The blizzard of lawsuits against the Trump regime continues apace. The developments today in a relatively recent one, J.G.G. v. Trump, were truly wild, perhaps the wildest in any of the litigation against the regime so far. Ultimately, the best way to understand the executive branch's actions and positions in the case is to see all of them as bid to get the question of executive branch compliance with judicial orders in front of the Supreme Court as quickly as possible, and in a case where Trump is claiming he has vast, unilateral authority because he claims to be acting in the national security context. (He is deploying the same strategy in Perkins Coie v. U.S. Department of Justice.)
IIPP launches Strategic Economics Alliance in Latin America aiming to reshape economic theory and practice
The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose has expanded its Strategic Economics Alliance (SEA) initiative in Latin America through a series of convenings in Mexico and Brazil. These sessions seek to reinforce and deepen IIPP’s existing policy work in the region bringing together women economists, policy practitioners, and civil society leaders to advance new economic thinking and translate theory into transformative policy outcomes.
Transforming Narrative Waters: Growing the practice of deep narrative change in the UK provides background on narrative change practices as well as the opportunities and challenges for narrative work in the UK.
The report examines what it takes to design deep narrative change, how to design narrative interventions, and offers recommendations for building more successful narrative change projects in the UK.
While we might win occasional policy battles, these wins are constantly under attack and in danger of being reversed. We win some battles, but we are losing the war. One of the reasons for this is that we are often working against powerful narratives that are embedded in the overarching culture. Thus we also need to look beyond the policy sphere, as narratives are embedded in the larger culture and in institutions. They shape the way in which problems and priorities are identified; they limit the types of solutions that are viewed as acceptable and possible, and determine how certain types of people are categorized and treated. – Brett Davidson
Contents
Introduction 04 Defining deep narrative change 07 What it means to do deep narrative change 14 Current practice in the UK 19 Barriers to practice 32 Recommendations 42 Concluding thoughts 60 Sources 61
Value capture is an equitable and efficient funding mechanism to support the development of high speed rail. It ensures that those who benefit the most from high speed rail contribute to its cost.
Starting in 2016, Narrative Initiative began gathering up different ways people talk about narrative change, how it’s structured, and how it moves in the world. As our staff—a team experienced in capacity building, organizing, communications, philosophy and culture work—engage partners and practitioners, we’ve found it helpful to highlight existing terms in use and offer shared terminology where we identify gaps.
Narrative change is a practice that draws on many different disciplines. Some have well established standards, like the legal profession. Others, digital organizing for instance, rely on an evolving set of practices to get the job done.
We and many others are doing the work of “narrative change” every day and, depending on where we’re coming from, we talk about it in many, many different ways.
What is Narrative Change?
A narrative reflects a shared interpretation of how the world works.
Narrative change, writes Brett Davidson, “rests on the premise that reality is socially constructed through narrative, and that in order to bring about change in the world we need to pay attention to the ways in which this takes place.”
The sector is plagued with scandals, from wage theft and conflicts of interest to excessive spending on marketing, travel, and consultants.
Alongside these scandals, Australia’s Vice-Chancellors are some of the highest paid in the world.
A recent Australia Institute submission provides an extensive list of recommendations that would improve university governance.
However, the Australian National University (ANU) has unwittingly shown that a good place to start would be greater use of a powerful existing tool: Senate Estimates.
Last month ANU’s Chancellor Julie Bishop was the subject of questions at Senate Estimates about external consultants and conflict-of-interest processes.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London is undoubtedly one of its worst decisions in the past 20 years. The Court gave state and local governments the option to transfer private property from its rightful owner to another private owner, justifying this as a “public use” since it will supposedly promote “economic development.” Kelo is a classic example of activist judges rationalizing a predetermined result—in this case, overturning the Constitution’s protection of private property rights.
The Court’s decision stripped Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the historic Fort Trumbull neighborhood of their property in order to build an “urban village”—a fact Justice John Paul Stevens breezily dismisses in his opinion, which is a thoroughly unimpressive piece of legal legerdemain. Stevens failed to note that the neighborhood would be bulldozed even though he acknowledged that not only had Kelo lived in her house since 1997, and had made substantial improvements to her property, but that “Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life.” The continued existence of what was apparently a very stable residential area, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of “progress.” Stevens held that the residents and their homes must be sacrificed in the interest of a supposed greater good.
Here is a list of definitions of different organising models, including the snowflake model, strike circles, distributed network, Ganz model, etc. This list of definitions is from an academic paper published in 2025 in The Organizing Journal, which summarises the first known exploration of the community organising landscape across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The list illustrates the combination and evolution of organising models and approaches mentioned by the survey respondents.
