Cultural and Narrative Strategy
Through culture we imagine and build the world we want to live in.
Through narrative we express the who, the why, and the what we need to get there. Cultural strategy and narrative strategy are just the most recent names for what we’ve been doing since the invention of language to expand our shared imagination of what can be possible.
These resources offer an introduction to thinking about how we change culture and narrative to make a better world.
Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy
The Butterfly Lab was a groundbreaking narrative lab in which we built narrative strategy theory and tools and seeded them to thousands of organizers, activists, and artists. The project was directed at building a world welcoming to migrants, immigrants, and refugees. Our learnings and toolkits are adaptable to designing any kind of work for change in culture and narrative. Click below to download.
Cultural and Narrative Strategy Resources
These important articles and reports will give you a sense of the evolution and breadth of the ideas and practice that have come to be called cultural strategy and narrative strategy.
- “The Creativity Stimulus” – Jeff Chang, The Nation, April 15, 2009
- “Culture Before Politics” – Jeff Chang and Brian Komar, The American Prospect, December 6, 2010
- Making Waves: A Guide to Culture Strategy, The Culture Group, January 2014
- The #PopJustice Reports, Liz Manne, 2016
- Cultural Strategy: An Introduction, Nayantara Sen for Power California, 2017
- Toward New Gravity, The Narrative Initiative, 2017
- Notes on A Cultural Strategy for Belonging, Evan Bissell for Othering & Belonging Institute, 2019
- The Storytellers’ Guide to Changing Our World, Erin Potts and Kirk Cheyfitz, 2020/2022
- Moving Mindsets: A Playbook for Building Momentum, Frameworks Institute, 2021
- Stitch This! Content Creators and Prospects for Social Justice Communications, Spitfire Strategies, 2025
For more resources on narrative strategy and cultural strategy, visit these sites:
- LizManne.com – One of the premier thinkers on narrative and cultural strategy, Liz has written and collected a number of essential reports here.
- Erin Potts at Jumpslide – The co-founder of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts and a germinal artist organizating effort called Revolutions Per Minute, Erin has a number of reports and guides she’s written here on her work here at her website.
- Narrative Change Hub at The Commons Library – a collection of very accessible reports, briefs, how-to’s, and much more from around the world.
Cultural New Deal
Written collectively in 2020 at the height of the pandemic and the surge of justice movements, the Cultural New Deal for Cultural and Racial Justice is a call to build a culture that is inclusive, sustainable, and leads us toward justice and freedom for all.
“We ask ourselves the question: arts and culture for what? We work in culture and the arts because we believe that stories weave together the moral fabric of our societies. We aim to build and sustain our communities, those most impacted by racial and cultural inequity. We believe that art and culture is never separate from the undoing of inequities in health, employment, wealth, detention, incarceration, deportation, housing, and the environment.”
The Call was spearheaded by ArtChangeUS, the Center for Cultural Power, First Peoples Fund, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Race Forward, and Sipp Culture. It was written by Michele Kumi Baer, Jeff Chang, María López De León, Tara Dorabji, Kassandra Khalil, Lori Pourier, Favianna Rodriguez, Nayantara Sen, Carlton Turner, Roberta Uno, and Elizabeth Webb.
Thousands across the country signed on to the Cultural New Deal and immediately incorporated it into their work. The call continues to inspire liberatory work and fire our collective imagination for a better world.
We invite you to download the Cultural New Deal here, circulate it, and use it broadly.
This beautiful and essential anthology, Future/Present: Arts In A Changing America, uplifts the voices of today’s artists and culture bearers, contextualizing and revealing the breadth and vision of the movements that built the Cultural New Deal.
Center for Cultural Power
The Center for Cultural Power emerged from CultureStr/ke, an idea birthed in 201 by Jeff Chang, Favianna Rodriguez, Ken Chen, and Andrew Hsiao to organize artists in support of communities in Arizona threatened by SB 1070, a racist law targeting brown and Black immigrants.
Cultural Power has since grown to become a powerful anchor organization in the field of cultural strategy, supporting artists and culture bearers working to transform the world into one in which power is distributed equitably and where we live in harmony with nature. Find out more at CulturalPower.org. Follow on Instagram @culturestrike.