarks.
As we continue to mark ReFrame’s tenth year, the question is not whether we have “arrived,” but what we are becoming. The decade behind us holds experimentation, risk, adaptation, and growth. Our past affirms a steady notion we have long known:
Narrative power-building is long work, sustained by people willing to learn, iterate, and stay in relationship even when conditions are difficult.
The shape we took in 2025 was not about being everywhere, but about becoming more grounded in who we are, how we work, and what this moment truly asks of us. Our work did not resolve the conditions we’re navigating—but it clarified our posture within them. Rooted in relationship, discipline, rigor, and care, that clarity reflects our commitment to the long haul and will continue to guide us as we build, adapt, and stay in relationship in the years ahead.
As we close out the year, we do so with deep gratitude—for the partners, collaborators, and communities who make this work possible, and for the leaders and organizations advancing narrative power every day. In the year ahead, we’ll share more from our 10-Year Impact Study and take time to honor this collective leadership through the inaugural ReFramies in Spring 2026.
We also pause to honor those we lost this year—visionaries, freedom fighters, artists, organizers, and elders whose work and lives continue to shape our movements. We carry their contributions forward with care: Sam Nujoma, Paquita la del Barrio, Cecile Richards, Souleymane Cissé, Roberta Flack, Roy Ayers, Rubby Pérez, Brandi Collins-Dexter, José “Pepe” Mujica, Assata Shakur, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, D’Angelo, and Alice Wong.We remember them not only in grief, but in commitment—carrying forward what they built, what they imagined, and what they made possible. Their lives remind us that this work is bigger than any one moment, and that the road ahead is walked in lineage, in solidarity, and together.
Returning to our mission, vision and values to build the narrative infrastructure we need to prevent further authoritarian consolidation.
All of the intersecting and diverging roads over ReFrame’s 10-year history have brought us to this pivotal moment. From our mentorship program and early research drops to leadership cultivation and large-scale convenings, we have strengthened our collective muscle and cultivated the trust needed not just to move narratives at scale, but to secure long-lasting victories.
We know we cannot build power alone. ReFrame continues to emphasize narrative infrastructure — centralized and decentralized people, organizations, networks and institutions that make meaning at scale — as a critical component to building narrative power.
On the wings of our anchor partnership with RadComms and our second Narrative Power Summit, we schemed the Narrative Campaign Design Pilot to advance our Action and Integration work in real time, transform our pedagogy and began building the core infrastructure behind what we are calling the Narrative Nerve Center (NNC). During our time in New Orleans, our Executive Director, hermelinda cortés, pointed out that the Right had identified 100 Days as a window of opportunity to consolidate power across all levels of government and institutions. Trying to visualize the timeline we were borrowing from was nerve-wracking, but it became a call to action for us.
The Narrative Nerve Center is an amalgamation that converges everything we have been moving toward over the last 10 years. The NNC operationalizes ReFrame’s vision and mission by shaping and developing leaderful multiracial movements to use iterative and networked technologies that develop strategic praxis towards a new society rooted in equity, justice and liberation. We have known that the path towards this new world is through sustained investment in collaborative narrative infrastructure, which ReFrame has dedicated its entire existence to building and sustaining, often with few resources.
The Narrative Nerve Center is ReFrame’s next-level strategy to:
This kind of innovation embodies ReFrame’s praxis model for the next decade of building lasting narrative power. We are moving away from individual and coalitional campaigning models toward networked approaches to narrative power building. Without a networked approach, we will not be able to consolidate ourselves in opposition to authoritarianism, nor will we be able to combat the doctrine of shock and awe with Leftist protagonism that clearly articulates the future we are collectively building and fighting for on our planetary homebody.The Narrative Campaign Design Pilot is a stress test of the groundwork we’ve laid together: deep narrative research, field partnerships, powerful experiments in strategic communications and courageous pivots in response to political, social and material crises. This experimental program brought together over 30 power-building organizations across sectors, geographies, and audiences to integrate an in-person strategy space with training, skill-sharing and peer support. ReFrame supported organizations in creating critical campaigns across audiences, issue areas and geographies:
And those are just three of the total 25 campaigns developed in the Design cohort.
