Work With Us
Build with us
Organizing and Narrative can’t be handled alone. We’re here to help you win with Story-based Strategy
CSS wants to help you get unstuck!
Our partnerships help organizations get unstuck and step into a space of radical imagination. We do this by building your organization’s narrative muscle to integrate story and lived experience as the foundation of your social change strategy.
Who this is for
Organizers, communicators, creative producers, artists, funders, programmers, dreamers, and policy enthusiasts.
Benefits of partnering with CSS
- Integrate Story-based Strategy into your work to break through new or existing audiences
- Improve collaboration and alignment across staff, members, stakeholders, and allies.
- Gain insights on how to counter opposing narratives using SBS
- Explore ways to foster spaces of radical imagination that inspire innovative and exciting strategic approaches.
How it works
We offer customized trainings tailored to the needs of each group, ranging from short 1-2 day sessions to longer partnerships that last six to eight months, or even collaborative projects spanning several years. Throughout these partnerships, we provide tailored Story-based Strategy training, narrative coaching, technical assistance, and guidance on narrative project and campaign design, as well as effective strategies.
What partners say
“CSS has taken the time to work deeply and widely throughout our diverse network, always checking to ensure members are well informed and actively participating in the process. CSS does not work top-down but instead supports our staff to co-create opportunities for our network to increase their capacity to imagine and create a new story of the economy, one that is grounded in justice. The result for our network has been a more cohesive group identity, an active practice to ‘show don’t tell’ our strategic analysis, and a growing appetite to stretch and take bolder risks together.”
“CSS customized a process and training to fit our organizational needs. The examples presented in the training were relevant to our work and easily relatable. Instead of jumping immediately into action, CSS showed us how to take a look inward and articulate our unique position — an essential strategic step telling our story in a compelling and world-changing way.”
A partial list of current & past project partners
- Alternatives for Community & Environment
- Amnesty International
- Asian Pacific Environmental Network
- Bay Area Black Worker Center
- Bay Rising
- Bioneers
- Black Mesa Water Coalition
- Blue Green Alliance
- California Alliance
- California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA)
- Californians for Pesticide Reform
- Center for Civic Policy / Clearly New Mexico
- Center for Health, Environment and Justice
- Center for Media Justice / MAG-Net
- Climate Justice Alliance
- Communities for a Better Environment
- Community Action New Mexico
- Community Housing Organizing Partnership
- Divestment Student Network
- Dream Defenders
- Energy Action Coalition
- Environmental Health Strategy Center
- Environmental Justice Coalition on Water
- ETC Group International
- Friends of the Earth U.S. & Australia
- Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
- Grassroots International
- Greenpeace USA
- Indigenous Environmental Network
- Indigenous Peoples’ Power Project (IP3)
- Iraq Veterans Against the War
- Karuk & Yurok Tribes
- LA Black Worker Center
- Living Wage Action Coalition
- NAACP Climate Justice Program
- National Black Worker Center Project
- National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON)
- National Domestic Workers Alliance
- National Forest Protection Alliance
- New Economy Coalition
- Oil Change International
- Open Society Institute
- Pesticide Action Network
- PODER SF
- Political Research Associates
- Progressive Technology Project
- Rainforest Action Network
- Right to the City Alliance
- Rural Vermont
- Safe Cosmetics Coalition
- Sierra Nevada Alliance
- Slow Food USA
- SPIN Project
- SCOPE
- Student/Farmworker Alliance
- Surdna Foundation
- Teaching for Change
- The California Endowment
- The Just Transition Fund
- UNITY Alliance
- United for Peace and Justice
- United Workers Congress
- WhyHunger
- Working Group on Extreme Inequality / Institute for Policy Studies