We are Investing in Building Narrative Power

We believe that transforming the narrative landscape around people of color, immigrants and refugees, Muslims, and Indigenous people– that shape hundreds of millions of people’s worldviews and behaviors– to affirming, pluralistic ones, is an essential strategy for all of us working toward a just and vibrant society where we can all flourish. 

For nearly a decade, Unbound Philanthropy has invested deeply in the immigrant justice fields in the US and UK to develop narrative and communications infrastructure, and over time our strategies have iterated and evolved significantly in response to what we have learned and as the field shifted.

We initially began by supporting and championing storytelling and communications infrastructure in the immigrant justice field. We then moved into cultural strategies that reached beyond our base, and that work at scale; and we made investments to expand the capacity of the immigration field to engage in narrative. We have supported organizations that offer new ways of combining traditional organizing with narrative. Over time, our strategies have evolved into a targeted effort to build narrative ecosystems that reach mass audiences, that recognize and honor the humanity of immigrants and advance freedom and justice for all.

Building infrastructure involves investing in the capacity of both individual organizations and leaders, and in coordinated networks. To achieve the scale required to influence and animate the national conversation about immigration– from our mostly deeply held mental models and beliefs; to how we treat our neighbors and talk about one another behind closed doors; to how we vote and the policies that are enacted– we must work in collaboration. Over the last several years, we have increasingly worked with funder collaboratives, and provided aligned and coordinated funding, so that we coordinate and scale investments. In the US, we were a founding member of the Pop Culture Collaborative, a leader in the narrative and culture change space, and in the UK, we were a founding member of the Power of Pop Fund. 

Today, a community of practice is emerging where advocates, strategists, and funders can learn from each other about narrative strategy and can shape narratives together. Our grantee partners like the Pop Culture Collaborative; the Butterfly Lab at Race Forward; CultureSurge; and Yes, And Laughter Lab in the US, and Counterpoints Arts and Heard in the UK, have helped build the knowledge and capacity of immigrant justice field leaders, artists, and funders to develop shared narratives. 

Guiding Principles of Our Approach:

• We recognize that narrative power is built when narrative strategy is interconnected with other power-building strategies, like organizing, civic engagement, and policy advocacy. These strategies strengthen and complement one another. 
• We support a narrative systems approach (see definition in Glossary below), where our grantee partners are in conversation and work in collaboration with one another, establishing a coordinated and aligned narrative ecosystem.
• This coordinated network involves social justice organizations, entertainment artists, cultural strategists, and researchers, along with funders.
• We champion intersectional work, engaging across and with a range of issue areas that are closely connected with immigrant justice, including racial justice, climate and migrant justice, and care, among others. 
• We support lived experience leadership to shift narrative power and elevate diverse voices.

We invite you to listen, watch, and read from the collection of resources below that we’ve curated.

If you are a funder interested in learning more about our investments in narrative, please contact narrative@unboundphilanthropy.org. We would love to hear from you!

If you want to go deeper into learning about narrative strategy and power-building, the following resources are a good place to start.