Welcoming Nayantara Sen, CSS ED, and Empowering a New Season for Narrative Power Building

Nayantara Sen, Executive Director

“Narrative change requires unlearning, which requires risk capital for experimentation and radical imagination”

Nayantara Sen (she/her) has been a narrative and cultural strategist, storyteller, educator and organizer in the field for 15 years, working across the social justice movement sector, philanthropy and the arts and cultural sector. She has worked on a whole gamut of interdisciplinary work for narrative & cultural power-building, such as capacity-building trainings and programs, Innovation Labs, campaigns, arts collectives, field research, and more. She was previously Senior Director of Field and Funder Learning at Pop Culture Collaborative; Director of Narrative & Cultural Strategies at Race Forward; Programs Director at Food Culture Collective, and Lead Designer and Narrative Strategist for the Butterfly & Chrysalis Labs for Immigrant Narrative Strategy.

She is the author of several narrative and storytelling field resources, including: the Butterfly Lab Narrative Project Design Toolkit, the Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity, How the Light Gets In: Narrative Power-Building through the Arts, Storyline Partners’ Stories for Change, and the widely referenced Cultural Strategy Primer. And now she’s our new CSS Executive Director! 

As Nayantara steps into her leadership role at CSS, we’ve asked her to share her thoughts on a few questions. Come read along!

What are you especially energized or inspired by as you step into this role at CSS?

Wow! I am so jazzed and ready to be the Executive Director of CSS; I’m currently experiencing daily bolts of energy and joy. 

Really though, it’s not just that it’s early days or that I’m idealistic. My elation and energy stems from clarity of purpose. As a first-Bengali immigrant, woman of color, poet and fiction writer who wanted to work with impacted communities for our liberation, I really struggled throughout my career to find reliable leftist institutional homes for my work, which could be spaces where I could be my whole self, both creatively and politically. Contrary to what it sounds like in my bio, my career was never really a straightforward or clear path. But even as I meandered through various roles in our movement ecosystem, I was always aware of CSS’ center of gravity. I followed CSS since its Smartmeme days, and built long standing relationships in our CSS network.

For over two decades, CSS has been an anchor, a political home, and a catalytic community of support and learning for changemakers and creatives who are growing narrative and cultural power for frontline communities. There’s nothing else like CSS  — we are crucial backbone narrative infrastructure for our field. So, I knew that stepping into this leadership role as a collaborator, caretaker and steward, as the Executive Director, was aligned with my own purpose. And feeling purposeful feels really good!

Thus far, I’m deeply inspired by the dedication, vision, expertise and kindness of our staff and the commitment, conviction and loving guidance of our Board. I’m energized by the relentless hope, and the wildly creative movement incubations, narrative projects, and stories of organizing successes that CSS’ movement partners and fellows have made possible over the years. 

I’ll say a bit more about clarity of purpose, though. 

I really believe that CSS is uniquely and strategically positioned to fill a tremendous vision and infrastructure gap for the progressive left, which is a result of continued disinvestment in narrative and cultural capacity-building for BIPOC and frontline-led grassroots movements and organizations. Over the last few years, there’s been an uptick in social justice organizations talking and learning more about narrative power-building (which is fantastic and necessary). 

But resources are still pooling around national intermediaries and not trickling down to under-resourced frontline groups. We’re in the thick of the cultural wars; legal, policy, and advocacy channels are shutting down due to rising authoritarianism and white nationalism, disinformation and plummeting civic trust; and climate devastation and social violence is producing continuous trauma and instability. What this heralds for our beloved communities are systemic conditions of fugitivity, of silencing, of invisibilizing us even as we are attacked. As mainstream institutions struggle to serve frontline communities, grassroots power building and social movements will be the primary narrative and cultural battlegrounds upon which hinges our collective survival. When I look around our field and forecast the next decade, CSS stands out to me as a robust, visionary center of gravity that can connect, weave and turbocharge the narrative ecosystem, and drive resources and capacity-building strategies to the grassroots. CSS is now more crucial than ever in our intersecting fights for justice, liberation, and regeneration. 

I’m energized by the clarity of responsibility that this cultural moment demands of us.