We’d be remiss to say that piloting the Campaign Design experiment was what we thought we’d be doing this summer. Based on the political and philanthropic landscape, we quickly learned that our planned annual ReFrame Academy would not be enough to meet the moment. So, we went to work.
We hired a team of communications gurus to lead trainings and office hours on measurement and evaluation, audience identification and refinement, earned media, and visual strategy. Whether they are former staff, mentorship alum, or seasoned practitioners, our trainers and field specialists have harmonized over a century of experience, anchoring the space with rigor and dynamism.
We engaged over 150 organizations in less than one month. Invitations were met with strong enthusiasm and interest from frontline organizations, even if they couldn’t join us this go-around. Over 83% of organizations that participated in the in-person Sprint stayed committed to developing their campaigns further as part of the 100 Days of narrative experimentation. There are almost 40 organizations identified for future Campaign Design work, too.
We hammered out the curriculum and program design in two weeks, incorporating the best of ReFrame’s offerings with emergence and experimentation. The cross-pollination of organizations provided the needed relational, political and practical guidance that enables participants to apply the tools and frameworks in their specific contexts. We facilitated real-time exploration and hypothesis testing, pushing participants to abandon scarcity and the need for perfection.
A lesson we’re holding as our truth? In the face of challenges, ReFrame has the chops and courage to make strategic pivots, even if that means building the car as we’re driving it.
If it sounds dicey, it’s because it was. However, it was the most principled call for us to do what we knew in our bones needed to happen. Many organizers and communicators crave greater political and strategic clarity and prefer it to yet another tactical training that leaves them with more questions than answers. The Design Campaign became ReFrame’s next-generation program, moving us away from yet another standard ‘training in a box’.
You didn’t hear it from us, though. The actual value of this work is reflected in the voices of our inaugural Design Cohort members:
Grace Holley, Co-Director of Communications at City Life Vida Urbana, had this to say about their collab with Homes for All Massachusetts and Right to the City: “The NCDS reinvigorated my love for doing this work, and I'm not exaggerating! I have had a difficult time prioritizing and showcasing work that I think is valuable at my org for the past few years, and the sharing with this cohort reminded me that my ideas are worth raising and putting forth, that experimentation is necessary, and that we need to be striving for excellence in our comms work and building infrastructure across movement. Being together in person in ATL was definitely the highlight for me because I do better that way, but I also enjoyed meeting with specialists online, and plugging into the weather station.”
Although Movement Law Lab did not launch a campaign during the 100 Days, they are building legal frameworks into a long-term narrative campaign focused on illegal searches and seizures, the first of its kind, to meet the moment. Carlos Ochoa, Senior Communications Manager, said his most memorable experience was when “I started thinking critically about narrative interventions and audiences in Memphis. I was able to work with organizers to start engaging the media with narratives about the 4th amendment, administrative warrants, and the erosion of civil liberties by ICE and the federal government.”
When asked why they believe in the Campaign Design model, Celina Lee, Member Organization Rep at Grassroots Global Justice, said it is a “visionary model that builds strong relationships between organizations, teaches meaningful communications strategies rooted in movement values, and shares cutting-edge tools and techniques to refine and advance our work. This level of intervention we need to support and elevate communications work in this moment.”
We did all of this and more in 100 days. Imagine what else we can build together when we are resourced to scale this work beyond our wildest imaginations.
Become a monthly sustainer. Your investment will help us continue our vital work of building narrative infrastructure and empowering the next decade of narrative power builders working toward freedom, justice, and liberation.
We hope you know that whoever you are and wherever you’re from, you have a story to tell, a community to rely on, and narrative infrastructure to co-build for the betterment of all of our people, animal and plant kin. We hope this success story gives you the drive you need to end 2025 strong and plant the seed for your contribution to the Narrative Nerve Center and 100 Days of Narrative in 2026.
We join our friends and comrades in mourning the passing of Brandi Collins-Dexter, a visionary scholar who embedded her values and principles in her studies of race, history, and social justice, providing accessible and digestible calls to action that spanned public policy, technology and media studies.
