Messages alone don’t change minds. Neither do facts. Where facts and messages are most effective is in the context of relationships, lived experiences, and actions that change people’s immediate surroundings and lives. Messages and facts only matter in the context of a movement that is building power. 

Informational power establishes sustained, proactive community control over the facts and information that we need in order to struggle and survive, and that inform how we make sense of the world together, and the actions we take to shape our futures. 

In this new report, Interrupting Criminalization’s Journalism Fellow Lewis Raven Wallace explores the need for informational power and informational infrastructure on the left, through profiles of five local abolitionist organizing efforts and four movement media and information projects. It explores how we are already building this kind of power locally, and poses questions about what nationally networked informational infrastructure might look like and how to build and fund it. 

Join IC’s Lewis Raven Wallace and Andrea Ritchie, along with Cayden Mak of Convergence Magazine, and Vivian Anderson of Every Black Girl, for a discussion about building informational power on the left, from ‘zines and local radio to national distribution networks. Organizers, activists, movement media makers, journalists, and funders in those areas are encouraged to attend to learn about this essential framework for defeating authoritarianism!