What if philanthropy stopped funding individual stories and instead invested in relationships, creative infrastructure, and cultural archives capable of shifting public imagination for generations? That is the question Deaconess Foundation began asking nearly two years ago.
The question emerged from what a pattern we were seeing across St. Louis and the Midwest, communities were dealing with repetitive crises: catastrophic tornados, historic flooding, environmental pollution and more broadly, the impact of racial injustices. In that communities have self-organized to care for one another and heal and producing extraordinary art, films, organizing, research, oral histories, and public storytelling in response to defining moments of civic and racial reckoning. Stemming from those efforts generated new leaders, strengthened relationships, and expanded the region’s capacity for collaboration. Yet too often, the olive branches stopped there as the knowledge, trust, and creative energy forged through those moments remained fragmented, under-resourced, and disconnected once the immediate crisis passed. We saw communities going back into their siloes when interconnectedness needs to remain activated and galvanized.
At the same time, philanthropy has often approached narrative as a communications product to be commissioned: a campaign, documentary, messaging strategy, or social media initiative, rather than as long-term civic infrastructure requiring sustained investment. We realized that investment was just as important in cultivating the relationships, shared learning, and creative ecosystem that make narrative power possible over time.
Creating the Space to Build Trust
This strategic inquiry led Deaconess Foundation to partner with narrative strategist Shantell Hinton to translate the foundation’s vision into what has become the Liberation Lab. Working alongside the leadership of Bethany Johnson-Javois and Constance Harper, the collaboration designed a nine-month experience that brings together artists, organizers, filmmakers, writers, and cultural strategists to build narrative power as community infrastructure. Rather than commissioning isolated creative projects, the Lab creates space to build trust across disciplines, strengthen narrative and media practice, and co-create work that contributes to a living ecosystem of Black cultural memory and public imagination.
Lasting systems change requires more than compelling stories. It requires durable relationships, shared practices, and creative ecosystems that allow narrative work to continue long after individual projects end.
In many ways, the Liberation Lab is less about producing individual narrative assets than it is about cultivating the connective tissue that allows communities to carry forward their stories, strategies, and relationships long after a fellowship concludes. If philanthropy is serious about shifting the conditions that shape how communities are understood, resourced, and remembered, it must invest in stories and the infrastructure that enables those stories.
The main goal of this narrative strategy is to answer: What kinds of relationships, practices, and narrative ecosystems must exist for lasting systems change to become possible? It intentionally moves participants from individual storytelling toward collective strategy, shared language, and cultural solidarity rooted in the long view of liberation.
Throughout the learning journey, participants engage through a private Narrative Network portal that functions as a shared learning common. In addition to supporting cohort collaboration, the portal houses a growing Liberation Library featuring narrative strategy frameworks, constituent analysis tools, messaging guides, media training resources, and other practical materials curated to strengthen storytelling for social impact. As Narrative Network continues to evolve, portions of this resource hub will be expanded into a public repository that shares lessons, creative artifacts, and field-building resources beyond the Liberation Lab itself.
Lasting systems change requires more than compelling stories. It requires durable relationships, shared practices, and creative ecosystems that allow narrative work to continue long after individual projects end. One of the greatest insights emerging from the Liberation Lab is that while the nine-month learning journey is incredibly valuable, it is the relationships, trust, and unexpected collaborations that continue to develop between participants that hold the greatest potential for long-term impact. As new partnership opportunities with journalists, artists, cultural institutions, and creative collaborators continue to emerge, we are discovering that sustained narrative infrastructure must extend beyond a fellowship model. It must create ongoing spaces where stories, people, and ideas continue to meet, evolve, and generate new possibilities together.
At its core, the Liberation Lab advances the belief that narrative change is not a communications function but rather a power-building strategy. By investing in the people, practices, and cultural infrastructure that shape public imagination, the work seeks to cultivate narratives rooted in humanity, interdependence, and possibility, creating the conditions for communities to build a more just future.
Black futurity asks us to move beyond documenting what has happened to Black communities and instead cultivate the stories, cultural artifacts, institutions, relationships, and public imagination capable of shaping what becomes possible next.
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Funding Black Futurity
As philanthropy increasingly searches for ways to support Black futures beyond traditional grantmaking, the Narrative Network also raises an emerging question for the sector: What would it mean to fund Black futurity through narrative archiving and public imagination?
Not simply preserving history after movements happen, but investing in the living cultural artifacts, films, publications, oral histories, and creative collaborations that future generations will inherit as evidence of how communities imagined themselves free.
We use the term “Black futurity” to describe the ongoing practice of imagining, creating, and investing in futures where Black communities are not defined primarily by oppression or survival, but by abundance, creativity, belonging, and self-determination. Black futurity asks us to move beyond documenting what has happened to Black communities and instead cultivate the stories, cultural artifacts, institutions, relationships, and public imagination capable of shaping what becomes possible next.
Within the Narrative Network, Black futurity is expressed through documentary film, community archives, editorial collectives, oral histories, immersive exhibitions, and collaborative storytelling that preserve not only the memory of survival but also the imagination of liberation. It invites philanthropy to invest not simply in solving today’s problems, but in nurturing the cultural infrastructure that future generations will inherit.
That work is already taking shape through a remarkable cohort of cultural leaders who are co-creating narrative assets that extend beyond individual artistic practice into a broader ecosystem of cultural memory, movement building, and public imagination.
Among this year’s flagship projects are a place-based short film featuring three St. Louis neighborhoods, led by filmmaker Cami Thomas and the My Friends and I cohort; a polyvocal magazine, led by Trevor Smith and the BLIS Collective; and a multi-genre magazine and visual poetic, led by Stevie Selby and the Warm Cookies of the Revolution cohort.
While each project is distinct, together they contribute to a shared ecosystem of cultural memory that documents community wisdom, expands public imagination, and reimagines narratives rooted in abundance, belonging, and collective care.
Developed through nine months of collaborative learning, media training, narrative strategy, and cross-cohort synthesis, these projects represent more than individual creative works. Together, they demonstrate how artists, organizers, and community leaders can co-create an interconnected ecosystem of narrative infrastructure that preserves cultural memory while making space for new futures to emerge.
Ultimately, the Narrative Network reflects a different theory of philanthropic investment. It suggests that lasting systems change requires more than funding communications campaigns or isolated creative projects. It requires sustained investment in the cultural capacity of communities to imagine, create, preserve, and pass forward narratives that shape how future generations understand themselves and what they believe is possible. If that is true, then the next evolution of philanthropy is not simply to fund stories. It is to help build the conditions from which transformative stories, and transformative futures, can continuously emerge.
