Roger Sorkin
Strategic Narratives That Drive Meaningful Change
Organizations today are facing unprecedented communication challenges.
Media fragmentation has scattered audiences across platforms, while deepening political polarization has transformed how people respond to even simple messaging. Meanwhile, the rise of AI-generated content has left the public understandably skeptical.
Traditional approaches simply weren’t designed for this reality.
As organizations struggle to find their footing in this new information landscape, they often get stuck wasting precious resources on ineffective messaging, missing opportunities to build coalitions around shared interests, and watching their most valued initiatives falter from lack of stakeholder support.
Perhaps most damaging, they risk surrendering narrative control to external voices that may not understand their true mission, values, and contributions.
30 Years of Finding Common Ground
I've spent decades helping organizations align stakeholders' diverse interests…
And that wealth of experience has shaped my core philosophy around communications strategy: that effective communication strategy begins with understanding what truly motivates different audiences.
People rarely change their fundamental values.
But they don't need to in order to support your organization's goals. They simply need to see how your work addresses the priorities they already have.
My approach identifies these critical connection points.
Through documentary-style storytelling, strategic communications planning, executive coaching, and immersive simulations, I help organizations develop narratives that unite previously divided audiences around shared solutions. Whether working with military officials, infrastructure authorities, or corporate leaders, I focus on finding authentic stories that show each stakeholder what's in it for them.
The Storyteller Behind the Strategy
With three decades of experience spanning documentary filmmaking, strategic communications, and coalition-building, I bring a unique perspective to organizational communication challenges. My background in anthropology and journalism taught me how to quickly read a room, build trust, and identify the stories that resonate on deeper human levels.
From producing a daily public affairs radio show to creating award-winning documentaries that have influenced policy at the highest levels, I've developed a methodology that helps organizations communicate effectively–even in politically complex environments and profoundly uncertain times.
Explore My Work
From reframing fossil fuel dependence as both a national security threat and environmental concern to showing how regenerative agriculture can simultaneously rebuild rural communities and safeguard global food supplies, my projects find points of alignment where others see only division. I’m proud to partner with collaborators who recognize that the right story can accomplish what facts alone cannot.
10 Rules for Dealing with the Police
Learn MoreClean Economy Now was designed to influence public policy that sustains the momentum of the energy transition. The film shares the rationale behind a symbiotic relationship between energy and economic prosperity.
Clean Economy Now
Learn MoreFarm Free or Die explores the economic, food security, and environmental hazards of American farming under mounting costs and a reliance on fossil-based fertilizers. Centering voices of American farmers, it was made to influence the Farm Bill by highlighting the impact of climate change on farm state constituents.
Farm Free or Die
Learn MoreCurrent 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.
Current Revolution
Learn MoreCurrent 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.
Current Revolution
Learn MoreTidewater explores regional efforts to adapt to rising waters and sinking land. This film was used to convene bipartisan members of the Armed Services Committees of the U.S. House and Senate to authorize defense legislation.
Tidewater
Learn MoreThe Burden interrogates fossil fuel dependence as our greatest national security threat and the military’s leading role in the transition to clean energy. It was successfully used to achieve a number of successful defense policies and convene military leaders internationally on the importance of reducing fossil fuel dependence.
The Burden
Learn MoreI collaborated with the sustainability and communications teams of a major U.S. airport, not only to tell the story of their sustainability and resilience successes, but to help them all become better communicators on the subjects.
Resilient on the Ground
Learn MoreRoger worked with a leading environmental nonprofit to design and produce a social media video series to defend the progress of the energy transition.
Renewable Energy Works for Rural America
Learn More—Rear Admiral Ann Phillips USN (RET.)
—David Gautschi Founder and CEO, Tilt Global Decisions
—Nicole Lederer Chairman and Founder, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2)