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As we grow the narrative power ecosystem we need to win we are taking moments to highlight the awesome strategists we get to work with. Talia Gad is a participant in the Northwest Health Foundation Fellowship and we took a few minutes to check-in on how she is doing.
“‘Culture eats policy for lunch’ is a quote that I think about a lot,” says Talia Gad, Communications Director at Partnership for Safety and Justice in Oregon. “If you don’t shift the culture, you can pass all the policies that you want but they won’t necessarily be implemented appropriately. A culture shift must happen whether we pass laws or not… It’s essential.”
As we grow the narrative power ecosystem we need to win we like to highlight the awesome strategists we get to work with. Gad is a participant in the Northwest Health Foundation Fellowship and we took a few minutes to check-in on how she is doing.
Gad enters her work from a public health background and currently spends her time at Partnership for Safety and Justice (PSJ) working to change the way the public safety system is viewed and operated. PSJ is about transforming society’s response to crime and violence in a way that centers accountability, equity and healing. It is the first policy-advocacy organization in the country to take a holistic approach of bringing together folks who are victims of crime, folks who have been convicted of crime and the families of both to address the challenges Oregonians face when dealing with the root of the issue, public safety and the lack and dysfunction in the criminal justice system.
What narratives do you believe are important to lift up in the work you do?
Gad: “One narrative would be that public safety looks different for different people. What our systems put forth as public safety is rooted in systemic racism and punishment, and it just doesn’t offer true public safety for real people, in particular for communities of color. Another is that we cannot solve homelessness, addiction and mental health crises with the carceral system. Those are a couple of the main narratives and narrative frames that we need to rebuild in order to make our public safety system more effective.”
I often think about if we could eliminate barriers in education, housing, healthcare, public health, transportation, and all of these other public services and deliver true healing services for people who seek treatment and other approaches to healing, what then could our public safety system look like? So there's a big prevention component here. There are certainly elements that we are working to get rid of but we really don’t frame our work in terms of what we are trying to deconstruct. We are framing our work in what we are trying to build.”
What are the goals of PSJ and what work are you doing to push towards those goals?
Gad: “PSJ has 3 strategic goals: Invest in local solutions to build up a public safety system that achieves true accountability and healing, shrink the current corrections system that disproportionately harms Black and brown families, and transform people’s expectations and ideas of what the public safety system is supposed to look like.
We are currently testing the way we talk about needed policy reforms and framing them as values that we share. When we view needed policy changes as values that we all want for our own families, and when these values are communicated by the right people, our hope is that we can create a more vivid picture of why we need to eliminate unnecessary barriers and give more people an opportunity to succeed.”
What brings you hope in the work you do and what keeps you inspired?
Gad: “I am really excited about this current wave of the civil rights movement. As a person who has not been systemically impacted by the system, I have to be led by people who have something to say about it. There’s humility in stepping back and making space for the right voices and right stories to be leading the movement and I am deeply influenced by those people. The movement also makes me feel hopeful because folks are taking the time to listen to impacted people, and you can’t unknow those stories. There is a wealth of knowledge and information that people are constantly being exposed to and you can’t unknow things that are now in the water.”
What do other community led organizations need to understand or do better when it comes to narrative and comms work?
Gad: “Stories inspire emotions, stories inspire feelings. If you can make people feel things, you can make them change things. This is the heart of why it's so important to make people feel what the status quo is doing to families and communities and the urgency to rethink what true public safety should look like for communities in Oregon.”
To learn more about the fellowship, check out this blog.
ReFrame and Northwest Health teamed up to train leaders in community organizations in the Pacific Northwest to engage in narrative work to win.
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.
Rona Report 2.0 explores narrative trends, content, messages and stories around the economy, jobs and workers under Covid-19
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.
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.
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!
Disinformation has become more effective at generating chaos and seeding doubt in reality. As part of our work with the Disinformation Defense League, ReFrame and This is Signals have committed to sharing lessons learned with the field and action steps on how to slow the spread of disinformation.
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.
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.”
