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 begin building 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:
- Disrupt reactionary narratives and prevent further authoritarian consolidation
- Seed liberatory stories and campaigns with compelling narratives and clear calls to action and vision
- Coordinate real-time research, storytelling, campaigns, and digital infrastructure
- Align movement leaders, organizers, funders, researchers, creatives, and communicators
- Move from fragmented, siloed work to ecosystem-scale narrative power and collaborative approaches
- Fortify our ecosystem for the narrative playing field we’re on — not the one we wish we had.
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:
- One collaborative visibilized victories in other regions to advance a ballot measure towards affordable statewide housing in Massachusetts
- While Team ReFrame kept a pulse on conversations about militarism, we supported veterans in reframing safety narratives for a national Right to Refuse campaign and in timely responses to the federalization of major cities across the nation
- We witnessed the early stages of a popular education that not only takes its namesake from the slums of Shaolin but also has a clear call to action for working-class Black and brown youth to turn up on billionaires, not on each other.
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.
Join us as we celebrate these organizations, campaigns and more at The ReFramies: Celebrating a Decade of Narrative Impact, on December 11, 2025, at 6 PM ET. This isn't your typical awards ceremony. We're bringing serious fun and reverence to a night that will honor the leaders, organizers and organizations, artists and creatives who are shaping meaning at scale across all areas and modalities within and beyond our movement ecosystem. RSVP here.
This giving season, 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.
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