Describe yourself in three words.

Organizer, strategic, funny

Tell us about the work you brought into your Fellowship and why this work is important to you?

I was working with the UFW Foundation (United Farm Workers) in 2014, and there were four officer-involved shootings within a span of three months. We were organizing around that. That’s where Action Council saw me doing organizing work and hired me to be their Communications Coordinator.

I was part of a CSS intro training four years ago, and I was just blown away by their work. It was through that training that I got interested in narrative strategy. A couple of years in a row, we were in a budget fight with the city. The opposition had better narrative strategies than us, and we would just be in reactionary mode. That’s how I decided to look into the Advanced Training and learn more about these tools, which led me to the Fellowship.

Explain to us why you are doing this work and at what stage you are in your process.

My passion for social justice, my passion for community organizing drives me. It make me sad that with a few simple words, the opposition can knock out hours of community organizing. Six or seven years ago, we did a statewide caravan for immigration reform with the UFW and a number of other immigrant rights organizations to put pressure on Kern County’s representative, Kevin McCarthy. Hundreds of people came from across California to just be outside of his office. And the Congress member issued a statement saying, “Great job bringing all those people next time, bring people from my district.” And just like that, it knocked out all of our efforts.

A lot of times, activists have the privilege of coming in, protesting and then going home. Some of them want to feel powerful, not so much want to gain actual power. So the phrase Defund the Police makes us feel awesome, makes us feel powerful. I mean, we're taking on the cops. It's a powerful statement, but it is also a polarizing statement. When it comes to gaining actual power, it doesn't help us win. And so that was my interest in that — how can we utilize strategies that may not help us feel as powerful but actually gets us real power?

By moving away from narratives of negation like defund and moving toward statements of reinvest or reimagine, that gets people more interested. Because defund the police is only one thing, but refund or reinvest in our communities could be a number of different things. That inspires people. That's been one of the things that just drove me to this project in particular. How can we utilize narrative strategies that 1) don’t polarize, and 2) helps us gain as many supporters as possible, 3) get four of the seven people in our city Council to vote for it. By switching up our narrative from defund to reinvest, we're far more likely to get those four votes we need to actually defund the police.

Our campaign only started last year. And just by not saying defund the police and talking about reinvest and reimagine, we were able to take $1.39 million from their budget.

How would you describe Story-based Strategy (SBS) to someone who has never heard about it?

It's a way of communicating a story of our campaign that is in line with the on-the-ground organizing efforts. A lot of times those two are separate, so it's a way of making sure that these strategies are aligned, which increases our chance of winning. We make it clear who we are, what we stand for. It doesn't give the opposition any room to misrepresent us.

How did SBS affect your work on the project? What SBS tools did you use or center in to move forward your fellowship work?

It helped me out a lot, even in the most unexpected places. Right after the Advanced Training and into this Fellowship cohort, there was the backlash against ethnic studies, and our natural reaction is to go out to public comment at a school board meeting and say all of these anti-ethnic studies people are racist. But by doing a Narrative Media Power Analysis, we realized that ethnic studies was approved at a state-wide level in California. Honestly, the anti-ethnic studies people weren't going to win anything anyway. So our target was just to reassure the trustees that we got their back.

By framing it not as we're going to lose or they're going to win or anything like that, we see these people are just loud and irrelevant. Our goal is to make the trustees feel comfortable. We were able to reframe the conversation and actually utilize a lot of their terminology against them, right? Ethnic studies is pro-American, ethnic studies is freedom of speech, ethnic studies is everybody's right to learn about their culture from a different lens. And, you know, the opposition kind of tripped out because they're like, well, how can you fight against America and freedom of speech?

The Points of Intervention tool is also good, because a lot of the time there's a campaign coming up — let's just say the budget fight — and the initial thought is okay, let's shut down a freeway. However, your point of intervention should be the place that provides the most resonance for your campaign’s story.

So you may think…let's shut down an intersection. But then ask your self why and decide The point of intervention has got to be at the City Council meeting because that is where it makes the most sense to win over your base, constituency and target.

If you could have another iteration of your work, how would it have changed?

I would focus a lot more on the intersection between social programs that cities and counties are able to fund with economic justice. This past couple of months it has been more on the forefront of our work specifically because we got a grant for economic justice. We never think that cities and counties could have an impact on people's day-to-day economic lives. We just kind of accept the fact that the Dow is down and therefore inflation is up. And what can you do about it?

That intersection between what's possible politically to support economic justice of the everyday workers is something that I really look into. And that's exciting because you get to work with unions. You get to work with folks that just have a different lens, right?

How was working on this project, using SBS, different from your work without SBS?

SBS helped me, especially because very early on in my work I was introduced to the ideas of story based strategy, but I did not walk away with a set of tools or written framework. So before I would just kind of articulate these ideas to the best of my abilities. Now there's a toolbox. There's an actual process. So that helped me just gain more clarity about what's possible. What are the different tactics that we can utilize? And at the same time, help me just sit down, type some stuff, run it by the staff, the organizers, come back, revise it, and then, boom! All of this happens before the campaign really heats up, whereas before we’re already in a campaign and we're trying to figure out new strategies.

Do you think SBS will change how you relate to future work in collaboration with others? How? And why?

It creates an opportunity to actually create a structured dialogue during a meeting. In the past it was like, hey, let's have a meeting to discuss strategies. Okay. Hella, unstructured. The story based strategy framework provides the opportunity to capture people's ideas and capture more diversity of ideas. It opens up the possibility that people actually enjoy narrative strategy and would be down to do things that I've been saying for a while.

Share how folks can get involved with your work or see your work’s final product.

We're a community organizing group. If you are in Salinas, just come to a meeting.

Reimagining #Defund the Police