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.
Photo: Arise Legislative Day, held Feb. 25, 2020 at the Alabama State House in Montgomery. Photo courtesy of Alabama Arise.
Photo: Arise Legislative Day, held Feb. 25, 2020 at the Alabama State House in Montgomery.
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.
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