Funding Narrative Change

Inspirit Foundation and the Narrative Change Lab initiative were highlighted in The Philanthropist Journal‘s feature on funding narrative change.

CEO Sadia Zaman shares Inspirit’s funding strategy to support narrative power and shift away from small individual initiatives to bigger projects that target systems.

Read the full feature here. Below is an excerpt from the article.

“For Inspirit Foundation, thinking differently about its funding strategy and how it could support narrative power building started in 2019. ‘[We were interested in] moving from small individual initiatives, where there was really good work being done, to thinking about what could be bigger, what was systemic? That’s when we first started to have conversations about narrative change and narrative power,’ CEO Sadia Zaman says.

In 2021, Inspirit launched a Narrative Change Lab that brought together a dozen Muslim content creators working in the slipstream of pop culture to reimagine Muslim narratives. ‘Many communities, especially communities of colour and racialized communities, don’t want to define themselves in response to the existing narrative,’ Zaman says. ‘Creatives are in the best position to be amplifying, creating, and reimagining those stories. We chose pop culture because we did not want this to be an academic exercise.’

Inspirit’s funding strategy is now focused on three streams of building narrative power: the past, the present, and the future. They’re supporting the Muslims in Canada Archives, which aims to reverse the erasure of Muslims from the historical narrative in Canada; building partnerships that challenge Islamophobia today, including one with the Béati Foundation that’s supporting community leaders to develop responses that challenge Islamophobia and create alternative narratives; and investing in infrastructure and ecosystem-building to resource the work into the future.”

Learn more about the Narrative Change Lab.