Our movements need to contest for narrative and cultural power and win, across all our intersecting issues — so that we might propel our communities from a culture of death and necrosis towards a culture of justice, wellness and freedom. I’m grateful to do my part in this role to help grow stability, sustainability, growth and abundance for CSS.

What gifts and offerings are you hoping to share with the CSS community?

This is a big question because I have a lot of gifts and skills to share — and I expect to use all of them for CSS. But I’ll name a few intentions, to start.
I hope to nourish conditions for listening, learning, adaptation, and innovation at CSS. As a trilingual person who often has to translate from Bengali to Hindi to English and back in my head, and as an immigrant who has experienced stress, disbelonging and extraction in many organizations, I’ve gotten pretty good at learning, un-learning, adapting and recalibrating. (It also helps that I come from a long line of teachers and educators in my family who like to learn!)

Adaptation is essential for effective narrative strategy. At a basic level, we need to understand if our Story-based Strategies are working on our target audiences or not, and learn by reshaping them. But at an institutional level, experimentation, learning, reflection, and iteration actually have to be practiced routinely, in a disciplined way. 

Narrative change requires unlearning, which requires risk capital for experimentation and radical imagination. What that means emotionally, in a “felt sense” for a network and community like CSS, is that we need to feel safety and freedom in trying things, failing strategically, iterating, sending out test balloons. We need to feel grace and support when we try and fail — and feel accountability and purpose when we adapt to try again. 

In How the Light Gets In: Narrative Power Building Through the Arts, I wrote that “narrative strategies are not just for disrupting harmful narratives held ‘by those people out there’ — they are also practiced by us, and so therefore involve composting dominant ideas about ourselves.” This is one of my favorite things about narrative change work — the promise and possibility that we get to learn, innovate, and change too. Transition — especially if it’s just transition — can be fundamentally creative and life-affirming. I’d like to plant seeds for creativity in service of purpose alignment and Just Transition — and (to pull inspiration from our long-time collaborators, Intelligent Mischief), maybe even some joyful mischief.  The trickster can make the world, after all.

I’m also interested in bringing my gifts as a fiction writer and poet to CSS. As a writer who loves to experiment with storytelling methods for systems change (I do that currently through the global Systems Storytelling Initiative and Fellowship at Collective Change Lab), I’d like to explore new adaptations of our SBS tools to bring them into conversation with non-Western, indigenous and diasporic forms of storytelling. As a South-Asian immigrant who grew up with stories of Indian epics and folklore (involving literally hundreds of characters in one story, magical realism, and nested and looping story structures), I’m curious about how Story-based Strategy tools can extend beyond Western-dominant modes of storytelling. This feels timely too, as our national fights are now increasingly interwoven with global trends in authoritarianism, democratic decline, and climate chaos. There’s a staff & network-led initiative now to level up our SBS curricula — stay tuned for more updates on that this year!

What are some challenges ahead for CSS in 2024 and how are you thinking about them?

Well, it’s hard to distill down because there are several adaptive challenges ahead for CSS. But there are two consequential challenges that I’ve been thinking about. 

One challenge relates to resuscitating our Movement Incubations and Innovations programs to seed and scale new narrative projects and impact storytelling projects, especially those focused on Just Transition. There are so many brilliant, catalytic leaders and projects out in the field right now, sparking practices and experiments for Just Transition. Some are practicing Story-based Strategies at the intersections of abolition, reparations, and Just Transition. Some are crafting successful stories to bridge the struggles and break the wedges between Black, Indigenous and immigrant communities. And many are demonstrating real impact for Just Transitions — at the level of transforming norms, culture, and institutional practices. With appropriately timed investments in their narrative skills, leadership, resources, and infrastructure, these seeds for Just Transition could sprout, bloom and dramatically change our narrative landscape within just a few years. So how do we grow the narrative power of Just Transition itself, and invest in the story-based strategies of Just Transition practitioners and projects?

