I collaborate with social justice activists, organizations, and campaigns to inspire action and build narrative power. I recently completed a tenure as the Movement for Black Lives communications director.

In 2016, I founded the Radical Communicators Network (RadComms) to strengthen the field of narrative power. I also train leftist and progressive spokespeople to make critical, real-time interventions through the media.

In 2017, I joined The New School as its inaugural Activist-in-Residence. I spent ten semesters on faculty teaching Black Resistance 1960 — Present, Critical Theory and Social Justice, and Resistance Narratives from 21st Century Social Movements.

In the fall of 2023, I joined the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at City College at the City University of New York as their incoming Distinguished Lecturer.

I am co-authoring a forthcoming anthology detailing world-building narrative campaigns and strategies led by progressive and leftist social movement communications workers in the 21st century.


NPS 22 | Photography by: Green Tangerine Photography

The Radical Communicators Network (RadComms) is a community of practice for social justice communicators to cross-pollinate discussions across various movements, organizations, levels of experience, geographies, languages, and political associations. This network incubates transnational connections, visionary narrative strategy, and collaboratively developed frameworks and best practices.

This year, RadComms took home bronze in the Anthem Awards for our research on how the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors talk about poverty and wealth. Check out the BROKE Project.


Framing New Worlds: Resistance Narratives from 21st Century Social Movements

Framing New Worlds authors call

Social movement communicators, organizers, policy advocates, cultural workers, and others for whom narrative and story are essential elements of their day-to-day work deserve comprehensive political education tools to combat the vast and dangerous attacks advanced by conservative and right-wing factions. Attacks include banning books and curricula, criminalizing protests, the right-wing capture of judicial and legislative institutions, entrenchment of forced birth, and restriction of transgender people’s freedoms, rights, and healthcare access. 

Although resources exist, many social justice movements and nonprofit workers have adopted neoliberal market-based strategies that are ineffective at solving deeply rooted social problems and ultimately hinder progressive narrative and cultural change by reinforcing the status quo of power and privilege.


To expand the corpus of progressive and left narrative-power building tools, the Radical Communicators Network is developing a 30+ chapter anthology that analyzes case studies about how social justice communicators challenged and delegitimized dominant narratives and built power for radical ideas between 2000 and 2020. The collection also demystifies 21st-century movement communications strategy and its relationship to organizing and power-building. It provides accessible, behind-the-scenes content about the authors and editors and their journeys into social justice communications.

This is the first anthology written by and created for social justice communicators. In it, movement workers analyze how we used progressive and radical campaigns and movement moments to build power for revolutionary and radical ideas that change the material conditions of people’s everyday lives, such as defunding the police and Medicare for all. These praxis-driven case studies uniquely blend academic theory, historical examples, and behind-the-scenes best practices to reveal an honest, future-oriented analysis of how real-world narratives are developed and challenged through social change communications. 

The initial funding for this anthology came from Borealis Philanthropy and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.


Channel Black 1.0 cohort with then Rep. Stacey Abrams, 2016

Channel Black 1.0 cohort with then Rep. Stacey Abrams, 2016

Media Training & Channel Black

Narrative power—the norms and rules our society lives by–is shaped by an influential faction – media moguls, policymakers, activists, celebrities, and the tech industry, to name a few. They use formulas and algorithms to construct messages that shape what we think, say, and do.

Building narrative power for a more inclusive and democratic society means telling complete stories that lead to complete interventions and solutions. To do this, we must build narrative power and change policies and practices to center on the needs of the many instead of the needs of an elite few.

Messaging is more than a well-constructed sentence or giving audiences information; it’s a pairing of logic, data, story, and values coupled with a clear articulation of the problem, solution, and call to action.

To help close a gap in access to progressive media training for Black organizers and impacted communities, I developed Channel Black in 2016, a tailored media training curriculum that prepares progressive spokespeople to make critical, real-time interventions through the media.

Channel Black is a storytelling and media training program that develops everyday social movement leaders' strategy, intervention, and spokesperson skills. By taking into account everyday social movement leaders' experiences and cultural nuances, Channel Black offers a one-of-a-kind intersectional training experience. By tailoring this program to meet the needs of emergent spokespeople and tapping into the robust lived experiences and deep knowledge of social movement leaders and impacted community members, we can weaken harmful narratives and share our stories. Channel Black democratizes how we make meaning of our world: by changing the story and the storyteller.

Professor and narrative researcher Ken Plummer reminds us that “out of deep conditions of domination and exclusion, people create their own insights, understandings, knowledge, and narratives,” which are fundamental to the fight for the interests and self-determination of future generations.

Channel Black 3.0

In partnership with Black Feminist Future’s Constellation Network, Channel Black 2022 provides training for 10-15 seasoned and newly activated Black reproductive justice leaders to engage in leadership development rooted in shifting narrative power on reproductive health, rights, and justice issues facing Black birthing people. During Channel Black 3.0: Building Narrative Power for Reproductive Freedom, participants define and illustrate the importance and impact of narrative power, learn a methodology for how to analyze the hidden assumptions that prop up brutal systems of power, and demonstrate how to construct a meaningful message that prompts your audience to feel, say, or do something differently. 

If you’re looking for media training, hit me up.

I learned my media training practice from the great, late Chris Jahnke.



First Year Freedom Scholars and me in Washington Square Park ‘22

TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP

From fall 2018 to spring 2022, I was faculty for the Freedom Scholars Program at The New School. Freedom Scholars is a social justice peer-learning community where an inclusive cohort of students study the elements of intersectional movement building and social justice through a values-based curriculum.


Through a holistic, participatory model, Freedom Scholars creates a fluid space where New School faculty and staff are committed to providing students with financial support, student advocacy, rigorous academic scholarship, and access to activists and organizers from the movements of our time. Freedom Scholars creates a nourishing environment for students to think critically about using what they learn to build a more inclusive and dignified world through readings, podcasts, movies, field trips, guest speakers, and community activities.

The student-scholars participate in courses centered on social justice taught by practicing scholar-activists. Together, the Freedom Scholars Community works through tenets of critical inquiry, community building, growth, trust, integrity, change, knowledge sharing, and love of self and community.

Previous Courses:

Black Resistance 1960–present @ The New School (2018)

Critical Theory and Social Justice @ The New School (2018 - 2022)

Resistance Narratives From 21st-Century Social Movements @ The New School (2022)

Narrative Power in the Black Radical Tradition @ City College (2023)

Current Courses:

Rhetoric of Liberation: The Role of Narrative Power in Contemporary Movements @ City College (2024)

MPA Capstone @ City College (2024)