While we never got the privilege to work closely with Brandi, we shared collective space at the Disinfo Defense League, where she served as a recurring guest speaker, facilitator and collaborator. Through her leadership and guidance, we learned how to research disinformation and media manipulation, watched her dig into billionaire CEOs during Media Justice’s #BigTechOnBlast campaign, dissected and discussed her case studies about policing and copaganda narratives, studied her work on the role of racialized disinformation during the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election cycle, and laughed at the back-and-forth banter she brought to Bring Receipts, a podcast she co-hosted with long-time friend Steven Renderos. In many ways, Brandi inspired and encouraged us to continue bringing rigor to our disinformation work and to prioritize uncovering anti-Black racism where it shows up across the narrative landscape.
She was a brilliant thinker, researcher, student and mentor. She was funny, smart and courageous. We join the chorus across the social justice movement sector in paying homage to her. Brandi will receive the United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry’s Parker Award posthumously. The Shorenstein Center, one of Brandi’s home bases, has committed to renaming its annual community award in her honor. Her critiques and analyses were as sharp as steel.
“Brandi was interested in change, not in the aspirational kind but in the concrete. The kind of change that sees giant corporations crumble, and where people get to make their own way.
I decided to share something now as I continue to make sense of what grief is teaching me. With Brandi, it’s taught me a lot about the importance of celebrating our ancestors in the present. Like a true ancestor, she laid a path that others who are Black and nerdy enough to care about media and technology’s role in our lives, can see themselves as part of. It’s not hyperbole to say that many people inside of the media justice movement are here because of Brandi.”
- Steven Renderos, Executive Director at Media Justice
“Brandi was a warrior and now she is a warrior spirit. I wish there had been more time. I wish so many things. But instead of wishing, I will work. To be more accountable, trustworthy and loving. May Brandi’s sarcasm, love, brilliance and heart fill the ecosphere. May it birthmark the day. May she bring us closer to each other, to victory, to love.”
- Malkia Devich Cyril, Founding Director of MediaJustice and ReFrame board member
Team ReFrame sends love and warmth to Brandi’s family, friends, and colleagues. We welcome all to dig into the treasure trove of work she imparted to us, understanding that her legacy will live on as she transitions into our ancestor.
Order your copy of Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future, her book that combines pop culture analysis, digital ethnography and investigative journalism to understand the trajectory of Black political, economic and social power in the United States.
Listen to Black Skinhead: A Conversation between Brandi Collins-Dexter and Justin Hendrix for Tech Policy Press
Read the beautiful memorials written by Brandi’s colleagues and friends at Media Justice and Free Press
Watch or listen to Deepfakes, parody, and disinformation with Brandi Collins-Dexter, Jane Lytvynenko and Karen Hao
Watch or listen to Meme Wars: Disinformation, Media Manipulation, and Political Futures, a VAST: Visiting Artist & Scholar Talk between Brandi and Dr. Joan Donovan at the University of Colorado Boulder
Watch or listen to Brandi’s Impact of Anti-Black Radicalization & Disinformation discussion at Aspen Digital
With love and solidarity from all of us,
ReFrame Board & Staff
Malkia Devich-Cyril doesn’t mince words. From the opening moments of NPS 25, Malkia helped us name what time it is — and what narrative power demands of us in this moment. “Authoritarians win through the politics of isolation. Our job is to build belonging.”
On May 8, 2025, as the doors opened at Narrative Power Summit 2025 in New Orleans, writer, strategist, and ReFrame board member Malkia Devich-Cyril opened our first plenary with deep fire and clarity.
In a time of disinformation, fear, and growing repression, Malkia invited us to see narrative not only as a defense against authoritarianism — but as a pathway forward. Their remarks grounded us in the urgency of the moment and the ancestral wisdom needed to navigate it. They reminded us that grief is not weakness — it’s a unifier. It’s power.
📖 To see how this speech shaped the rest of the gathering, read the full recap blog here.