The academic paper was developed from a project by the Commons Social Change Library, Australian Conservation Foundation, and Australian Progress which aimed to fill a gap in understanding how advocacy groups organise in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Organising Models
Ganz Model
Marshall Ganz’s organizing model focuses on developing leadership through relationships, storytelling, and strategy.
It emphasizes the importance of building teams, creating shared purpose, and developing the capacity for strategic action. The model combines personal narrative (the “Story of Self”), collective identity (the “Story of Us”), and a vision for change (the “Story of Now”) to motivate and mobilize people for collective action (Ganz 2010).
Australian renters now need an annual income of $130,000 to afford an average rental, with even six-figure earners facing housing costs exceeding 30 percent of their income in capital cities and many regional areas.
The 2025 Priced Out report by national housing campaign Everybody’s Home shows a single person needs to earn at least $130,000 per year to comfortably afford the national weekly asking rent for a typical unit. An even higher income is required to afford the average unit rent across capital cities.
The report, which analyses rental affordability for Australians earning between $40,000 and $130,000 per year, found rental stress has extended well beyond low-income earners.
Campaign Bootcamp was a UK-based charity that gave people the skills, confidence and community to run powerful campaigns. The organisation, which closed in March 2022, ran campaigning trainings for marginalised activists and communities.
This collection of resources charts some of the legacy of Campaign Bootcamp, including parts of their training methodology, content and approach. The resources are free, for anyone to use and adapt. Please note that they are not a complete collection and may be out of date.
You can still access their amazing collection of resources via the legacy website and the Commons Library.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is today announcing the theme for the updated $5 banknote, which will honour the enduring emotional, spiritual, and physical connection of First Nations peoples to Country.
My new book, The Last American Road Trip, comes out April 1 — and I’m going on tour! I will be talking with guest hosts, taking questions from the audience, and signing and personalizing copies of my books.
Tours are nerve-wracking, but meeting my readers has been a highlight of my life and career. It’s exciting to get to see folks face to face and I hope you all can make it! I’m grateful for the independent bookstores that make this tour possible.
Here are the dates, venues, and information.
April 1: St. Louis. Hi-Pointe Theatre at 7:00 PM. Sponsored by Left Bank Books. In conversation with Jason Rosenbaum of St. Louis Public Radio. More information on the Left Bank Books website.
April 7: Seattle. The Elliott Bay Book Company at 7:00 PM. In conversation with Kenny Mayne. Event info here.
April 8: Portland. Powell’s City of Books at 7:00 PM. In conversation with Omar El Akkad, author of the recent bestseller One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Event info here.
This was a talk I gave at the Sanctuary for Independent Media. Thank you to them for hosting me, and allowing my team to upload this talk I gave to The Chris Hedges Report. Visit their YouTube channel, where this originally aired, here.
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist Greg Jericho has charted exactly where home buyers would be if they’d taken Mr. Hockey at his word.
A decade ago, a home buyer needed a deposit of $154,600 to buy a median-priced house in Sydney.
If someone earning the average full-time male wage had saved 15% of every pay packet in the ten years since, they’d have amassed $126,096.
Not only would that have left them well short of their original target, but the growth in house prices means the deposit they’d need now has almost doubled, to $281,500.
So, a decade after setting out to save $154,600, they’d still be $155,404 short.
These notes were compiled from a skillshare session in early 2025 as part of an afternoon of workshops in Musgrave Park, Kurilpa called ‘The Last Sunset’. This convergence of activists and community organisers was organised by volunteers through the Institute of Collaborative Race Research.
This article, originally published here, doesn’t cover how to make and sew together large banners (but you can easily find other resources online covering that).
Hanging a large protest banner or a flag from a bridge or monument is an effective and reasonably simple tactic to draw attention to a cause or show solidarity with a particular struggle.
Here are a few tips that might be useful for anyone planning an action like this…
Prepping your Banner
When hanging large banners (more than around 5m x 5m) off structures where they won’t have a solid wall behind them, it’s important to add some weights to the bottom and cut flaps/holes for the wind.
For a bigger banner – e.g. 10m x 15m – you usually only need 1 or 2 kilograms of weight in total along the bottom to stop it blowing in the wind too much.
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) blames its financial crisis on declining revenue from cleaner, more efficient cars.
The reality is that the agency suffers from chronic overspending on highway megaprojects.
Motor fuel revenue is actually up $100 million per year compared to 2020, but in the past five years, cost overruns on just three Portland area highway expansion projects in amount to nearly $5 billion.
ODOT has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
ODOT’s poor management is to blame for these overruns, and they promise to become worse in the years ahead.