CSS has steadfastly invested in incubating movement-led narrative projects  — we’ve done that through partner support, spin-off projects, and annual fellowship programs in the past. We’re now at an evolutionary stage in the field where we need more incubation labs, more strategic and operational support for emerging narrative projects and organizations, and more nurturing spaces for birthing and growing narrative infrastructure. I’m excited to revitalize this legacy of narrative innovation and incubation at CSS — and the reason it’s a challenge (although an exciting one) is because it requires thoughtful and phased build-out of infrastructure and capacity for CSS. Our team is lean and mighty — but small. Growing narrative infrastructure investments (whether through new fiscal sponsorships, in-house or spin-off incubated projects, Labs, seed funds for narrative innovations, or other incubatory avenues) requires strong backbone infrastructure, including robust operational, financial and consultative supports for our network. (We’ll soon begin looking for funding and partners interested in growing CSS’ movement incubations and innovations services for narrative power-building — so hit me up if you’re interested in talking about this!)

And then, there’s this second, deeper challenge, related to joy, repair and rejuvenation for our organization and network.

The last three years for CSS has been a time of significant transition and adaptation. CSS has navigated leadership and staffing transitions, and major adjustments in programming as a result of the pandemic (our work transitioned to virtual delivery due to COVID). And, we’re an organization committed to supporting frontline communities who are bearing the brunt of socio-political upheaval, racial terror, climate chaos, and escalating attacks on queer and trans communities and immigrants. 

But frontline communities are not just our partners — we are also people who are of and from these impacted communities ourselves. Our families, elders, and loved ones are struggling, too. Our team is heavily comprised of BIPOC, immigrants, women, and queer folx. So CSS too has been holding, in our collective body, the weight and weariness of living and working with cycles of grief, loss, and exhaustion. Tending to the radical imagination and visioning capacities of our collaborators is actually arduous work that produces wear and tear on our own bodies, spirits and minds. And our team has been doing this amidst the daily devastations of our news cycle, through a scary pandemic, for several years in a row. Through these strained times, we have struggled to meet growing demand for our narrative capacity-building programs and responsively attend to the needs of network leaders who turned to us for clarity of purpose, for movement connections, for revitalization and growth.   

Our organizational role has a mission and mandate that’s not analogous to many other types of social justice organizations — we are charged with stoking the fire for our social movements by tending to our radical imagination, and by nurturing the responsibility for powerful storytelling that (as the IWW/Wobblies said) — builds new worlds in the shell of the old. This work needs consistent care, commitment to wellness, disciplined practice for dreaming and imagining together, ample time for play, and grace for trying and failing. And we’ve all been yearning for this, right? 

So a challenge ahead is to take seriously the charge of our own rejuvenation, our own radical imagination, our own creativity and joy as preconditions for our work. In the year ahead, we’ll be intentionally recalibrating our organizational culture to protect and grow practices for our own radical imagination and joy. We’ll be returning to memories and practices of accountability, caretaking and love. And by love, I don’t mean non-profit talk posing behind feel-good intentionality. I mean fostering concrete organizational and network strategies that support us to love ourselves and each other wholly, fully, honestly and vulnerably — not just in service of being productive, but as a radical act of caretaking and labor that animates our purpose. Movements built on grief and anger can carry us only so far (these are emotions that, if not transmuted,  eventually drain us) — for durability, we need love, care and joy. (And if you want to know why I believe joy is an essential leadership attribute for building effective movement organizations, check out this piece I loved in Convergence Magazine, authored by organizers from Maine People’s Alliance - Nuts and Bolts of Building Resilient Organizations)

I grew up in America during the Sanctuary City movement, and I find it a useful frame as I think about this specific organizational challenge ahead. CSS has been, and can be, a sanctuary space providing joyful, vitalizing, imaginative, and strategic narrative work for our movements. In the year ahead, we’ll be stretching into collective embodied practice, living in our bodies and spirits more, practicing vulnerability and love with each other, dancing, laughing, and sharing joy. And I know we’ll see the impact of this renewal in our work. Through my work on the Stewardship Council at the Food Culture Collective, I am routinely reminded that: Dreaming and playing together is essential and strategic work. What we feed, we nourish. What we nourish, we grow. 

We are feeding ourselves to grow our narrative and cultural power! Come join our orbit, so you can learn, prototype, build, laugh, grieve, dream, tell stories — and maybe even dance with us at CSS.