We strengthen emergent narrative projects in our community while providing a political home for the work
Sometimes, innovative ideas need the resources and a political home to see them grow and contribute to change. Our incubation work identifies emergent narrative projects in our communities and we strengthen these new efforts with. These engagements are typically time bound, must align with our values, and actively engage with or use story-based strategy.
Black Cornerstones Project
The Project: Black Cornerstones Project (BCP) is a current fiscally sponsored project of CSS. BCP is a community engagement project that emboldens Black Stories, amplifies Black Voices, and carves out bold and amazing Black Spaces. BCP is looking to build collective power in Black communities in Chicago’s Southside — where communities experience disproportionate rates of intra-community violence, community divestment and systemic poverty. Black voices transforming radical dreams of freedom to construct new realities of liberation is the vision that shapes our tomorrow. BCP stands to eradicate racial oppression by challenging and dispelling anti-Black perspectives, co-creating bold Black-led spaces, building power together and providing equitable prosperity.
Read more about Black Cornerstones Project >
ReFrame Mentorship
The Project: The ReFrame Mentorship increases the capacity of individuals, organizations, and the field to engage in daily communications practices and integrate communications as a key strategy in the fight for justice. Through powerful convenings and weekly mentoring sessions the six-month program helps mentees and organizations build strategic communications skills and inter-organizational relationships that strengthen issue sectors and movements.
ReFrame launched as a separate organization in 2016, and has since grown multiple initiatives in addition to the mentorship program — critical pieces of our movements’ narrative infrastructure.
S.T.O.R.Y. Program:
Strategy, Training, and Organizing Resources for Youth
The Project: A multi-issue communications strategy program providing youth-led social change organizations story-based strategy training, consultation, leadership retreats and capacity-building partnerships — supporting youth activism and developing youth organizers’ skills in strategic media literacy, leadership skills, communications, and strategy. With the power of storytelling, we collaborate to build movements for peace, human rights, and an ecological future!
STORY was spun down and closed in 2007.