Accelerating Social Change
How the I-Belong Fund Shifts Narratives To Shift Power
From a social media post by Adriana Zehbrauskas and Aliento Arizona: Growing up in a mixed-status family, Angel would travel back and forth from Mexico to the U.S. with his brother, parents, and grandma and remembers at a young age when his grandparents made sacrifices to support building a better livelihood for them. Angel is a recent first-generation graduate of Arizona State University with a degree in biomedical engineering. He has been a community member of Arizona since he was four years old.
If I could take you back to 2019 — to a learning delegation trip I took to border towns on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border — you’d hear the disruptive, polarizing disinformation that painted immigrants as threats.
But you’d also hear something else: hope, and a deep hunger for empathy and human decency. Tides’ Immigrants Belong (I-Belong) Fund and our narrative change work were born at that moment — a time when I knew that the extreme right’s tactics of chaos, fear, and exclusion could only be met with humanizing stories that build bridges.
That experience shaped how I and the I-Belong Fund see the power of narrative change today: a response to disinformation but also as a tool to build connection and capacity.
Why Narrative Change Is the Missing Link in Social Change
Narrative is like the air we breathe. It informs the patterns we use to make sense of the world — often repeated in media, digital spaces, TV, news, radio, movies, books, art, science, and more — yet we hardly notice it at work. How we make sense of the world then dictates how we act in the world, meaning that if, for example, we are repeatedly told that immigrants are dangerous, we may be less inclined to protect them.
Narrative change is the work of shifting the stories, beliefs, and assumptions that shape how people see the world and one another. It disrupts harmful messaging — in the I-Belong Fund’s case, anti-immigrant rhetoric — but it also affirms that America’s greatest strength lies in its diversity and inclusion. Shifting a narrative can take decades, but once it changes, it’s catalytic.
“Policy doesn’t change until the conversation around the issues shift,” says Shauna Siggelkow, vice president of programs at Define American, the I-Belong Fund’s lead facilitator. “We need to shift hearts and minds, and the way to do that is through storytelling.”
How the I-Belong Fund Is Rewriting the Story
For every harmful narrative that spreads online, there are people working tirelessly to write a different story that affirms our shared humanity instead of exploiting our divisions. The I-Belong Fund catalyzes that shift through three foundational understandings:
- Build on what works: The Fund draws on narrative research and communications initiatives shared across the immigrant justice movement, accelerating the path to impact.
- Elevate leaders with lived experience: I-Belong strengthens organizations and leaders near the border and those already working on asylum, immigration policy, and detention.
- Root the fund in collaboration: The Fund works through a community of narrative practice, which is when a group that shares a concern about immigration disinformation unite to learn, share, and intentionally shape narratives that could reach the hearts and minds of movable audiences.
The I-Belong Fund turns these principles into action. With Define American as the lead facilitator, the Fund supports deep, sustained learning that builds shared skills, strategies, and storytelling power, strengthening not just individual campaigns but the movement as a whole.
Centering Immigrant Voices in Grantmaking Decisions
Those closest to the challenges are closest to the solutions — and both Tides and the I-Belong Fund build our work around that truth. An independent advisory committee (IAC) representing Tides’ voices led all grantmaking decisions, guided by the perspectives of those deeply embedded in the immigrant justice movement.
“Engaging with organizations representing Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other immigrant communities across the country has reinforced how multifaceted and interconnected our experiences are,” says IAC Member Paola Kim. “It’s shown me how vibrant and resilient our immigrant communities are — and how powerful it is when decision-making includes voices from every corner of that ecosystem.”
The IAC selected ten community-based organizations as a pilot community of practice, awarding each a total of $250,000 over three years. The awards both built grantees’ long-term capacity for narrative change and supported their near-term work to produce targeted media campaigns reaching “movable middle” audiences — audiences with the potential to shift their point of view on immigration.
Shaping Narratives in the Near-Term
Together with Define American’s culture change expertise and leading experts and influencers, each grantee identified its movable middle audiences based on four major archetypes from Harmony Labs. Using data about each audience — their value sets, messengers, and genres of content — grantees developed creative strategies that meet people where they are: on their screens.
One such partner, the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) — a nationally recognized immigrant and refugee network — teamed up with lifestyle influencer Ami McClure to produce a video where she taught her daughters how to respond to bullying. The piece was grounded in TIRRC’s canvassing guide, a resource filled with hard-won lessons on how to engage movable audiences with empathy and skill. That video ultimately outperformed all others, a testament to the power of meeting people through culture and everyday storytelling.
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Sustaining Immigrant Justice in the Long-Term
While short-term campaigns shift hearts and minds, the I-Belong Fund’s true power lies in strengthening the people, networks, and infrastructure that make narrative change sustainable. Measurement makes that possible, enabling us to identify and amplify the messages that truly move people.
Through the community of narrative practice, grantees engaged in continual learning with Define American, Harmony Labs, and partners like Grow Progress that specialize in message testing. Together, we measured how effectively grantees’ campaigns influenced moveable middle audiences and collected insights about grantees experiences with the I-Belong Fund.
Using metrics like views and engagement to measure content performance, we found that grantees’ campaigns received over 3 million views and 102,000 engagements within the first month of posting; by now, we estimate views will have exceeded 5 million. Further testing of the video products with our partners at Grow Progress revealed that 70% of the videos significantly helped our target audiences view immigrants more positively.
The fund has also been catalytic to our grantees’ own narrative change work. Every single grantee expressed interest in continuing to collaborate with the I-Belong Fund, and 93% said narrative change was directly relevant to their efforts.
One grantee from the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) shared, “We’re going to continue exploring how to further connect with influencers and use new platforms like Twitch. The illustrations that we used from Phase One also continue to be used as a major part of all outreach and mobilizing efforts. It’s almost become a bigger part of our motif at TCRP.”
In this way, the I-Belong Fund is more than a fund. It builds the capacity of organizations to shift narratives themselves, backed by a network of peers and proven strategies for centering human dignity and empathy as the key emotions around immigrants and immigration.
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Funding Narrative Change as a Foundation for Justice
Lasting justice begins with the stories we tell — and who tells them. In an era marked by division, disinformation, and rapid shifts in media, we’ve also never had greater access to stories, networks, and tools to amplify them.
The I-Belong Fund is proof that, even in these challenging times, we can harness that power to drive real, lasting change. By supporting the I-Belong Fund, you are funding narratives — but you’re also standing with the people reshaping the conversation about who belongs in America.
Help us strengthen the proximate leaders meeting fear tactics and chaos-based narratives with the research, debunking of false narratives, and strengthened capacity that lead to dignity and humanity. Together, we can move toward a more inclusive future where all belong.
Select “Immigrants Belong – 2275” from the “I want my donation designated toward” dropdown to direct your donation to the I-Belong Fund.