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Welcome radical communicators
Welcome narrative strategists
Welcome power builders and cultural workers
Welcome
It's your moment
It's your time.
I was thinking about one of our teachers of cultural strategy, the anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who wrote in Wretched of the Earth:
“Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.”
To discover our mission, right, I think we have to begin with an accurate assessment of conditions.
I've been thinking about how we are living inside the largest global shift since World War II.
The drivers are many — from healthcare and housing to education and employment — our people's needs are just not being met.
We see identities of belonging being forged by racial and ethnic nationalist movements rather than democratic, reconstructive freedom movements.
We see the interconnected rise of gender essentialism and religious fundamentalism as vehicles for conservatism and control.
And we see the failure of bourgeois democracy increasing the appetite for autocracy and monarchy.
In this context, our movements are under attack. Faith in democracy has weakened. Base building has all but been abandoned.
In this context, narrative strategies and power seem rudderless, weak, almost ineffectual.
Authoritarianism is rising — but so are we.
A way is ending, and a way is being born.
It’s inside of this dialectic between history and future that our present narrative moment is being shaped.
Italian communist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci spoke of that dangerous time between stable governments when many things are possible — from mass loss to mass liberation, from authoritarianism to agency and action, from fascism to new forms of freedom.
This period of collapse and rebirth is characteristic of late-stage capitalism.
But while change is inevitable, the vector and velocity of change will be defined by our actions.
We will determine the direction of the future.
My friend and comrade Jen Soriano just spoke of the need for solidarity narratives — for bridges strong enough to bind, strong enough to block fascism, strong enough to build a new freedom.
James Baldwin has something to say about that in his book No Name in the Street:
“All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie — the lie of their pretended humanism… this means that their history has no moral justification… and that the West has no moral authority.”
Baldwin said America prospered. This prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, Baldwin says, even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are unable to endure these benefits.
He said they can neither understand them nor do without them. Baldwin said:
“Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims or subjects for this way of life. And so they cannot afford to know why their victims are revolting.”
This is the formula for a nation or kingdom in decline.
No kingdom can maintain itself by force alone.
Force does not work the way its advocates think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary. On the contrary — it reveals the weakness, even the panic, of the adversary.
And this revelation invests the victim with passion.
They want us to be afraid.
They want to invest in us weakness.
They think their actions will paralyze us.
Instead, their violence invests us with passion.
The neo-reactionaries, the neo-conservatives, the oligarchs — they are all consolidating under the MAGA banner to force a national decline and insurrection, a corporate kingdom.
They are using nationalism, including Black nationalism, to wedge Black communities from immigrant communities. This increases right-wing power to roll back civil rights enforcement and redefine citizenship back to pre-1850s definitions of citizen and slave.
But we know something too.
Black people in America have always been — and continue to be — a conjunctive motive force for democracy, peace and justice.
We must counter the nationalism and isolationism that has narrowed Black self-interest. We must build a new belonging for Black people in 21st-century social movements and democracies.
The narrative question is:
How do we re-inspire Black people to believe in — and engage in — organized liberation fights in this time, after neoliberalism has mainlined individualism for decades?
The organizing question is:
What infrastructure can actually absorb these hundreds of thousands of disaffected and disenfranchised people?
How can Black communities understand deportation in the context of the Fugitive Slave Act, rather than as a solution to the limits of Black citizenship?
The right is rising — but so are we.
They are wedging transgender and cisgender people.
Able-bodied and disabled people.
They’re targeting our bodies — through bathroom bans, abortion bans, sports bans, book bans.
But while they are playing their games, we know this: they have no narrative plan for climate disaster.
This is their narrative weakness — and our opportunity.
We can build belonging through our shared experience of loss.
Our narrative strategies must persuade a divestment from patriarchy and an investment in economic redistribution.
What narrative strategies connect these issues — and shift us from a moral argument about sex and gender to a moral argument about wealth and fairness?
The right is rising — but so are we.
They’re trying to wedge the Left from the Liberal. They’re criminalizing the movement for Palestinian sovereignty. Decimating our nonprofit infrastructure. Recalling our elected officials. Withholding resources from our tributaries and higher education.
