My name is Piper Hendricks and I appreciate your interest in Stories Change Power. Over the curious course of my career, two critical truths have emerged:

First, to create a just, equitable, and peaceful world, many laws, policies, and systems must change.

Second, we will never achieve that change without skillful calls for change.

Stories Change Power empowers people to skillfully call for change.

I’ve worked with and within a hefty cross section of organizations around the world that promote needed change with huge hearts but small budgets and infinite enthusiasm but finite time. I’ve seen the result of budgets too small to support effective advocacy and time too finite to support team members in those roles: opportunities are missed and needed change doesn’t happen.

Over the course of conversations with new and seasoned advocacy communications professionals, mission-driven leadership, and nonprofit funders as I prepared to launch Stories Change Power, three critical needs emerged: 

• Preparation: New advocacy communications professionals feel deeply motivated but not prepared to thrive in this emerging specialty, particularly when they do not report to someone with communications experience.
• Funding: Advocacy communications efforts are not sufficiently funded; whether due to organizational prioritization or lack of clarity around the time and cost of effective communications, neither general operating nor grant-specific funds allow even seasoned professionals to reach organizations’ full potential.
• Collaboration: Advocacy communications professionals at all levels feel lonely (particularly in one-person shops), siloed (regardless of communications team size), and disheartened by the lack of collaboration.

Around the time my professional dreams coalesced in the field of advocacy communications, the World Bank issued a report that still gives me nightmares, which was summed up in headlines like "The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads." 

Why invest time, talent, and funding into researching solutions only to not have them implemented? Why thoroughly understand a problem but not ensure those with the power to fix it are persuaded to do so?

I believe deep in my bones that organizations advocating change are only as effective as their advocacy communications efforts. And I know many of those organizations do not have the budget or bandwidth to train new team members in the emerging field of advocacy communications, nor the organization-wide collaboration to translate internal work into external impact.

That's why I created Stories Change Power.

Whether people recognize it or not, laws, policies, and systems shape our lives every day. Stories Change Power equips people at the frontlines of efforts to create a just, equitable, and peaceful world to use advocacy communications to power change. Beyond advocacy and ethical storytelling, we promote bridging divides across the country, collaboration across organizations, community across cohorts, and meaning across individual lives.

Along my professional journey, I’ve been called “audacious” many times – and each time I took it as a compliment. The audacious goal of Stories Change Power is to upend the status quo and help mission-driven organizations fully harness the power of advocacy communications, knowing that doing so will catalyze change for every individual, family, and community those organizations serve.

Thank you for joining us in creating a just, equitable, and peaceful world,

Piper Hendricks

Founder & CEO

Jule Hall is a Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) Alumni and is featured in Lynn Novik’s College Behind Bars. While advocating for the reinstatement of Pell Grants for incarcerated students in 2017, Jule worked as campaign coordinator for documentary films at Picture Motion, LLC. 

In 2019, Jule was the first formerly-incarcerated person to work full-time at the Ford Foundation, where he analyzed data and developed strategies for its work on gender, racial and ethnic justice. In 2021, Jule worked at the Ascendium Education Group, where he recommended grants for educational programs operating in jails and prisons. With Horace Mann High School in 2023, Jule taught a virtual, college-credit bearing writing class for women incarcerated in the state of Maine. 

Currently, Jule is the Assistant Director of Ambassadors and External Programs at Innocence Project where he engages celebrity influencers on campaigns to exonerate people who are wrongly convicted. His favorite pastimes are gardening and bike riding.

Alexis Matsui is a digital strategist currently working in public communications for the San Francisco Bay Ferry. She is an award-winning and mission-driven multimedia storyteller and producer who creates content strategically designed to inform and engage specific audiences. Alexis' expertise spans multiple media forms, including video, photography, audio, and motion graphics. She is skilled in developing content strategies that incorporate an organization’s overarching goals, consider implications for multiple departments and stakeholders, and optimize each multimedia tool for success.

With her roots in journalism, Alexis has spent her career telling stories to inform and engage public and leadership audiences across several advocacy sectors, including documenting p.h. balanced films’ inaugural Reel Women Real Change workshop in Nepal in 2017.

Jaime Werner is the strategic and operational leader overseeing the Congressional Management Foundation's (CMF’s) Partnership for a More Perfect Union (PMPU), where she works to inspire and support meaningful engagement between citizens and Congress. She focuses on relationship management, internal operations, strategic growth, and is usually accompanied by a service dog in training wherever she goes.

Jaime has led CMF’s membership management since 2015, liaising regularly with PMPU partner organizations to ensure that their citizen advocates have ready access to the most up-to-date guidance and best practices. She has managed CMF’s advanced advocacy training program since its inception, using proven techniques to significantly enhance effective advocacy by constituents. She is a contributor to the Communicating with Congress series, the Democracy Awards program, the RepDemocracy coalition, and is a founding member of the Diversity in Government Relations Coalition. As Vice President, Jaime is part of CMF’s leadership team where she is instrumental in all strategic, financial, personnel, and operational decisions for the organization, including the supervision of multiple CMF employees.

Jaime joined CMF with more than 10 years of campaign and member management experience. Previously, she served as the Director of Strategic Partner Relations at the American Retirement Association, where she focused on outreach to financial institutions working in the 403(b)/457 retirement market. In addition, she has experience working in PAC fundraising for advocacy organizations and Members of Congress. She also has expertise in field organizing and event management for ballot initiatives, issue campaigns, and Congressional races.

Originally from Ukiah, CA, Jaime made her way to Washington, DC by way of Union College in Schenectady, NY, where she earned her BA in Political Science and Philosophy with a focus on Political Ethics. She is a proud resident of Capitol Hill where she enjoys the historic neighborhood and morning strolls on the Mall with her ever-rotating Canine Companions puppy in training.