On day one of Narrative Power Summit 2025, ReFrame Executive Director hermelinda cortés opened with a charge to the field — a grounding in grief, strategy, and the responsibility of narrative work in a time of rising authoritarianism.
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How key strategists built narrative power in 2020 during a global pandemic, the rise of the largest demonstrations for racial justice in US history, the highest rate of voter turnout and a significant defeat of Trumpism at the polls.
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.
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:
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. Powerful tools to push back while continuing to advance our work for justice
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.
We are organizing and telling stories on an uneven playing field, where the underlying narratives have long been shaped by highly conservative forces. This is the playing field on which mis-and-disinformation is spreading. So how do we combat it?
At ReFrame, we envision a world where marginalized communities have the power to shape meaning and material conditions toward justice. To get there, we first need to understand that the terrain on which we’re operating is stacked against us. We are organizing and telling stories on an uneven playing field, where the underlying narratives have long been shaped by a vast and resourced network of highly conservative forces. While narratives are never static and are always up for contention, conservative narratives of racism, sexism and homophobia have been built into the functioning of society and continue to undergird many systems and institutions today.
This is the playing field on which disinformation and misinformation is spreading. Disinfo and misinfo spread because the content invokes narratives that feel like common sense to certain audiences, including anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and red-baiting. 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.
So how do we combat disinformation and misinformation? The same way we work to even the playing field and shape meaning and conditions toward justice for the long term. By moving strategically to control the debate, and by building social power for the long term.
Another way to talk about social power is narrative power. At ReFrame, we define
narrative as a collection of related stories that are articulated and refined over time to represent a central idea or belief.1 We must build the power we need to have our narratives matter– narratives that advance racial, economic, gender, and climate justice. The more our narratives build influence and traction, the more we even the playing field toward justice, and the more we change conditions to even this playing field, the more our narratives can matter. As we respond to disinformation and misinformation, it’s our job to start seeding counter narratives that innoculate against disinformation by creating a a new common sense where racist, sexist and homophobic values have no place, and therefore little cognitive traction through which to spread.
We’ve known for years that our opponents lie and manipulate people to maintain and consolidate power. They’ve used advertisements in news media, made deceitful phone calls to voters, and posted anonymous and misdirecting flyers in shops. What’s different is that the digital realm, a realm in which we make meaning and sense of the world and connect with people, has created the opportunity for a wider range of bad actors to spread disinfo, and has allowed for more varied and targeted ways for it to be spread. That is exactly what’s happening today, and it is contributing to a sense of chaos that can feed into mounting fascism, unless we launch an increasingly coordinated movement response.
Tracking, combatting, and neutralizing disinformation isn’t separate from our narrative power-building approaches as organizers and advocates. Instead, we see it as something we should integrate into the work we’re already doing — print and social media scanning, 1:1 conversations on the doors and on the phones, the ways we communicate with our bases and our members, and how we organize and work with journalists and digital platforms. That said, we also need to combine forces with others who are doing larger platform accountability campaigns, journalist education and organizing, and building networks of trusted messengers, disruptors and meaning makers across all sectors of society (see our Movement Framework for Disinformation Response).
It’s going to take more than a pithy tweet that goes viral to neutralize disinformation and seed the narratives that we want to be common sense, although it might help from time to time. We don’t have to choose to strategically respond to disinformation or spend our time building narrative power – to try to prioritize one or the other. In these times and in the fights we are in for our lives and the lives of people we love and care about, we can and need to do both.
Let’s build power, fight lies and fascism, and win the world we long for.
Stay tuned for our Disinfo Defense Toolkit, co-curated with PEN America coming soon!
1: This definition was developed by Narrative Initiative in conversation with 100 strategists, as outlined in their paper Towards a New Gravity
2: The concept of the internet as the “digital realm” comes to us from Kairos, from their Medium post, Building Power Online
Exploring the narrative weather of Covid-19. The Rona Report is a project of ReFrame and Solea Signals. COVID time is confusing. It can feel like light speed and sloth slow all at once.
Exploring the narrative weather of Covid-19. The Rona Report is a project of ReFrame and Solea Signals.
COVID time is confusing. It can feel like light speed and sloth slow all at once. The same goes for public debate at this time; trending concepts like “flatten the curve” and “Grandma Killer” can appear and disappear within days and weeks, while narratives that we’d like to see disappear, like “Yellow Peril” and “Government as freedom-killer,” threaten to become further entrenched.
Navigating the dynamics of this narrative space is no easy task when we’re putting out the fires and running from crisis to crisis. The Rona Report is here to help those of us who don’t have time to find the signal in the noise. We’re drawing out trends and analyzing them to offer you possibilities to leverage them toward big change.
This week, in our inaugural Rona Report (see endnote for research methods), we’re exploring narrative weather trends from the past three months around Covid-19, the economy and workers.
Want to make sure you receive future Rona Reports and other nerdy behind-the-scenes-banter about building a narrative weather station? If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up here.
In 1992 political strategist James Carville declared, “The economy, stupid.” This became a core message for Bill Clinton’s winning campaign against George H.W. Bush. The message became a mantra, and “the economy” became a primary driver of U.S. narrative in modern times. This is no different under Covid-19.
