FRESH Labs provides a radical re-imagining of the cultural and structural practices of thought leadership through research, collaboration, and content creation. Our goal? Create a world where leaders can show up as their whole selves in the public square. 
For the first time, FRESH is taking the most cutting edge thinking that circulates through the FRESH community and framing it up for everyone.
We imagine a future where ideas are born from the most diverse of thinkers and joyful of noble friendships, amplified in a wide variety of ways on a wide variety of people-powered platforms, and refined and evolved over generational time. We want a world where people with worthwhile ideas can show up as their whole selves wherever they go–multi-faceted, creative, caretaking, quiet and loud, healing and healed, followers and leaders.
That means podcasts and TikTok videos for aspiring thought leaders on how to have impact without restoring to poverty porn, toolkits for philanthropists to avoid tokenization and increase genuine belonging at their gatherings, and original research on the most powerful conferences in America and who is on the stage and in the audience.
We want to play our part in transforming the public square. Less sage on the stage and more collective thought leadership. Less training BIPOC+ speakers how to perform for elite, White-majority audiences and more diversifying audiences in rooms where it happens. Less hero-worship and more collective future-building.
Want to collaborate? Reach out.
Thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting this culture change work.
Projects
The Speaker Power + Practice Toolkit
Across conferences, speakers – especially people of color, women, and other speakers from marginalized communities – too often experience misaligned expectations, pressure to fit narrow narratives, and an unspoken expectation to share personal or traumatic stories in exchange for visibility. And too often, this comes with little or no compensation. At best, these dynamics limit speakers’ ability to show up as their full selves. At worst, they re-traumatize people in rooms designed for “influence,” not care.
The Speaker & Power Toolkit is a practical resource for both speakers and organizers designed to make invisible power dynamics visible, and offer tools to navigate and change them. This toolkit is free and open to the public, and includes strategies, templates, and advocacy practices for specific scenarios when speakers feel othered, tokenized, or faced with other inequities when they’re invited to speak on a stage. While we don’t believe the burden should fall on speakers to fix broken systems, we do believe that naming power — and equipping people with tools — is a step toward shifting it.
The Greenroom Podcast
The Greenroom is a podcast produced by FRESH Labs featuring some of the world’s most transformational advocates, where we ask and answer big
questions about how we co-create new stories and interrupt old ones. Designed for the narratively inclined and the communications curious and hosted by author and FRESH co-founder Courtney Martin, we get into intimate, strategic conversation with the people who are changing the public conversations we’re having about care, money, violence, and love.
Diving deep into longer half an hour episodes and getting straight to the heart of it in bite-sized minisodes, The Greenroom wrestles with questions like: How much of their storytelling success is part of a grand plan vs. how much is their ability to harness the magic of a moment? What does that trendy term–narrative change–actually mean? Learn more and listen here.
Who Gets The Mic?
Conference stages have become the 21st century battleground for ideas; they are where so much of our country’s policies are shaped, and history gets written. So, how is the industry faring today? What do the cultural and structural practices of the conference world look like? And what can we do to create a more equitable industry for everyone?
Who Gets the Mic? is an initiative out of FRESH Labs examining who gets to take the stage at the world’s most influential conferences—and what happens once they get there. We audited major conferences across technology, climate, and global health, analyzing speaker demographics, industry practices, and the experiences of speakers themselves. What we found reveals how power, pay, and representation shape who gets heard—and who doesn’t. Dive into our findings and recommendations.
Flipping The Script Report
We are facing a crisis of culture and, thus, of imagination. Narrative change is one of the most powerful tools we know to collectively create the world as we know it could be. Flipping The Script is our first-ever FRESH Labs-commissioned report for activists, non-profit leaders, and policy advocates who are working to expand the public imagination and galvanize action, not just from the margins, but also in the mainstream.
The report provides key insights from those who have successfully shifted societal narratives on the causes they care about. We share lessons from eight impactful leaders who work on pivotal issues. like climate change, gun reform, wealth redistribution and the care economy. Informed by their perspectives, we provide creative and sometimes surprising approaches to bringing radical ideas to the center of the national conversation. These suggestions challenge assumptions about what it takes to be an effective communicator in the public arena. Read the report.
