The CSS Blog

This short video features affirmations and personal stories of how CSS has impacted people and social justice campaigns all over the world through story-based strategy practice, radical imagination, culture and more!

We are proud to be in struggle with so many bold and creative movement organizations. These are groups building power at every scale, from frontline community organizations to national coalitions, united by a common purpose to lift up the expertise and leadership of the most-impacted and changing the story of possibility for justice and liberation. We are looking forward to the coming year of deep reflection, creative interventions, and grassroots movement power-building!

When the well runs dry, where do creative people go to hydrate? What kinds of spaces exist or could be cultivated for artists to be their full selves in movement organizations or at their jobs? Campaigns and organizations often demand creativity to be delivered within the constraints of political messaging, time frames and marketing and campaign plans.

Participants in the 2021 Advanced Practitioner’s Training closed the week by composing a “This is the Year” poem together….

CSS encouraged me to use my radical imagination and shift the narrative. As I pondered the strip mall event I thought about my community burning down and realized the stories of hardship, loss, and pain are usually the stories we remember to tell. This storytelling exercise helped me to embrace the story I had forgotten to remember.

THE FUTURE IS US, with possibilities as abundant as the dreams of our ancestors and our hopes for our children. The senselessness of our now is giving way to a collective stirring, the conviction that there is a better way — that abundance, health, justice, love and belonging are things we can grow in this world by our own hands.

Nominations are open! This year's edition of Top Memes will focus on narrative interventions for democracy. What images, messages, actions or other containers of meaning are our movements using to expand and champion "rule by the people"?

The practice of land acknowledgements is a well-intended attempt by non-indigenous organizations to address a broken collective relationship with history, the erasure of genocide and colonization, and alienation from the land upon which human life depends. And, the most well-intended narrative interventions can still be bent to the will and need of domination and power-over.

The defense of “Black Life” necessitates the valuing of Black Lives AND Blackness in all its forms, shifting the problem towards “the WAR on Black people.” And this moment of the twin pandemics of “COVID” and “police violence” further reveals that “stop killing Black people” is about way more than police accountability.

“This is the year our babies stop playing with police cars and instead use their hands to plant seeds 🌱.” Participants in the 2020 Advanced Practitioner’s Training closed the week together by composing a “This is the Year” poem. Here it is.

As we decided to shift the Advanced Training (AT), our regular offering to our movement communities, to online, we wanted to lean into the visionary opportunities. We mourned the loss of all the in-person parts of the training and then moved into radical imagination.

Once upon a time a group of strangers sat together in a dimly lit room to share stories, struggles and heartbeats. After a week of spending more time listening than speaking, all these amazing folks came to the realization that they were not really strangers but just friends who hadn’t met yet...

Free tools available now to boost your imagination! Step into #the4thBox in a game on your phone, in an online course, and with downloadable PDF tools. We're making these resources free to our movement community to better support our ability to dream big in this critical moment. We can only go where we’ve first imagined.

As a queer women of color led organization, we know that frontline leadership looks different for each issue and in each place. We acknowledge the expertise — and look to the leadership of — those who have already been coming together to survive, that is: organizing in the current economy that invisibilizes and ignores them

“I picked up Pleasure Activism because I’ve long been a fan of and been a learner from adrienne’s writing - and was really curious about the book because so many people were talking about it, especially at this past year’s CSS Advanced Practitioners’ Training. I was also drawn to it because I’ve long been interested in how we stay in movement work for the long haul given the enormous and intensifying political conditions we live in.”