Turning narrative risk into strategic advantage.
Translating complex environmental, economic, technology and security challenges into compelling strategic narratives with attainable calls-to-action.
Does your story hold up in front of funders, regulators, and your own staff at the same time?
Do you need your team ready for a conversation you can't afford to get wrong?
Is your technology getting judged on politics rather than on performance?
For nearly three decades, Roger Sorkin has taken on complex subjects where getting the communication wrong carries real consequences. He has served organizations that include the U.S. military, Sierra Club, Indianapolis Airport, NATO, Citizens Climate Lobby, NASA, veteran groups, regional planning commissions, business schools, and more.
His workshops, strategy sessions, and films have shaped federal policy, inspired investment, prepared leaders who have to tell their stories under pressure, and built durable coalitions of unlikely allies.
A Range of Services to Meet Your Communications Needs
The Burden
In response to the challenges climate communicators have faced reaching conservative audiences, The Burden was made to anchor a campaign that recast fossil fuel dependence as a national security threat, carried by Pentagon officials, military veterans and other trusted messengers. Screenings, expert panels, briefs, and stakeholder toolkits, run through more than 50 partner organizations, drove passage of energy legislation in various states and investment in clean energy companies, and educated policymakers at home and abroad.
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Association of Climate Change Officers
ACCO's participants understood the technical work but struggled to defend it in public meetings without raising the political temperature. Instead of another seminar, role-playing exercises put them into scripted characters and a mock town hall, employing principles of improvisational comedy and real-time coaching. People who rarely spoke up in public found their voices, and learned to tailor a message to the room.
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Tidewater
Rising seas threaten military readiness and the coastal economies where service members live, and political constraints had left local and military leaders with limited room to act. Tidewater was designed to reframe environmental changes in terms of national and economic security. The film and campaigns convened lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels, alongside military officials and resilience advocates, through screenings, panels, and briefings that produced specific policy recommendations and contributed to the passage of defense legislation and better intergovernmental cooperation.
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Fordham University Gabelli School of Business
Gabelli's leadership treated this as a career problem rather than an academic one: students who could not hold a position under pressure would be limited as leaders, whatever their financial skills. The school needed a repeatable format that transferred consulting-floor stakeholder methods into coursework. Simulations assigned students roles they disagreed with, then required them to argue those positions under pressure.
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Farm Free or Die
Farm Free or Die showed how the climate crisis affects farmers and food security. It put farmers, legislators, and entrepreneurs on record demanding a carbon removal economy, and partnered with Regenerate Nebraska and E2 to convene rural and conservative voters alongside policymakers around practical measures: equipment loans, soil health, erosion control, and the incentives that improve farming livelihoods and increase crop yields.
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National Conservative Energy Summit with the Conservative Energy Network
CEN's advocates had the arguments for renewables on conservative terms: reliability, energy independence, free markets, manufacturing jobs. What they lacked was practice delivering them to a room organized against them. A session at the National Conservative Energy Summit put each advocate in a hot seat while colleagues played sixteen adversarial crowd characters, then analyzed the attempt and ran it again.
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Current Revolution: The Transformation Cannot Be Stopped
Current Revolution: A Film Series for the Energy Transition comprises two full-length films and one short targeting the public policy and investments necessary to modernize our electric grid. The series explores various aspects of the energy transition, including how workers in the combustion engine industry can adapt to the future.
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Current Revolution: Nation in Transition
Current Revolution: Nation in Transition documents the coal-to-renewables transition in the Navajo Nation and northern Arizona, offering a human-centered roadmap for just energy transitions worldwide.
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Indianapolis Airport Authority
The Indianapolis Airport's sustainability and resilience projects were saving it money and improving reliability, but describing it publicly in a conservative region risked its political neutrality along with the funding tied to state, utility, and congressional support. A documentary built around efficiency and stewardship, produced alongside the airport's own communications staff, gave the organization a defensible story and a team equipped to speak confidently on theses subjects.
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The Natural Resources Defense Council
The Natural Resources Defense Council needed the case for rural solar made in terms that would resonate with farming communities and their representatives. A series of short videos and social media campaign, built with its partners at Environmental Entrepreneurs, argued renewables around what rural America stands to gain: energy resilience, higher farm income, healthier soil, and a more resilient food supply. Advocates used the assets to brief policymakers directly.
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10 Rules for Dealing with Police
This dramatic educational film and series of role-playing exercises were created in collaboration with the Flex Your Rights Foundation and used across the political spectrum from the ACLU to the CATO Institute to teach people of all ages how to exercise their constitutional rights and stay safe during encounters with law enforcement.
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