Driftless Rivers Coalition Driftless Rivers Coalition
Part of the Driftless Rivers Franchise
Coalition › Student Media

Inspired by Current Events and Community Needs

Students deploy ideographs and semiotics aimed at displacing trending harmful narratives. Each domain is a real campaign addressing real failures in the public square — media literacy, democratic discourse, civic courage, electoral advocacy, and rural preservation.

The Circle

Awareness → Strategy → Action

Every ideograph identified becomes a narrative. Every narrative becomes a campaign. Every campaign feeds the next ideograph. These three domains work in sequence to start the whole process — and they complete it.

1
The Awareness Layer
viyobi.com Live
Vote In Your Own Best Interest
Daily video series. Each episode identifies one ideograph and shows you how it's being deployed in real time. "Criminal." "Illegal." "Deviant." "Agitator." You learn to hear the words — the words that do the moral work before the policy even arrives.
2
The Strategy Layer
dont-take-the-bait.com Live
Don't Take the Bait
Training curriculum for campaign managers, PAC directors, and community organizers. Take the ideographs identified on VIYOBI and learn the three-question framework: Who benefits from this word? Who is harmed? What does the story look like from the other side? You learn to convert slogans into counter-narratives.
3
The Action Layer
silence-is-betrayal.com Coming Soon
Silence Is Betrayal
Knowing the ideograph isn't enough. Building the narrative isn't enough. At some point, you have to act. This is where narratives become campaigns, where strategy becomes organizing, where the circle completes — and feeds the next one.
The circle completes — every campaign feeds the next ideograph
Expanding the Work

More Domains in Development

lincoln-douglass.com Coming Soon
Lincoln–Douglass
Imagines a different kind of debate — between two individuals who shared very little in common, but found their own emergent narrative built on what they did agree about. Not the historical debates, but the model for what debate could become.
lincolncoalition.com Coming Soon
Lincoln Coalition
Coalition-building in the Lincoln legacy. Exploring what it means to hold a coalition together when the members disagree on everything except that the house must not fall.
1858events.com Coming Soon
1858 Events
Historical engagement rooted in Galena and the Lincoln–Douglas era. 1858 was the year the debates happened, the year Grant was working in his father's store, the year the country was deciding whether it could hold. What's your 1858?
deeprootsrisingtide.com Coming Soon
Deep Roots — Rising Tide
The franchise tagline repurposed as activist framing. Deep roots in community, rising tide that lifts everyone. Projects that connect the speculative fiction's vision to real organizing on the ground.
voteforthegayguys.com Coming Soon
Vote for the Gay Guys
LGBTQ+ electoral advocacy. Unapologetic, direct, and refusing the polite circumlocutions that let voters pretend identity doesn't matter at the ballot box.
saveruralchurches.org Coming Soon
Save Rural Churches
Rural preservation and community identity. The church building is often the last standing institution in a dying town — what happens when it becomes a platform for engagement instead of a monument to decline?
intergroupcontact.com Coming Soon
Intergroup Contact
Intergroup contact theory as a living practice, drawn from the research in Forbidden Friends. The conditions under which contact between hostile groups reduces prejudice — and the conditions under which it doesn't.
voteLGBTQ.com Coming Soon
Vote LGBTQ
LGBTQ+ electoral advocacy with broader institutional framing. Moving beyond individual candidates to the structural question: what does an electoral strategy look like when queer voices are centered rather than appended?