But we know this moment is an interregnum. It is not full fascist capture.
There is room for our victory.
We understand that the narrative strategy gap is actually a capacity gap. And it’s one we can close.
That the cultural gap is actually an organizing gap. And it’s one we can close.
There is no narrative strategy without organizing — and vice versa.
We can recapture higher education, federal institutions, public schools, civil infrastructure.
Because while we’re being called to protect aspects of bourgeois democracy — we can meet that charge by transforming our base from audiences into agents of change.
Invested with passion.
Guided by strategy.
Grounded in solidarity.
The right is rising — but so are we.
Theirs is a death cult. We believe in living.
They invest in our mass loss.
We radicalize our people at the site of loss.
They dismiss and disenfranchise our grief.
We know collective grief is a powerful unifier — that grief itself is a narrative path to power. A strategy of mutual interest and common benefit.
Grief is a solidarity strategy.
Our mission, family — if we choose to accept it — is to rebuild the narrative strategy of solidarity out of our collective grief.
We know no faction can go it alone.
Solidarity narratives are the ones that will help us win.
Wherever there’s a wedge, we will build a bridge.
Wherever the right has built a bridge, we will build a wedge.
Our message:
There is enough.
There is room.
We can win.
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📺 Watch the full video on Vimeo
📖 Read the full recap blog here
Building Narrative Bridges, Defying Wedges Opening Remarks from Jen Soriano at Narrative Power Summit 2025 On May 8, 2025, in the opening plenary of the Narrative Power Summit, writer, organizer, and ReFrame co-founder and board member Jen Soriano issued a powerful call: build bridges wherever the right tries to drive wedges.
Building Narrative Bridges, Defying Wedges
Opening Remarks from Jen Soriano at Narrative Power Summit 2025
Watch the video
On May 8, 2025, in the opening plenary of the Narrative Power Summit, writer, organizer, and ReFrame co-founder and board member Jen Soriano issued a powerful call: build bridges wherever the right tries to drive wedges.
Jen is a longtime movement strategist and a core voice in the lineage of justice communications — her work spans public health, investigative journalism, narrative strategy, and cross-racial solidarity building. Her recent book Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing was named a best nonfiction book of 2023 by Electric Lit and Kirkus Reviews.
In this opening, she grounded the Summit in what it means to move from narrative advocacy to narrative movement building, anchoring our work in collective identity, shared struggle, and transformational solidarity.
📖 To see how this charge shaped the rest of the Summit, read the full recap blog here.
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Mabuhay.
Some of you know that that means welcome, and it also means long live. And it also is an imperative — it means you better live. Mabuhay.
That's a Tagalog expression that many organizers use to invite people in. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you all about today as a way to set up everything that’s to come — inviting people in, and using our work as a tool for building narrative solidarity.
Some of y’all are familiar with the block and build strategy. It’s a framework to meet this moment that’s been developed by Convergence, Rising Majority, Working Families Party and some other organizations.
And essentially, the idea is: we have to both block fascism at every moment and in every form. And we have to build. We have to build, particularly deeply among different communities, to be able to have the power to move beyond this moment.
So narrative has a role — it has an imperative — in both of those pieces of the strategy.
In blocking fascism, we need to amplify all the stories of resistance. We need to get better at propaganda.
But also in building — and that’s the part I want to lean into. And you’re going to hear some examples of this type of narrative solidarity building, I think, after Malkia and I talk.
We are radical communicators. We’re narrative workers. We’re ReFramers. We’re orators, griots, futurists.
And we’re also, in this moment, called to be bricklayers.
Because we’ve seen what happens when narratives are used as weapons. Narratives can be murder.
But they can also be mortar — to bring communities and issues together.
And we need this, because while Trump takes a chisel to wedge everyone who is not a billionaire, we must take our tools to lay bricks.
To build bridges. And to defy every wedge.
Rather than helping Trump with our own little chisels — we do this too often — and we wedge against ourselves.