For the record. Joe Cortright, I’m an economist with City Observatory. I’d like to address two issues on the agenda today. They have to do with finance and climate.
Today was tough. Too many Democratic Senators caved, enabling the passage of a truly horrible six month spending bill favored by the Republicans. While that was unfolding on the Senate floor, Donald Trump personally visited the Justice Department and singled out individual U.S. lawyers by name, putting targets on the backs of Norm Eisen and Marc Elias, two attorneys who have had great success litigating against the Trump regimes, among many other achievements in their outstanding careers. Then, to cap off the day, Trump targeted another law firm for retaliation, this time yanking the security clearances of attorneys at Paul, Weiss.
Two monumental events have shaken the U.S. foreign policy establishment since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. They took place at roughly the same time, but few have recognized their connection.
The first was the widespread exposure of USAID as the “world’s hipster vanguard of globalist, cultural Marxist revolution,” in the words of J. Michael Waller. When it wasn’t outright funding jihadist terrorism, USAID redirected billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to left-wing organizers promoting LGBTQ radicalism, anti-racism, climate change, and every other imaginable progressive policy around the globe.
While “charity” CEOs living in taxpayer-funded luxury wailed about how cuts would cost lives, the debate among the online Right was about burning USAID to the ground and salting the earth, or perhaps repurposing some form of foreign aid to support an America First foreign policy agenda.
I’ve been asked why demagoguery rises and falls, more than once by people who like the “disruption” theory—that demagoguery is the consequence of major social disruption. The short version is that events create a set and severity of crises that “normal” politics and “normal” political discourse seem completely incapable of ameliorating, let alone solving. People feel themselves to be in a “state of exception” when things they would normally condemn seem attractive—anti-democratic practices, purifying of a community through ethnic/political cleansing, authoritarianism, open violation of constitutional protections.
Pretending Work-from-Home Never Happened. Oregon and Washington highway department’s are planning for a $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Project based on assumptions that pretend that the Covid pandemic and work-from-home have done nothing to change predicted travel patterns. They claim that unreferenced and apparently entirely mythical “industry standards” require them to ignore everything that has happened since 2019, even though a wealth of data shows that commuting and travel patterns have permanently changed.
Understand how progressive organisations navigate the complexities of community organising in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
This overview of an academic paper published in 2025 in The Organizing Journal summarises the first known exploration of the community organising landscape across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
The academic paper was developed from a project by the Commons Social Change Library, Australian Conservation Foundation, and Australian Progress which aimed to fill a gap in understanding how advocacy groups organise in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
The researchers invited 97 groups across the two countries that engage in community organising, and 24 of those group responses.
These were groups that mainly worked on
climate change (44%),
political issues like democratic rights and unions (29%),
environmental concerns (21%), and
social issues (4%).
By examining these survey responses, the research team uncovered patterns in how different groups structure their organising work and the common hurdles they face along the way.
Findings
One of the main findings is that these groups use a bespoke mix of community organising approaches. Most of them use mixed approaches that blend local, relationship-based organising with centralised professional support.
The Australian Government’s latest report into the state of live music – “Am I Ever Gonna See You Live Again?” – makes some great recommendations, including for:
tax offsets to be given to venues that host live music;
training and education programs to help foster a love of music among young people;
a rebate or voucher scheme to incentivise younger audiences to attend live music (which, as Australia Institute research has shown, is an approach that has been successful in Europe).
But, for these recommendations to have any weight, they’ll need to be backed up with adequate funding; the March budget is an opportunity for just that.
It’s the question progressives are all asking: how can we grab the opportunity presented by the 2025 Australian Federal election to steer the public narrative – in the media, on the streets and online – in the direction of care and connectedness for people and nature?
No matter what policies or campaigns we’re working on, our messages can influence the election outcome for good at this crucial time.
But there’s no doubt we’re up against it.
Organisations like Advance are prepared to spend millions to promote a very different story – one based on the neoliberal ideals of wealth accumulation, competition and social power for a selected ‘in-group’. Even a glance at the news from the USA shows we can’t dismiss their appeal to the voting public – especially when it’s all they’re hearing.
So what the heck can we do? What must we do, if we want to gain traction for our ideas, our policy asks, and our own worldview?
The good news is that plenty of very astute thinkers have been applying themselves to this very question.
Narrative Lessons
Here are some important narrative lessons for progressives in Australia in 2025.
“[T]he love of fame,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, is “the ruling passion of the noblest minds” (Federalist 72). But—also in the noblest minds—passion bows politely to reason, and the love of fame is tempered by love of the true and the good. Fame is the height of honor on the grandest scale, and the noblest minds will want to be honored only for what is most worthy of honor. They don’t seek the applause of fickle opinion here and now, but the respect of the wise and good of all times and places; ultimately, they want to be measured by what is worthy in the eyes of God.
