NARRATIVE RESILIENCE
Culturally Responsive Learning Design
Abolitionist Pedagogies
Organization-Community Partnerships
Education Justice
Narrative Strategy
Digital Organizing
Message Testing
Intersectional Communications
Media Training
HI, I’M ELLIS
(they/them/elle)
I'm a narrative strategist and educational consultant invested in opportunities to drive intersectional communications work with greater knowledge, deeper collaboration, and more kaleidoscopic strategy. I have worked with non-profit and philanthropic organizations, advocates, practitioners, and grassroots groups to shift perspectives and policy, create organizational change strategy, and build partnerships that center community-driven decision-making.
I bring a broad range of experience building strategic digital organizing supports for grassroots organizers to develop radically responsive communications. I lead organizations through messaging work that rises to this moment of cultural warfare to underscore cross-movement connections and shared values that hold us together through feelings of crisis and powerlessness. In this work, I build narrative power that dismantles white supremacist infrastructure and disrupts the liberalist custodial violence that maintains it.
I advocate for decarceral and restorative practices in collaboration with community and youth organizers who are addressing social justice issues in schools. I have been designing learning through abolitionist pedagogies and developing cross-disciplinary programs in hybrid learning environments for twelve years.
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“The present moment clearly demands a convening of radical pedagogical energies that can build the collective human power, epistemic and knowledge apparatuses, and material sites of learning that are the precondition of authentic and liberatory social transformations.” -Dylan Rodriguez
BUILDING MOVEMENTS
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Narrative Justice
Narrative builds power for people, or it is not useful at all. Meaningful narrative change is not possible without the amplification of marginalized voices to create leverage over those who maintain the unjust rules and norms that shape society. It means having the power to defeat established oppressive systems that seek to close down the opportunities we need to open up to achieve real impact at the policy, community and individual levels.
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Youth Allyship
I advocate for community-based pedagogy to work toward transformative social change in collaboration with youth-centered and youth-led grassroots organizations who are addressing social justice issues in schools and communities. For those involved within intergenerational organizing, respect and trust must be mutually earned to mitigate barriers between young people and adult allies. Adult allies and community elders should not situate their own ideas or expectations for resistance, but use their power to carve out space for youth organizers to develop relevant methods to dismantle oppressive systems.
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Decarcerating Learning
Schools serve as carceral institutions, or arms of the school and prison nexus in which students are actively controlled and disciplined rather than educated throughout the day, and not even by trusted adults they have relationships with, but by real police officers posted at their schools. In cities with the majority of students coming from historically disinvested Black and Brown communities, or immigrant and refugee communities, where there should be school-based wraparound services to support non-academic needs in addition to academic needs, these schools are now paying city police salaries.
Organizational Partners