We can use our tools to transcend every wedge. And we must, if we hope to build the power to resist fascism — but come out the other side with the foundations of transformation.
And I think this is what it means to live in this moment. And to go beyond narrative advocacy to narrative movement building.
And a key component of narrative movement building is narrative solidarity building.
So on top of our advocacy narratives that are issue-specific, we can build another layer of movement narratives that bridge audiences and communities and issues that might otherwise be left on opposite shores or in separate silos.
So that we can have our narratives meet the reality that Audre Lorde has talked about — which is that none of us lives single-issue lives.
And the measurement of change here is not the language people use to talk about a specific issue.
The measurement of change is: how much closer do we get to mass solidarity?
Because, as Malkia is going to talk more about, solidarity is not an idea.
It’s an action that emerges from:
But we need to build those collective pieces.
And narrative can help contribute to that.
So before I pass it off to Malkia, I’m going to leave you all with a few questions.
To build bridges toward narrative solidarity — which can then lead to solidarity power:
All of this helps build protagonism among those who may feel powerless.
And Makani Themba has said that, in this moment, our narratives maybe should be less about enacting persuasion, and more about building protagonism — to combat the victimization, fear, isolation, and paralysis of fascism.
So meeting this moment is something I think we all can do as narrative strategists — so that we can play a role in moving from “there is no alternative to this fascist slide” to:
We are the alternatives.
So I want to wish everybody a very productive — a very disruptive to fascism — conference.
A very generative and building few days.
And I want to wish everybody:
Mabuhay at Isulong.
Onward.
📺 Watch Jen’s full remarks here
📖 Read the full NPS 25 recap
Nearly 700 movement leaders gathered for Narrative Power Summit 2025 — in New Orleans and online — to build narrative infrastructure, sharpen strategy, and hold space for joy, rage, and resistance. This is what we built together, and where we’re going next.
Nearly 700 movement leaders, organizers, strategists, artists, cultural workers and storytellers came together for Narrative Power Summit 2025, co-hosted by ReFrame and the Radical Communicators Network, in Tremé, New Orleans and online across the globe. Together, we wrestled with the questions we’ve all been carrying: Not just what if we win, but how do we prepare when we win? What if narrative isn’t just reactive, but revolutionary? What does it take to build narrative infrastructure that holds under pressure, especially in the face of rising authoritarianism?
From the big screen of the main ballroom, ReFrame board members and longtime movement leaders Malkia Devich-Cyril and Jen Soriano grounded us in the work ahead. As Malkia reminded us:
“Authoritarians win through the politics of isolation, and our job is to build belonging.” — Malkia Devich-Cyril
Jen followed with the charge:
“The right wins by driving wedges between us. Our task is to build the bridges that keep us connected — through story, through strategy, through struggle.” — Jen Soriano
Their reflections draw from a deep lineage of justice communications — one that recognizes narrative not as a tactic but as infrastructure for organizing, campaigning and cultural transformation.
We showed up with open hearts and sharpened minds. From the first drumbeat to the final mic drop, it was clear: this wasn’t just another conference. This was a pulse check for our movements.
We began with a cultural grounding from the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, a living tradition of resistance, beauty and survival. Local historian Cierra Chenier reminded us that, "Black New Orleans will be free." Wendi Moore O’Neal and local frontline organizers including Sara Gozalo, Tamia Cenance, Renée Slajda and Amber Walker shared narrative interventions rooted in deep practice of community organizing and cultural resistance. Hermelinda Cortés closed the opening with a charge to the room:
"Narrative power must be principled, strategic and collective. The charge at hand is not just resisting power but preparing to win it. Narrative is a team sport. It’s time for us to coalesce, to be greater than the sum of our parts.” — hermelinda cortès, ReFrame
To read her full opening remarks, click here.
Over the next three days, we moved through dozens of sessions, from narrative design labs to strategy clinics on climate, abortion, AI and antifascism. Some spaces held stillness. Others sparked action. But three themes came up again and again:
“Each session felt like an intervention in the best way. Powerful, clear and rooted in movement.” — Samy Nemir Olivares, Narrative Power Summit 2025 Attendee, In Person
The virtual summit brought the same energy. Attendees built the vibe with playlists, chat love, screen takeovers and real-time organizing. Film screenings, keynotes and workshops came alive onscreen. Many called it the best virtual convening they had ever attended.