What is most worthy of honor deserves to be remembered. “Old men forget,” as Shakespeare’s King Henry V proclaims at Agincourt, “yet all shall be forgot,” before oblivion shrouds in darkness the most worthy deeds. These will be remembered “from this day to the ending of the world.”
No human deed, in the whole “course of human events,” surpasses the American Revolution—bringing forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Rightly will the names of those happy few, that band of brothers—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams—be remembered to the ending of the world.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss new research showing just how difficult it is to save for a house deposit and the political response to Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 13 March 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
BIPOC Cholbe | The Roundtable Ep. 258
First, they came for the green card-holding terror groupies—then they came for…us? Not exactly. But the recent detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest organizer who fought “for the total eradication of Western Civilization,” has prompted cries of fascism. Again. Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom sheds his skin and snakes his way toward the center of the political spectrum: best not be fooled! This week, the guys discuss the antisemitic venom poisoning some young right-wingers, the ongoing disarray of Democrats; and more! Plus: a batch of media recommendations.
Prosper Australia was proud to join with Per Capita and a host of other organisations across the community sector in presenting the 2025 Community Tax Summit. Held in the richly historic Trades Hall, the Community Tax Summit was a two-day conference that brought together researchers, advocates, people with lived experience, and economists to examine how […]
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, by Strong Towns member Eli Smith on The Faith-Based Housing Initiative Substack.It is shared here with permission. Header image provided by the writer.
In 2015 former Treasurer Joe Hockey suggested to buy a house you just needed a “good job that pays good money”
Ten years on new research shows that had a person on the average full-time male earnings in each state been saving 15% of their after-tax income, they would still be unable to afford a deposit on a median-priced house.
Worse than that, in Sydney they would have gone backwards. At the end of 2014 they would have needed a deposit of $154,600, but by the end of 2024 after saving $126,00 for 10 years they would still need an extra $155,404 in order to afford a 20% deposit on the median-priced house in Sydney.
As people have saved, the price of houses – and the size of the deposit needed – has kept going up, even faster.
In politics, as in life, winning is better than losing. But some losses are worse than others. An especially damaging defeat creates a situation that is both hard to endure and hard to change.
This is the Democratic Party’s dilemma after the 2024 election: It suffered a bad defeat. An important cause of that defeat was that the party had embraced and become identified with a social justice ideology that offends more voters than it attracts. To become more politically competitive by becoming less politically correct is, under the circumstances, clearly advisable but also highly improbable.
A Win Is a Win
First, the election. Republicans retained a majority in the House of Representatives, with a 220- to 215-seat advantage, after a net loss of two seats. By gaining four seats, the GOP also captured control of the Senate with a workable but not dominating 53-47 majority. Finally, the party won the presidency with a 49.8% to 48.3% popular vote plurality and won 58% of the Electoral College: 312 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 226.
The Interstate Bridge Project’s traffic projections pretend that the massive shift to “work-from-home” never happened
The IBR traffic projections rely almost entirely on pre-Covid-pandemic data, and ignore the dramatic change in travel patterns.
Traffic on I-5 is still 7 percent below pre-pandemic levels, according to Oregon DOT data
Commuting between Portland and Vancouver has fallen by half since 2019 according to Metro
Traffic on the I-5 bridge is lower today that the purported 2005 baseline for the Columbia River Crossing project (135,000 vehicles per day)
Post-covid travel analyses have shown a permanent shift toward lower growth in vehicle miles traveled
State DOTs claim that mythical “industry standards” require them to ignore everything that’s happened since 2019, including the effect of work-from-home
The Interstate Bridge Replacement project’s traffic and revenue forecasts appear to be built on increasingly shaky ground. New data from an array of sources shows that post-pandemic travel patterns have dramatically diverged from pre-pandemic trends, calling into question the fundamental assumptions underlying the multi-billion dollar project. Commuting patterns are different, traffic is now lower, and growing more slowly than prior to the pandemic, contrary to the assumptions built into IBR traffic projections.
Any account of the decades-long occupation of Palestine from a Palestinian is immediately expected to be refined within a specific lens to appeal to the pathos of Western society. Well meaning activists, journalists and politicians may intend to share the stories of Palestinians, but too often end up curating them into a digestible format, one adjacent to the truth rather than one that embodies the whole of it. In other words, society forces Palestinians to justify and format their identities, experiences and traumas in order to be seen. Yet through this process, crucial pieces of their stories are sacrificed.