When looking at the conversation about the economy during Covid-19, two primary trends emerge: the Trump Economy and the Covid Economy.
Amidst these two trends, we wondered how social movement reframing of the economy compared. We explored the popularity of Solidarity Economy and Care Economy.
Hot Takes
With 33+ million people in the United States laid off, furloughed and out of paid work, there is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the conversation about jobs, labor, workers, wages, and the role of the government in relationship to protecting workers and regulating corporations and the economy.
While we are all in this together, historic and present day systemic racism means that Black people, Native people, Latinx people and some segments of Asian-American communities are getting sick and dying at far higher rates than white people. There are many reasons for these disparities, and one of them is that it is people of color, and often women of color, who are disproportionately exposed to the virus because they hold down frontline jobs.
In this context, it’s of course more important than ever to fight for workers’ rights. But just as everything in the rest of the world has changed, the way we demand these protections also has to change.
Similar to the economy search, the popularity volume trend of Workers Rights has erratic peaks and valleys but overall the pattern is steady. By the middle of March we see the emergence of Essential Workers as a core trend with significant volume increase over workers rights.
When we explore unemployment in comparison to workers rights and essential workers, we can see that the peaks and valleys of essential workers and unemployment are similar but the volume of unemployment is much higher.
Taking it a step further we begin searching for the patterns in search popularity around demands coming from individuals, communities and organizations in response to the economic crises under Covid-19 including hazard pay, paycheck protection, and unemployment benefits.
While we searched for several variations of PPE for workers, the volume is negligible in relationship to wages and salary for workers. Finally, we explored other demands in relationships to unemployment benefits and the CARES Act (which included paycheck protections for some). These included canceling rent, student loan forgiveness, and the people’s bailout.
Hot Takes
Narrative is a process and not a product. If we are trying to influence common sense, then we have to crack open space so that new meaning can be made to fuel the breakdown of trust in some narratives while establishing confidence and hope in others. We can do this by seeding doubt and seeding vision. This is not a linear process, it is a dance. Here are some possible steps in this dance:
Endnote – Research Methods
This report uses a combination of Google Trends analytics and “small listening” or content analysis done by our Signals team at ReFrame. Google Trends analyzes “a sample of data based on Google web searches to determine how many searches were done over a period of time.” The results are a 50,000 foot view of search term popularity over time. While we are not looking at absolute volume, we can get a sense of the movement of a conversation or set of conversations across time and in comparison to each other. While the data from Google is imperfect, and partial as all data is, it is free and can be a useful tool for foraying into the world of big listening. Future Rona Reports will combine big listening, Google Trends and human-powered small listening.
At ReFrame, drawing from our experiences inside of other crisis moments, two of the tools we’ve been using to coordinate our team in the time of COVID-19 is individual and organizational threat modeling & SWOT planning.
At ReFrame, drawing from our experiences inside of other crisis moments, two of the tools we’ve been using to coordinate our team in the time of COVID-19 is individual and organizational threat modeling & SWOT planning.
Threat Modeling
Threat modeling is a practice to prepare individuals and organizations in the event of threat – like the COVID-19 pandemic – and identifying ways to mitigate or lessen the impact of the threat, or eliminate the impact all together.
We use a five-step exercise to build our threat model.
1. Identify the Threat
This is the crucial first step. A threat is something that has happened, is happening or you can with some level of certainty assume will happen. If we don’t know what we’re up against, we can’t plan to lessen or eliminate the impact of it. For multiple threats, create multiple threat models.
2. Name the Impact Areas
Impact areas are a thing, a person or persons, or an activity that will be negatively affected by the threat. If we can assess where the threat will have a negative impact, then we have a better sense of where to focus our efforts.
3. Think through the Potential Outcomes
Potential Outcomes are what you think will happen to the impact areas if the threat succeeds. This can address both the direct and indirect results from the threat’s success. If we can think through possible outcomes, we can think of possible actions to either lessen the effect of the threat or eliminate the effect of the threat all together.
4. Action Planning: Mitigation
These are the actions you can take to lessen the effect of the threat on the impact area. This does not mean that you have mitigated the threat in and of itself, but rather the impact on a particular person, place, thing or action/activity. There are different actions for different risk levels as individuals and collectives, and it’s good to map those out if you can.
5. Action Planning: Elimination
These are the actions you can take to eliminate the threat. This does not imply that the threat is eliminated, but rather it means that the impact of the threat is eliminated.
We have a Google Slide template for threat modeling, a linear approach through the five steps.
Another idea is to create a flowchart like this.
Last, but not least, inside of crisis moments things are always changing. One design process we like to help us adapt our threat models to shifting conditions is called PAI: Postulate, Assess, Iterate. It means that as we do our threat model, we ask questions and brainstorm. After completing it, we assess it with ourselves and those we work with and care about. After we assess it, we then iterate or develop it further to respond to the assessment.
Identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT)
Another tool we used as an organization is called SWOT, a tool that helps us identify our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. To further develop your strategic action plan use the SWOT template we’ve developed to help you answer strategic questions that will assess the strengths, tools, and resources at hand.
In addition to looking at the organizational level, we added an extra layer on it to look at the movement ecosystem your organization is a part of as well.