“It felt like a family reunion. I laughed, I cried, I built strategy. The virtual space made me feel just as seen and heard as if I were in the room.” — Lourdes Rivas, Narrative Power Summit 2025 Attendee, Virtual
Even folks tuning in from their kitchens or phones felt the NPS-heat. Our virtual fam didn’t just log on, they showed up, dropped wisdom and built community. If you think a chat box can’t be lit, you are mistaken.
Friday night, we turned up. ReFrame’s 10-Year Turn Up kicked off our yearlong anniversary celebration for ten years of building narrative power. We packed Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club in the Tremé with movement family and DJ Rakimbeau kept the dance floor moving. The Original Pinettes, New Orleans’ legendary all-women brass band, lit it up.
It wasn’t just a party. It was a declaration. Joy is strategy. Culture is infrastructure. The room smelled like sweat and sequins. We danced to our own beat, laughed too loud and remembered why we fight for narrative power. The joy was earned. The rhythm was resistance.
Our people are worth celebrating. Since 2015, ReFrame has trained, supported and collaborated with thousands of organizers, creatives and communications strategists. We’re proud of the work and we’re just getting started.
“The sessions were deeply transformative. Every element felt crafted with political care.” — Rukia Lumumba, Narrative Power Summit 2025 Attendee, In Person
Saturday closed with a rapid-fire block of Ignite Talks. Movement builders offered bold, urgent reflections on trans liberation, worker power, reproductive justice, housing, abolition and economic transformation. The format moved fast. Every speaker brought clarity and imagination.
“At some point I forgot I was attending from my laptop. The energy, the facilitation, the culture — everything made me feel like I was right there.” — Sarah Soto, Narrative Power Summit 2025 Attendee, Virtual
After the round of impressive ignite talks, RadComms’ Shanelle Matthews took the mic and brought us home with the kind of clarity that cuts through the noise. She reminded us that narrative isn’t just a tool we use when things fall apart. It’s how we shape what comes next.
“The future isn’t just something that’s happening to us. It’s something we are narrating into existence. The empire will try to write the ending — and why we are here is to make sure they do not get the last word.” — Shanelle Matthews, RadComms
You could feel the shift in the room. Heads nodding. People grabbing their notebooks. That wasn’t just a closing line. It was a charge. For us to pick up the pen, claim the story and build narrative power to win.
This summit launched the next chapter of our work, alongside Radical Communicators and other power builders. In June, we’ll kick off 100 Days of Narrative in Atlanta, a coordinated space for narrative strategy, networked infrastructure and campaign support aimed at what our movements need now to push back the authoritarian threats facing all of us.
100 days of Narrative is part of a larger push – a cross-movement effort to build coherence and drive strategic narrative action. Want in? Sign up here: bit.ly/100daysofnarrative
We closed the space knowing the terrain is shifting but so are we. We’ve got imagination and vision, compelling strategies, a decade of movement narrative power building, and we’ve got each other - a robust network of leaders positioned and ready to answer the charge of this time.
To the facilitators, co-dreamers, tech wizards, cultural workers, funders who get it, and every single person who helped hold this thing down — you have our unending gratitude.
To the people of the 64 parishes of Bulbancha, or what we call New Orleans: thank you for hosting us with deep hospitality and stewardship. We thank you.
Endless gratitude to our movement partners at the Radical Communicators Network for your radness, your throw-down spirit, and for co-holding this powerful space with us. Here's to continuing to build the bench, the infrastructure, and everything our movements need — today and until we all win. We left recharged and recommitted to this work, and we hope you will join us for our next sets of offerings, including the Narrative Nerve Center, ReFrame’s virtual Academy October 20th - 24th, Spanish-language narrative training, and more.
Nos Vemos
— Team ReFrame
Special thank you to Red Feather Films and Green Tangerine Photography
