Think Big: A Narrative Learning Community
Photo: Arise Legislative Day, held Feb. 25, 2020 at the Alabama State House in Montgomery. Photo courtesy of Alabama Arise.
Create a space to consider big ideas
Foster peer-to-peer learning and sharing
Identify unanswered strategic research questions
Provide a resource for lessons learned
Think Big: A Narrative Learning Community
Photo: Arise Legislative Day, held Feb. 25, 2020 at the Alabama State House in Montgomery.
Guided by a team of state and national advisors, this two-year long project aims to:
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Create a space to consider big ideas
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Foster peer-to-peer learning and sharing
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Identify unanswered strategic research questions
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Provide a resource for lessons learned
Our Team
Organized by the Topos Partnership
& Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
Think Big is guided by an advisory team:
Our Story
In January 2021, Topos Partnership, in collaboration with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, launched a six-month pilot project funded by the Omidyar Network to organize advocates around one broadly shared challenge —austerity thinking in the face of an economic shutdown that threatened to drain state budgets. Over 300 advocate participants across issue areas – including budget, education, reproductive health, housing and homelessness, racial justice, environment, labor, and more – joined the Learning Community and participated in our monthly webinars, listserv, and fledgling resource library.
What we heard from advocates at the end of this time together – loud and clear – was that there is an ongoing need for these conversations and for new strategies that lift up campaigns with our own messages of abundance that can and will be heard. Think Big attempts to fill a gap in the progressive communications infrastructure by providing a collaborative learning environment that links high-level strategic thinking with practical applications to counter conservative narratives and austerity thinking – undergirded by systemic racism and anti-government narratives – across issue areas and campaigns.
Join Us
The Learning Community is open to all advocates and stakeholders who want to think big, learn together, and share strategies to build the America we want and need.
For more information, contact: thinkbig@topospartnership.com