Our Mission:
Center for Story-based Strategy (CSS) cultivates imagination spaces where story, grassroots leadership, organizing, and democracy are interwoven strategies to build power.
We believe in everyone’s innate and collective capacity to understand our own selves and our communities’ needs and stories. Collective liberation is only possible rooted in our deepest wisdom and truth.
Nothing About Us, Without Us, Is For Us is movement wisdom inherited from decades and even centuries of peoples’ movements insisting on collective dignity in the face of oppressive power-over. We inherit this wisdom directly from South African disability rights movements, and the U.S. movements for disability justice who have lifted it up.
Our movements are stronger when issue expertise arises from direct experience of the injustice at hand. Legitimate leadership and insight is found under the police baton, before the bulldozer, holding the eviction notice, and in the welfare line. A healthy movement culture must honor, cultivate and follow that expertise. And we must consciously seek out the skills to make this happen, in the face of a larger culture that does its best to silence that expertise.
We build tools and hold spaces that facilitate grassroots leadership from directly-impacted and marginalized communities. By focusing on facilitation and capacity development, we can contribute resources and co-create story-based strategy with those most-impacted by an issue.