Our Values

What we stand for

Our core belief

The existing extractive economy stifles political imagination and represses visions for change, obstructing our efforts to build a just future. That’s why the Center for Story-based Strategy aims to cultivate imagination spaces where story, grassroots leadership, organizing, and democracy are interwoven strategies to build power. While CSS encourages anyone eager to change dominant narratives to utilize Story-based Strategy, we primarily focus on supporting power-building groups that prioritize frontline communities affected by pollution, poverty, and racism.

Learn more about our theory of change →

Our fundamental principles

Just Transition

Our work aligns with the Just Transition framework, which advocates for a fair and sustainable shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative one. Through centuries of extracting natural, labor, and cultural resources, the profit-driven extractive economy is severely undermining the life support systems of the planet. CSS is in service of any group or organization fighting for a Just Transition, but most importantly our role is to challenge the deeply rooted extraction logic within our economy. By employing regenerative tools, fostering connection, and building relationships, we can embody the future we aspire to create.

Radical Imagination Builds Power

Prioritizing time for radical imagination is crucial for envisioning a better world. In our fast-paced environment, creativity and innovation are often sidelined, further complicated by chaotic news cycles and community pressures. To drive real change, we must expand our imagination of politics and redefine “politically realistic.” This is why we create spaces, events, and communities that cultivate experimentation with play and imagination. When we foster radical imagination, we reveal new choices, allowing us to draw from our communities and ancestors to uncover the infinite futures within us.

Learn more about Radical Imagination →

Working Principles: Anti Oppression

In all of our efforts to collaborate for change, we value relationships, and approach our work with respect for all people and all life on Earth. We intend our working principles to be a living and evolving guide for Center for Story-based Strategy’s practices, strategy, and vision. We commit to embracing the following principles:

Holistic Analysis

Social, economic and ecological issues are interconnected and interdependent. The problems are interrelated, and so are the solutions.

Analyzing Institutional Power

We identify and unpack systems of oppression, and analyze the narratives that help to legitimize and hold these institutions in place.

Undoing Racism

Racism is the single most critical barrier to building effective coalitions for social change. We commit to create and promote an anti-racist culture in our organization.

Listening

We take responsibility for making space for all voices in our community. We prioritize listening to elders, youth, women, queer folks, and people of color.

Appreciation & Gratitude

We will respect and nurture each other’s culture, class, gender, orientation, racial, and religious differences. We will call each other in, and also celebrate each other often.

Acting

Acting consciously and consistently to publicly challenge historic patterns of marginalization and oppression in all its forms.

Leadership

We develop leadership intentionally and systematically within our organization. We engage in mutual mentorship and in collaborative, antiracist, and feminist leadership models.

Networking

Effective broad-based movements require “building a net that works.” CSS nurtures our network and acts as a connector across the issues and communities we serve.

We, the staff, activists, board, and volunteers of Center for Story-based Strategy, commit ourselves to working together to embody the above-stated principles. If you share these principles, we invite you to join us in fulfilling them.

We are inspired by the following organizations and documents: