HeyJaredNarrative Field Notes
Twenty years covering movements, campaigns, and organizations trying to change the world taught me that the work is rarely the problem. The narrative is. Narrative Field Notes is where I break down why messaging fails — and what's possible when it does.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
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- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 10, 2026
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What Are We Funding: Wins or Direction? (opens the original)
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A few weeks ago, I attended the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition’s Voices for Justice gala and learned about an organization I hadn’t been paying enough attention to: Advance Colorado.Then I looked at the ballot.Colorado voters will decide 14 statewide measures this November. Eight of them—more than half the statewide ballot—have ties to Advance Colorado. They touch immigration, energy, hunting and fishing, voting, ballot language, redistricting, taxes and criminal justice.On their fac
The dotted line of progress (opens the original)
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We tend to tell the story of political change through its peaks and valleys. A landmark law passes, a court hands down a major decision, voters approve a ballot measure, a campaign shifts public opinion, or a policy that once seemed untouchable is suddenly overturned. Those moments become the history because they are visible, measurable and easy to name.But I’ve become increasingly interested in a different part of the graph: the dotted line running underneath all of those individual wins and lo
We Don’t Have to Agree on the Road (opens the original)
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There is a fault line running through the American justice field that we usually describe in two words:reform or abolition.The disagreement is real.Reformists believe the institutions we have can be transformed. Courts can become fairer. Progressive leaders can change the system from within them. Policing can be constrained and redesigned. The criminal legal system we inherited can, through sufficient change, become something capable of delivering justice.Abolitionists start somewhere else.Their
The Institution Behind the Outcome (opens the original)
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Earlier this week, my team and I attended the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition’s Voices for Justice event in Denver. Featured speakers bemoaned the “direction our country is taking” and several invoked the overturning of Roe v. Wade.I’m a history nerd so after the event I dug into the decades-long effort that ultimately produced the landmark ruling’s reversal and it turns out there is an easy way to understand that history: a political movement wanted to overturn Roe, organized around
Not every story needs a hero (opens the original)
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Every organization has one: the person whose story seems to prove the whole point. The student from an under-resourced school who makes it to an elite university. The person who experiences homelessness and goes on to build a business. The immigrant who arrives with almost nothing and becomes a surgeon. The person who leaves prison and eventually leads a major organization.These are extraordinary people, and their stories are worth telling. But there is a problem with asking an extraordinary per
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