a link list ↦ shared knowledge
Communication for social change isn't invented anew each day. It has history, judgment and memory. It's learned, practised and shared.
Here I gather part of what has guided me over nearly twenty years of practice: readings, guides, cases, tools and organisations that help you communicate from rights, with the cause at the centre.
It doesn't say everything; it helps you look better. Six shifts in perspective for rethinking what we communicate, where we do it from, with whom and what for.
Branding sets you apart. Identity says who you are and why.
How do you explain who you are without putting the brand ahead of what you want to change?
A brand is a tool, not the centre. When it serves the mission, it helps bring coherence to what an organisation says, does and decides. That coherence is built outwards and inwards alike: no story can stand in for practices that contradict it.
by Montse Santolino
A still-relevant critique of the model that reduces NGO communication to visibility and fundraising. Santolino argues for reclaiming it as a space of power: to contest imaginaries, politicise causes and act as agents of social change.
ReadPDFESby Kylander & Stone · SSIR
The Brand IDEA model: a brand aligned with the mission, built with integrity and shared across the whole team, not an image exercise.
Readby Marta Pulgar · L'Apòstrof
What does it mean to communicate from inside a rights organisation? Lessons from nine years at Arrels: the count of people sleeping rough, the Localitzador, and the X account @Placido_Mo. Three practices for listening, making visible, and opening space for people to tell their own reality in the first person.
Read the articleCAdriven by the Sindicat Popular de Venedors Ambulants de Barcelona
Here the brand doesn't cover up the conflict: it tells it. Top Manta creates dignified work, sustains the anti-racist struggle and builds its own narrative against criminalisation. Identity, economy and advocacy in a single piece.
Find outNo one needs to be given a voice. What's usually missing is space, listening and the power to be heard.
Who decides what gets told, how it's told, and what's left out?
People are not a narrative resource or an audience to be moved in a direction. They are rights-holders and agents of change. Transformative communication creates the conditions for them to take part in the story, the decisions and the outcomes — with informed consent, context and care.
by Coordinadora de ONGD
The Spanish benchmark against paternalistic imagery and 'speaking for': dignity, not pity.
ConsultESby Lafede.cat
Seventeen recommendations for communicating from your transformation goals, not from easy impact.
ReadPDFCAby EnxarxadESS
A free, practical manual written from within the social economy: participatory, values-based communication.
ReadPDFCAby Bond · 2024
Anti-racist criteria for producing images and stories with consent: the people portrayed as collaborators in the communication, not as material.
Consultself-organised hotel room cleaners
'The woman who cleans' stops being invisible and becomes a subject: workers who represent themselves, name themselves, and write their own law. From audience to protagonist.
Find outESNo narrative is neutral: every way of explaining a problem makes some responses more thinkable and others less.
Does your story only seek a reaction, or does it also help people understand the causes and imagine alternatives?
Advocacy doesn't mean giving up on emotion or persuasion. It means doing so without manipulating: connecting experience, data and context; showing the structural causes; and opening up paths to action. Narratives aren't a wrapper around social change. They're part of it.
by Quepo · Oxfam Intermón · Lafede · UJI
The third sector's reference guide on narrative change, from the social economy: hegemonic vs. dissident narratives, narrative and power, and a decolonial communication toolkit.
Explore the guideESby Fundación porCausa
Replacing both the frame of fear and the frame of pity with the frame of what unites us: narratives that start from community, not from threat or charity.
ConsultESby FrameWorks Institute
The science of framing: how you frame a problem shapes how people think about it.
Readby FrameWorks Institute · 2025
The difference between changing the narrative and 'communicating better': how to approach narrative change strategically and for the long term.
Readby PIRC · Common Cause Foundation
Values and frames for campaigns: mobilising from intrinsic values, not self-interest.
Readby LatFem · 2024
Framing and narratives from Southern feminism: widen the conversation, don't win the argument. Fresh and situated beyond the Anglo canon.
ConsultESby Barcelona City Council
Dismantling rumours with data, conversation and community work, not emotional appeals. A model later replicated by the Council of Europe.
Find outCAby ONGAWA
The how of advocacy: designing, running and evaluating a mobilisation campaign.
ReadPDFESby More in Common España
The disarming fact: the first layer of polarisation is perceived, not real. A basis for building narratives of encounter instead of trenches.
ReadPDFESby Obertament
Reporting on mental health from rights and the first person, without stigma or sensationalism.
ConsultCAmovement of those affected
From individual shame ('you didn't know') to collective right ('it's not a crisis, it's a scam'): the reframing that turned thousands of private cases into a public cause, with those affected as protagonists.
Find outESpeople who rent
They explicitly reject a 'paternalistic' tone and victimhood: they communicate collective power and victories, not vulnerability. Advocacy to reverse the balance of power.
Find outCACentre Irídia
Culture as a space for advocacy: art and human rights against the culture of hate, with proceeds funding support for victims of institutional violence.
Find outAnd, for narrative power at scale, two Latin American platforms: Puentes (narrative infrastructure for social-justice movements) and El Inspiratorio (its training school).
Clicks can be counted. Cultural change is observed, interpreted, and takes time.
What signs would tell you a narrative is starting to shift, beyond the reach of a single piece?
Measuring transformative communication isn't about giving up counting, but about knowing what's worth counting and what can only be understood by combining indicators, listening and time. Reach can be useful, but on its own it doesn't tell you whether the frames, conversations, practices or decisions have changed.
