Describe yourself in three words.

Playful, resourceful, earnest.

***Sarah Glover***, 2024 CSS Liberation Generation Fellow

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

I work as the Director of Political Education & Research at Rising Majority (RM).

RM is a broad-based, multisectoral, and multiracial formation that was convened by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) after the 2016 election. Led by Black people and people of color, RM was formed because the founders saw the importance of cohering the social movement Left around the fights for radical democracy and against racial capitalism. We aim to grow the collective power of the social movement Left, and our member organizations range from local grassroots groups to large national formations. They address many issue areas and sectors, including labor, racial and gender justice, climate justice, immigrant rights, and prison abolition.

I came into this work in 2017 as a former public school teacher who was looking for smart, politically sharp folks who were not giving in to the apathy, despair, and isolation felt so widely among the Left at that moment, folks who were looking for ways to move together more strategically.

Since 2021, RM has been working with our members to outline the vision that we have collectively developed for the year 2050, along with an initial 10-year strategy that moves us closer to that vision. You can see a version of our vision at 2050vision.us.

Part of my job at RM is to help tell the story of what we are trying to accomplish together in a way that is compelling and inspiring. My work on this began during the pandemic, when I participated in CSS’s introductory training. When I found out about the fellowship, I knew I wanted to apply so that I could learn and practice new narrative skills.

Summarize your fellowship project and how you are using narrative strategy to expand the impact of your work.

As I worked to make the vision more accessible to a broader audience, I noticed that folks can much more easily imagine how things can get worse than how we can make them better—even though we desperately want positive change!

Recently, I heard Maurice Mitchell from the Working Families Party say something on a podcast that has stuck with me: every system and institution that we dislike and that we take for granted as given, all of them were made by people, which means they can also be dismantled by people and replaced with systems that serve us better. And that should be an obvious point, but it is so easy to forget, especially as we prepare for the incoming presidential administration and see the overwhelm, apathy, and nihilism that is already taking root.

The Right doesn’t have a problem with vision. They have 900 pages of a vision that they are currently preparing to enact. We need to counter this with our own vision, our own story of the world we want to create. We have to find ways to invite people into our vision and to keep reminding each other of the collective power that we have to make it real.

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

My project, Nova 2050, is a choose-your-own adventure story inspired by Rising Majority’s 2050 Vision and Strategy, as well as by my own kiddo, who is a graphic novel enthusiast and will be 35 in 2050. As I thought about them in 2050, I imagined the world they will experience between now and then, and how much the choices we make today will have an impact on those experiences.

Slide From Glover’s Fellowship Presentation

When I was a kid, “choose your own adventure” stories were my absolute favorite. I was fascinated by how differently the stories ended depending on the decisions I made. A “choose your own adventure” story seemed like a natural fit for exploring vastly different outcomes, giving the reader the power and agency to choose what those outcomes might be.

The plot of this story is pretty straightforward. Nova is a nonbinary 10-year-old who is living in Anywhere, USA, in 2025. Preoccupied with a school lesson earlier on the climate crisis, Nova putters around their neighborhood with their cat, stumbling upon a magical dandelion. (The dandelion is RM’s long-standing symbol.) This dandelion can transport them to two different timelines of the future, both in the year 2050. By exploring their own neighborhood in these two different timelines, Nova observes the vastly different versions of the possible future and learns about the action (and inaction) that made them possible. The story ends with Nova returning back home to 2025. The reader is left with a choice about the future they want. If they choose the brighter timeline, they are invited to join in the interventions that made that future possible by joining RM or its member organizations.

The story is still being written as RM works on the next phase of our shared work: strategy.

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

In this age of information overload, buzzwords, and endless scrolling, I think of SBS as a way to clearly and concisely communicate ideas and to cut through all the noise, reach folks, and help them see themselves as a main character in a story about the world they live in.

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

SBS helped me reframe my thinking about our vision and strategy as a story we are inviting people into. At RM, we often talk about inviting folks into a deeper sense of their own protagonism; SBS tools allow us to build stories that enable people to see their own agency and power in building a future in which we’d all like to live.

I used several SBS tools, especially:

Cornerstones to get clear on my audience and the story’s framing and purpose;
Fairy tales to help me develop a succinct pilot and story overview;
Story archetypes to develop the ministories within the larger story (to give it a real choose-your-own-adventure feel!); and
Battle of the stories and drama triangle to understand how the opposition frames its stories (to develop the bleak 2050 timeline).

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

This project is inherently iterative, given that RM has been defining and honing our work for years now. As this gets clearer and our strategy takes more shape, Nova’s story will come into sharper focus as well.

If I could time travel, I’d have begun this project in 2021, when our members began working on the 2050 Vision. I think some of the exercises could have helped them create the vision, and some of the more somatic visioning could have helped us build out Nova’s world a bit more. I would have brought more people into the project at the outset, but I’m excited that I still have the opportunity to do that now.

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

SBS tools can help collaborative work in many different moments, such as

When we’re too in the weeds and need a fresh perspective.
When we think we’re on the same page, but there’s a disconnect. Engaging in a shared practice can help us flesh out specifics and see where there are misunderstandings or where our opinions diverge,
When our thinking is too rigid—these tools can help us take a more creative and experimental approach.

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

This project is still in development, and I’d love for folks to be a part of it! This form is where folks can share their ideas and visions for 2050: https://forms.gle/2QkLmLGhvyLR5Qkr6

Imagining 2050: Sarah Glover and the Timeline We Choose