Learning Infrastructure for a National Narrative Change Consortium
ROLE
Synthesis Lead & Communications Strategist
CLIENT
YEAR
CoCreative / Mindsets Consortium
2024–2025
summary
An 18-month engagement building the learning and communications infrastructure for a national consortium of leading narrative change practitioners.
Six leading organizations working at the intersection of narrative change, racial equity, and health equity—Berkeley Media Studies Group, FrameWorks Institute, Harmony Labs, Narrative Initiative, Race Forward, and the Radical Communicators Network—came together in 2024 to form the Mindsets Consortium, an action-learning collaboration designed to advance more effective, aligned, and coordinated efforts to shift the mindsets that sustain structural racism and undermine health equity. Supported by a major national health foundation and managed by CoCreative, the Consortium was designed as a three-year experiment in field-level collaboration: organizations with different frameworks, strategies, audiences, and even foundational definitions of key concepts (narrative, mindset, frame) working together toward what none could accomplish alone.
CoCreative engaged me to serve as the Consortium's synthesis lead and internal communications strategist across the first 18 months of that experiment. The challenge was to surface collective insight and shared learning from a group of organizations working from different vantage points—and to do so in a way that held productive tension and that kept six organizations informed, aligned, and moving forward across months of iterative, non-linear work. The content itself demanded complexity-conscious handling. These were not organizations with minor tactical differences but with distinct theories of change, different relationships to research and action, and different positions on fundamental questions about how narrative shift happens and who it serves.
The engagement required operating at multiple registers simultaneously, including producing real-time synthesis after each Consortium session, building and maintaining an internal communications infrastructure, contributing to the design and production of in-person convenings, and ultimately synthesizing 18 months of collective learning into a final deliverable that could serve as both a record of the Consortium's development and a resource for the field.
key contributions
01
Attended and produced monthly sessions of the full Consortium and Stewarding Team—managing logistics, recording, and contributing to real-time synthesis—and produced highlights and insights reports following each session that surfaced collective patterns, named emerging tensions, and tracked the evolution of the group's shared thinking over time
02
Developed and executed an internal communications strategy across email and Slack to keep six member organizations informed, aligned, and in productive dialogue between sessions
03
Contributed to the design and project management of three in-person Consortium convenings in Washington, D.C., Princeton, NJ, and Denver, CO—including communications, attendance tracking, and travel logistics—and provided real-time synthesis at the first two events
04
Synthesized 18 months of collective learning into the final deliverable, Mindsets Consortium: Insights From 18 Months of Sharing, tracing the Consortium's evolution from foundational identity work through deeper explorations of difference, practical learning applications, and engagement with the broader ecosystem of mindset practitioners
impact
The monthly highlights and insights reports created a sustained record of emerging thinking in real time, building the foundation for the final synthesis and keeping the Consortium's developmental arc visible and legible to all involved.
The final deliverable captured how six organizations with different frameworks and approaches evolved from an initial focus on foundational questions of identity and process toward more coordinated action and external impact—preserving collective learning that would otherwise have remained distributed across dozens of session outputs, side conversations, and individual reflections. Produced at the close of CoCreative's engagement, the document served as a waypoint in the Consortium's ongoing three-year work—a record of what the first 18 months made possible and a foundation for what would follow.
The engagement demonstrates what complexity-conscious communications can produce in a collaborative learning context: a synthesis practice that holds difference without resolving it prematurely, and a communications infrastructure that keeps complex, multi-organizational work coherent and moving forward across an extended timeline.
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Testimonial
“I love working with Jessica. She's insightful but humble, confident but curious, and always open to ideas from others for telling stories in ways that shift both hearts and minds. It's a rare gift to be able to convey the complexity of systemic challenges but do so in a way that is warm, enlivening, and very human. I'm grateful that Jessica embodies these two capacities so fully.”
— Russ Gaskin, CoCreative