Center for Story-based Strategy partners with organizations on the frontlines to invest resources in and build capacity of grassroots vision and leadership
Our partnerships aim to increase your capacity for creative work and visionary strategy, as well as for our organizations to learn and grow together. We learn a lot from our partners, and we believe this two-way flow is part of building a more powerful movement for justice and liberation.
You are not the client, nor we the consultant.
We believe that change moves at the speed of trust, so we design participatory processes with our partners, and prioritize trust as the foundation for our collaboration. Our role at CSS is to help you build the skills, instincts and culture to integrate story and lived experience as the foundation of your social change strategy.
We offer a methodology, facilitated processes, and capacity-building convenings that cultivate radical imagination and build your teams’ skills and instincts for developing strategic and tactical interventions — words and actions combined — that move your narratives forward.
We engage in both limited Project-based Partnerships as well as longer-term Strategic Partnerships. We co-create with partners based on a combination of factors, including shared values and vision, availability of our trainers, timing with our overall work, and alignment with our Theory of Change.
Foundational Analysis
Using our participatory process, your group will assess its own work in the context of the current narrative terrain, landscape of opposing narratives, and the key underlying assumptions at work in the battle of the story on your issue.
Outcomes:
An understanding of story-based strategy
A preliminary assessment of your project’s narrative, and how — intentionally and unintentionally — it is being created via the stories you tell and actions you take
Core
Strategy
Cultivate radical imagination by implementing story-based strategy in your work. Tell a new story that can break through systemic assumptions rather than be constrained by them. Match the scale of your narrative to your organizing strategy, and learn how neither can be handled alone.
Outcomes:
An in-depth analysis of your organization’s narrative position in relation to opposing narratives
An understanding of how to create practice spaces that lead to the generation of strategic insights and prototypes
Integration
& Implementation
Integrating story-based strategy with your organizing practice and team culture. Integrate play, experimentation and iteration into your social change work. Build narrative power throughout your work. Connect personal stories to your organizational narrative and connect your organizational narrative to the movement narrative.
Outcomes:
Organizational practices that promote ongoing strategic narrative thinking
Prototypes and ideas for actions and narrative interventions
Inclusion of cultural producers in your community or from our CSS network
Coaching and consultation for implementing your ideas
What to expect in partnering with CSS
Capacity-building convenings to provide a foundational understanding of narrative analysis and strategy, and build story-based strategy into your movement culture.
Strategy sessions to build your narrative strategy based on that foundation.
On-going consultation in-person or virtually to support the implementation of that narrative strategy.
You will work with our Practitioner-Trainer network of seasoned movement-based strategists who are active in power-building work on issues across North America.
How to integrate cultural workers and producers into the development and implementation of your strategy.
A long-haul orientation. We work with you to meet your big dreams and goals, supporting urgent fights and high-impact interventions in the short term while working to achieve narrative shift over time.
At the intersections of power & possibility
The biggest insights and opportunities present themselves when we gather outside our silos at the intersections of power and possibility.
CSS works with organizers, communicators and creative producers. And artists, funders, programmers, dreamers, and policy wonks. Our work reaches far beyond storytelling and communications – it’s the work of building alignment and understanding across identity and experience, creating shared analysis between movement sectors, finding common cause between issues, and building shared narratives that get us closer to the abundant, intersectional, and just futures we need.
Does your social change work defy categorization? Let’s talk!
Our combined imagination is the only limit! Our work with Partners often takes us both to places we didn’t expect at the beginning of the journey. Past Partnerships have led to many things. New creative tools. New narrative insights. Customized curricula for specific communities. Joint storytelling projects. Videos. Games.
Have a challenge that you think story-based strategy might help solve? Let’s talk!
We have this idea … can CSS work
with us?
What’s it like to work with CSS?
“CSS has taken the time to work deeply and widely throughout our diverse network, always checking to ensure members are well informed and actively participating in the process. CSS does not work top-down but instead supports our staff to co-create opportunities for our network to increase their capacity to imagine and create a new story of the economy, one that is grounded in justice. The result for our network has been a more cohesive group identity, an active practice to “show don’t tell” our strategic analysis, and a growing appetite to stretch and take bolder risks together.”