What is the Network?
The Progressive Communicators Network exists to strengthen and amplify the power, voices, and vision of grassroots movements that are working for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice. Network members use communication strategy, framing and messaging, and media tools to: 1) enhance the influence of social change movements on public policy and opinion; and 2) realize a world without poverty, racism, and other forms of oppression. The Network is a project of Spirit in Action, a movement-building support organization located in western Massachusetts.
What does the Network do?
The Network serves and is directed by the needs of progressive communicators who are bringing grassroots voices and proposals to the public sphere. Three strategies are central to our current work:
- Connect and sustain progressive communicators. Through national gatherings, regional organizing, and listservs, the Network creates spaces and mechanisms for communicators to ask for help, share resources, and engage in peer-to-peer learning.
- Cultivating collaboration between communicators, grassroots organizations, and structures and leadership arising from communities of struggle. Collaboration is a key ingredient of building effective, creative, and powerful movements for broad-based social change. Communications for social justice cannot be achieved by individual communicators or communications "think tanks" isolated from organizations conducting or supporting grassroots organizing on the ground. In the past few years, the Network's support for this work has resulted in on-going working groups, projects, and coalitions as well as regional groupings of communicators.
- Advance the field of strategic communications. While progressives are increasingly interested in communication, there is often a lack of understanding of the field's complexity, and how to use different aspects of communication to support change making. The Network seeks to raise understanding of and support for strategic communication as a critical and underresourced part of effective communication change work.
How Do I Get Involved?
At the center of the Network are the relationships that exist among communicators interested in stimulating social change and increasing awareness of, and capacity for, communications as a critical tool for change work. Right now there are two ways to join the Network:
- Connect with an existing regional group - or form one of your own. We will connect you with an existing Network chapter or help you locate one of our peer organizations. If nothing exists in your area, we can support you form a Network chapter.
- Attend the Network's national gathering. Each year (usually in June), the Network gathers a diverse group of communicators to meet peers from across the country, share best practices and develop skills, and explore the possibility of cooperative and collaborative work. The size of the gathering is kept small so that people can meet and engage meaningfully with fellow participants.
Contact Carolyn Cushing (carolyn@progressivecommunicators.net) for more information or visit the PCN website at www.progressivecommunicators.net.