In January 2025, Communities of Opportunity and Resource Media launched the inaugural Powerful Narratives Work (PNW) Fellowship. COO came to Resource Media because it wanted to create a fellowship that provided hands-on learning workshops on narrative and communications strategy, and differentiate between narrative development and storytelling.
Together with our partners at Communities of Opportunity’s Learning Community, we set out to build the region’s first narrative power fellowship program, working with twelve local leaders already engaged in combining their economic justice work with storytelling. Over the next 6 months, we joined together to learn, explore, and catalyze narrative power in the solidarity economy space. Fellows received a stipend, customized support from Resource Media’s Sian Wu and Belinda Griswold, and deep dives into successful narrative change campaigns from liberatory campaigns such as Minnesota’s Greater than Fear, to regressive efforts like the narrative campaign to “end welfare as we know it.”
The Fellowship had two main goals:
As a result of the fellowship, participants presented final projects on programs ranging from community media to local farming and pursued partnerships for collaborative narrative development. The fellows reported gaining a clearer understanding of narrative power and storytelling skills thanks in part to a new narrative schema developed called “The Narrative Garment.”
Resource Media is actively seeking to expand this program after this initial pilot, exploring ways to partner fellows with artists or journalists to enable developed narratives to rise to the level of public consciousness through art or content.
The PNW Fellowship aspires to a larger vision to motivate more local leaders to develop narrative power building projects that strengthen the solidarity economy in local communities.
