ReFrame teamed up with @northwesthealth on a six-month program to support organizations in Pacific Northwest to build narrative power. Leaders in this cohort are trained to leverage stories that disrupt the narratives driving inequality and to seed a new common sense. Click here to read more.

This May Day we’re releasing Rona Report 2.0, a comparative narrative analysis of the inaugural Rona Report we released a year ago where we explored narrative trends, content, messages and stories around the economy, jobs and workers under COVID-19.

Read the full report here!

In an era of pandemic exacerbated by climate chaos and state violence, the ongoing and often unseen collective trauma is still palpable one year since the latest coronavirus made itself known. COVID-19 has uprooted our reality, and at the same time, offers us a chance to reimagine what our world can look like if we adopt values of care, interdependence, and social solidarity.

We believe the moment is ripe to continue reshaping narratives to imbue new meaning that projects and creates the world we want for the next seven generations.

We are all witnessing firsthand how the pandemic is cracking open narratives about the economy and workers in new ways. Over the last year, we developed and iterated upon our analysis from the first report revisiting the narrative landscape at the intersection of the pandemic, the economy and workers.

During that time we saw an enormous response of the collective care we so desperately needed all across the country —  mutual aid and grassroots mobilizations to get friends, family and neighbors the help they needed, a summer of uprisings where millions of people demanded the end to hyper militarized racist policing, and an election that was won by the sweat equity of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous organizers in battleground states.

At the same time, we saw the opposition respond in earnest through widespread voter suppression and intimidation tactics and a riot at the Capitol, which was born out of authoritarian policies and inhumane actions propagated by the right wing over the last four years. Within this context, chaos agents and unwitting participants have pumped an exorbitant amount of racialized and gendered misinformation and disinformation into the media ecosystem, further destabilizing public discourse. Indeed, we are living in difficult yet transformative times.

The Rona Report: One Year On identifies dominant, emerging and enduring narratives that have shaped the landscape between May 2020 and April 2021. Within this iteration of the Rona Report, you will find in-depth narrative insights and trends as they relate to the economy and workers. You’ll also find key narrative networks and influencers, narrative threats (including the ever present strains of disinformation and misinformation), narrative openings and concrete action steps to mitigate the risks we are to face.

Read the full download on narrative openings, threats, and actions here!

For many of us, the pre-pandemic ‘normal’  was a crisis in and of itself.

The Trump administration’s inaction had a devastating effect on all of us, especially those of us who live at the intersections of being poor and working class, trans and queer, incarcerated and undocumented, disabled and at the throws of white supremacy and nationalism. This state sanctioned, criminal negligence resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our friends, family, neighbors, and members of our global community.

As we move from red bar graphs highlighting the waves of sickness and death across the United States to the race for herd immunity under a new administration, many of us hold the deep desire to be free of the pandemic and restabilize our lives, and the narrative landscape reflects this desire and the shift in our attitudes about the economy, jobs, and workers over the last year.

COVID-19 has created a dynamic narrative space.

There is a robust set of narrative openings to leverage the current moment and shift narratives around COVID-19 and beyond.

• We have an opportunity right now to redefine the role of government and build governance that prioritizes people, not profits. Conversations around Big Tech and big business also suggest a narrative opening to move the needle on the role the government plays in meeting peoples’ basic needs. The lack of public internet infrastructure and the digital divide,  #FreeTheVaccine conversations, democracy and voting, and the forthcoming national infrastructure bill provide opportunities to expand the notion of what is priceless and what resources should be held by the public.
• Amplify and drive conversations that center workers. Make connections across industries. COVID-19 has left a big crack in the conversation about the economy. While productivity and growth are still primary drivers, we have seen the reemergence of #RaisetheWage, and support of unions and an expansion of the social safety net in 2021.
• While we need to tell a clear story about where we’ve been, the crisis moment we’ve arrived at, and where we’re headed, a focus on criticism can often depress action. The harms caused by capitalism, racism, and patriarchy need to be balanced with a clear vision. Project an aspirational vision of the future that speaks to peoples’ material conditions — weariness, exhaustion, and hanging on — and underscores that change is possible. Stitch stories together about mutual aid, creative governance, and people-centered economies that have come out of the pandemic and draw on rich histories. Regularly connect the dots between these disparate stories to weave  a bigger narrative on transformative and just governance.
  

Read more about how we identified these opportunities in the full report!

In the coming weeks, we’ll bring you opportunities to connect with us on the narrative research and action steps from Rona Report 2.0 and share more about how to get connected to our exciting project, Signals In The Noise!

If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up to our mailing list here so you don’t miss a thing.
Can’t wait to get in touch with us? Give us a shout!

As part of our work with the Disinformation Defense League, ReFrame and This is Signals has committed to sharing our lessons learned with the field.

One of the main lessons is that we can’t look at disinformation in a vacuum, and instead have to see it as part of the larger fight for narrative power. Read our latest reflections in the Nonprofit Quarterly.

If they speak to you, please share!

As always, we welcome feedback, and to get down with our fight against disinformation and for narrative power, you can donate, sign up for our newsletter and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

CLICK HERE to watch the recording!

2020 is a lot. If we left it at a global pandemic that would be enough, but we’ve also seen the rise of the largest demonstrations for racial justice in US history, the highest rate of voter turnout our country has seen, and a significant defeat of Trumpism at the polls.

This year has been a year of leadership from multi-racial movements and organizations led by Black people and people of color – making Defund The Police a common concept, shifting the electoral map in the country, and building power for the long haul.

We’ve seen on the ground strategists win by leveraging stories and messages that build political power and seed and amplify a new common sense to make hope, justice, and liberation more possible.

Join ReFrame along with our c4 partner, This Is Signals, Wednesday November 18th at 8PM EST (7PM Central / 5PM Pacific) as we host a panel with ReFrame from Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania share their experiences building narrative power in 2020 and their visions for the years ahead.

This LIVE discussion, hosted by Renee’ Mowatt and Ivie Osaghae, will feature these movement leaders:

Abril Gallardo, Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA)

Aimee Castenell, Georgia Working Families Party

Jacob Swenson-Lengyel, PA Stands Up

JaNae’ Bates, ISAIAH & Faith in Minnesota

Watch the event live at the top of this page!

Many who believe in justice are fighting hard for victories at the ballot box. However, our opponents are spreading disinformation that threaten the just future we are all working towards. This disinformation seeks to disrupt trust in accuracy, and rides off of old narratives that have used racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia to target and divide our communities for decades.

Today, this disinformation is spreading at unprecedented rates. If we hope to win narrative battles and shift the cultural terrain, we need to disrupt the disinformation that is affecting our communities the most (think: birtherism, all the varieties of Black/Brown/Asian wedges, blaming racial justice movements for the wildfires and violence caused largely by climate change and white domestic terrorists).

This year, chaos agents, who are interested in sowing discord and division, put some of our movement organizations at the center of conspiracy theories and disinformation attacks, threatening to delegitimize our work, sow distrust among our communities, and suppress our power. Many of us have heard and seen these conspiracy theories and lies littering our newsfeeds, circulating among our members, and maybe even from our Problematic Uncles.

But we can and are fighting back. Defending our communities against disinformation is inseparable from our organizing and integral to winning our fights for justice in this upcoming election and beyond.  And often, the best defense is a strong offense that neutralizes disinfo before it spreads. Let’s start with a few tools that we’ve developed with the Disinformation Defense League for organizers across our movements to deploy RIGHT NOW.

Tools for GOTV & Beyond:

• A new North Star (c3) messaging guide for staying above disinfo chaos and advancing our narratives from ReFrame
• This guide outlines core messaging and scenarios that campaigns can use in conversations with voters and media
• How to NOT Amplify Disinformation infographics – IN SPANISH and English
• These graphics describes how to respond to disinformation online (best practices are often counterintuitive). This is an excellent resource for educating members and anyone who uses social media.
• A How to NOT Amplify video to share with staff, members and member leaders, produced by Kairos and ReFrame.
• The START tool for integrating disinfo monitoring and response into your existing campaigns. This tool, co-developed by Dr. Joan Donovan and ReFrame, has been called the first of its kind in the disinformation field.
• For more juicy resources, check out #DisruptDisinfo and tools like these from MediaJustice‘s Week of Action against Disinformation.

For the FULL Disinfo Defense Toolkit, co-curated by ReFrame and PEN America, click here.

We know the work of making sure our communities aren’t manipulated by disinformation is draining. We must do this work together. That’s why ALL OF US need to equip ourselves, take care of each other, & share the load because defending against disinformation isn’t an extra thing. Right now, our best defense is our organizing, relationships, and our work, but we all know disinformation doesn’t end with the election. For a look at our stance on the long game, check out our blog, “Fighting Disinformation, Building Narrative Power.”

Curated by ReFrame and PEN America for the Disinfo Defense League.

We are facing a storm of disinformation, conspiracy theories, half-truths and lies. But organizers know what’s up.

We just need relevant tools to push back while continuing to advance our work for justice. We understand that while the details of the disinfo might be new, the underlying narratives that make the disinfo believable have been advancing for decades.

These new disinformation streams give emotional urgency to these narratives, often by exploiting fear, and thrive in voids of clear, factual and equally emotional information. As we respond to disinformation and misinformation, it’s our job to start seeding counter narratives that innoculate against disinformation by creating a new common sense where racist, sexist and homophobic values have no place, and therefore little cognitive traction through which to spread (Check out our blog post for more).

This toolkit can help you do this, during this election season and beyond.

Thank you to all who contributed tools and resources to this first edition:

American Press Institute
Claudia Flores-Saviaga
First Draft
Institute for the Future
Dr. Joan Donovan
Kairos
Media Justice
Strategic Victory Fund
The Leadership Conference
Ultraviolet
United We Dream
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Voting Rights Lab
Win Black/Pa’lante
Wisconsin Watch

Note: When you open the toolkit, you can navigate through it by clicking on the page numbers of each tool in the table of contents. Tools that are also online contain external links to those original webpages. These webpage links are marked by blue rectangles (if viewing with Adobe or Preview), hyperlinked, or the actual URL is included.