We often speak of the inevitability of the arc of the universe bending toward justice. But history tells a different story.
Freedom is not the result of inevitability; freedom has only been possible when communities have shaped the stories that form our collective social norms. This is the long-term, necessary work of narrative change. And this work, while often building from the ground up, has always had a price tag — and someone always has to pay it.
Today, we find ourselves facing an onslaught of disinformation and democratic strain. Public trust in institutions is eroding, and in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, top officials have put out a call to silence liberal groups. Coordinated attacks on inclusive education, voting rights and bodily autonomy are advancing. Targeted by the Trump administration, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was fully defunded, part of a broader and steadily growing attempt to unravel the stories and publicly shaped narratives of communities. And quietly, collective narrative power — the core piece of our civic infrastructure that permeates everything from possibility to policy — is being dismantled.
Historically, narrative change has taken strategic investment — and that helped build the road to freedom
In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed. It was a national, fully resourced campaign to end slavery. Donors, like Arthur Tappan, cemented its ability to scale, and the organization raised the equivalent of millions in today’s dollars.
That money funded abolitionist newspapers like The Liberator and produced other writings such as The Slave’s Friend, a monthly anti-slavery publication for children. The society printed tens of thousands of pamphlets, hired lecturers, backed legal defense efforts, encouraged civil disobedience and trained and deployed a network of lecturers. It used storytelling and media not just to share information, but to shape imagination, to moralize slavery and politicize the public. Its funders understood shared narrative and widespread access to new information as the infrastructure upon which freedom scales.
These funders weren’t simply aiding individual escapes from enslavement — they were seeding the collapse of an entire system. By resourcing newspapers, lectures and pamphlets, they weren’t just amplifying messages; they were laying the groundwork for cultural, moral and political transformation. Narrative was the infrastructure — the essential scaffolding for reshaping public consciousness and shifting what people believed was right, wrong and ultimately possible. Before policy could change, public imagination had to expand. And that expansion was built through story.
In 1859, Boston merchant Charley Fox Hovey endowed $50,000 — about $2 million in today’s dollars — to fuel the work of women’s rights and antislavery leaders. That fund paid Susan B. Anthony’s salary during the Women’s Loyal National League’s petition drive for the 13th Amendment. It also underwrote the abolitionist speakers who built public consensus, demand and ultimately pressure, before emancipation became policy.
These narrative campaigns altered the collective sense of what was just, and helped make change imaginable.
What funding narrative infrastructure looks like today
Today, the equivalents of abolitionist pamphlets and lecture circuits are everywhere. They’re just too often underfunded or misunderstood. They exist in the form of BIPOC-led, local and tribal newsrooms; cultural strategy hubs like Borealis Philanthropy’s Racial Equity in Journalism Fund or the Center for Cultural Power; trans-led narrative collectives like TransLash Media; and community-based storytelling efforts like MediaJustice and Black With No Chaser. They are podcast networks, TikTok creators with trust-based followings, investigative series from nonprofit newsrooms, digital campaigns designed by organizers — not solely marketers — and movement memory work that captures truth beyond the news cycle.
Contemporary freedom movements are clear about the values they hold and the future they are working toward — from access to abortion care to trans liberation; racial justice to voting rights. Together, they are building a tapestry of moral resilience, a network of stories and narratives to shape cultural norms and the structures that support them.
But while movements are clear, many funders today have lost track of narrative as strategy. They have forgotten the lineage of donors who played a key role in supporting narrative change through history — including donors to the American Anti-Slavery Society who understood that changing the law required changing hearts and minds. Today’s philanthropy treats narrative as a soft skill, often siloing it to communications, PR or marketing strategies, failing to invest in it as a key strategy that weaves through our shared civic life.
The work of narrative scaffolding, of course, is unfolding against a much broader media landscape today. Narrative infrastructure is not just created by funding campaigns and toolkits. The work includes training labs that equip organizers to tell stories with impact; long-term funding for public media ecosystems, including those being actively dismantled; digital narrative strategists embedded within movement organizations; and archival projects that preserve intergenerational knowledge and offer counter-memory to dominant accounts.
The far right understands the power of information and the weaponization of disinformation. Narrative ecosystems are the defense.
The backlash against progress — from book bans to curriculum restrictions and AI-generated conspiracy content — is not accidental. It’s narrative warfare. And it’s funded. Very well. The far right has long invested in the slow, quiet, technocratic work that builds actual power. The Koch network has spent generations funding infrastructure — legal, narrative, academic, media — that allows its worldview to endure.
What’s missing is an equally well-funded, long-game counterforce: a philanthropic commitment to build and sustain narrative ecosystems that include community-rooted journalism, cultural organizing, movement archiving, storytelling labs, local influencers, digital media strategists and the movement leaders and educators who bridge movements to public understanding. This is the civic infrastructure that helps communities shape, hold and defend truth.
In today’s democracy crisis, narrative is where the battle for the future is being fought — and too often lost. Too many funders have lost the thread that freedom isn’t inevitable; it must be funded, and narrative is one of our most critical tools for winning.
Today’s movements deserve the same — at scale
We are in the midst of a coordinated narrative collapse. To defend hard-won rights and continue building a more free and fair future, funders must stop asking what infrastructure to support and begin asking, “What am I doing to strengthen and sustain the narrative networks already moving hearts and minds?”
Philanthropy is not neutral. It never has been. Every era of progress — from abolition to civil rights — has been scaffolded by funders willing to back storytellers, media makers and cultural architects shaping public belief. Today, philanthropy once again has the opportunity to strengthen public imagination and action by supporting community organizations doing the most courageous, culturally rooted work — those best-positioned to tell the truth and hold the line. That means making years- and decades-long investments into narrative organizations, supporting cultural workers as civic actors, funding cohorts of media makers embedded in justice movements, and backing local storytelling that deepens trust.
We don’t need to invent a new blueprint — we just need to fund what’s already working, and fund it like it matters. The question isn’t whether to support narrative change. It’s whether we’ll invest in it with the scale, strategy and seriousness the moment demands.
Sadé Dozan is a philanthropic advisor with a particular emphasis on movement infrastructure, racial and gender justice, and resource equity. She is the Vice President of Advancement at Borealis Philanthropy and the founder of Melanate — an initiative centering Black women in wealth and resource movement work.
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