Quepo · 6 conversations · 2025 · in Catalan
Six in-depth conversations on transformative communication with those who think the field: Eloísa Nos (UJI, the mother of the 'cultural efficacy' concept), Simona Levi (Xnet), Eileen Truax (migration and narratives), Víctor Sampedro, Montse Santolino… To watch and listen, not just read.
by Lafede.cat
The origin of the concept: measuring communication by its capacity to shift imaginaries, not by reach.
ConsultCAby ORS Impact
How to translate 'changing the narrative' into observable signals, without falling into vanity metrics.
Consultby SSIR
Four layers for measuring narrative change: from message all the way to culture and structures.
ReadChannels make decisions too: about what's seen, what data is collected and who we depend on.
Is the infrastructure you use consistent with the rights and bonds you want to defend?
Communicating from your values also means looking at the tools. It isn't always possible to leave the big platforms, but you can reduce dependencies, reclaim your own channels and make conscious choices about privacy, accessibility, environmental footprint and free software.
CoopCamp · write-up
Communicating the social economy without submitting to the algorithm: the write-up of the event, with federated-network and proximity-channel alternatives.
ReadPDFCAethical, solidarity-based internet
Hosting, email and domains for organisations, on free software and 'zero-km' servers. Since 1993.
VisitCAcooperative phone & internet
Who owns the cable and the SIM is also a political choice: a not-for-profit cooperative for ethical phone and internet.
VisitCAfemProcomuns
The cooperative cloud: Nextcloud, email, forms and video calls. And you're a member-owner, not a product.
VisitFramasoft
The directory for detoxing from Big Tech, with proven free alternatives (PeerTube, Mobilizon…).
ExploreFediverse
A decentralised network: instead of a single commercial algorithm governing the whole conversation, each server is autonomous and talks to the rest.
Find outfree newsletters
A free, self-hostable newsletter manager: a channel of your own, with no middleman between you and the people who want to read you.
Find outweb analytics
Open, self-hostable analytics: understand how you're read without handing over your readers' data.
Find outby Donestech
Online gender-based violence as a structural problem, not 'misuse': tools and criteria to understand and counter it, with care at the centre. Bilingual.
ConsultESby Marga Padilla
A foundational Spanish-language text on network autonomy and cyber-activism, written by a Sindominio hacker. The genealogy of technological sovereignty.
ReadESby SWDM
Coherence is environmental too: how to estimate and reduce the carbon footprint of what you publish.
Consultby W3C
Accessibility isn't a technical finish: it's a condition of the right to communicate. Standards and resources to make it possible.
ConsultAnd, as the movement's framework and community: Xnet (digital rights and data sovereignty), SobTec (the technological sovereignty congress) and Colectic (technology for social transformation, with an educational angle).
When knowledge circulates and alliances are cared for, the capacity to transform grows.
What could you share or build with other organisations that you couldn't sustain alone?
No organisation transforms a system on its own. Cooperating isn't just adding logos: it's sharing resources, judgment and decision-making power; acknowledging conflicts; and taking the time to care for the agreements that make collective action possible.
communication cooperative for social change
The cooperative model applied to the craft: communication as strategy, community and mobilisation, not marketing.
VisitCAcooperative media network
Cooperative media outlets sharing infrastructure and capacity for action to strengthen communication as a commons.
Find outCAL'Enxarxada SCCL
Training, a manual and support for organisations without a communication department. Mutual aid turned into a school.
VisitCAXarxa d'Economia Solidària
The node where communicators in the social economy share judgment and strategy instead of competing.
VisitCAXarxa d'Economia Solidària
The solidarity economy making itself visible and communicating itself, in common: a fair that is both showcase and act of collective communication.
Find outCACommunication for social change has a plural genealogy, with a decisive contribution from Latin American thought. Freire, Beltrán, Kaplún, Alfaro and Martín-Barbero questioned the idea of communicating as one-way transmission, and put dialogue, participation and communities' capacity to make meaning and transform reality at the centre. The path this page traces doesn't begin here; without these roots it would be incomplete.
by Paulo Freire
The founding distinction: to communicate is not to extend knowledge in one direction (extension), but to hold dialogue.
DetailsESby Luis Ramiro Beltrán
The manifesto of horizontal communication: access, dialogue and participation as a right, against the vertical sender→receiver model.
ReadESby Mario Kaplún
Latin American popular communication: communicating is a shared process, not an effect you produce.
DetailsESby Rosa María Alfaro
Communication as relationship, not as media, in the service of 'another development'. An essential voice from Calandria (Peru).
ReadPDFESby Jesús Martín-Barbero
The turn that shifts the gaze from media (devices) to mediations: culture, everyday life, popular reception.
DetailsESby Gumucio-Dagron & Tufte (eds.)
An extensive anthology gathering the field's written memory, from its roots to contemporary debates.
DetailsESby Alfonso Gumucio Dagron · Rockefeller
Fifty cases of participatory communication from around the world; a report that helped consolidate the field.
ConsultUniversitat Jaume I
The author's own academic lineage: communication, civil society and social change from a culture of peace.
Find outESQuito, since 1959
The historic centre of Latin American communication thought and its journal, Chasqui.
VisitEScommunity radio
The worldwide community radio movement: the right to communicate, on air.
VisitESeducational radio
Educational radio and popular communication in Latin America, a direct heir to Freire and Kaplún.
VisitESglobal knowledge network
The living, widely cited hub for communication for development and social change.
VisitShared knowledge has no full stop. It grows when we test practices, revisit frames and share what we learn.
If you know a resource that should be here, I'd love to read it. And if any of these shifts touches a conversation your organisation has been putting off, we can talk.
Links checked in July 2026.