You Can’t spin you way back to trust
Strategy, writing, social media, outreach, and advisory support for public work that needs to be understood.
When a community stops believing an institution, sharper messaging in a vacuum only speeds up the reputational collapse. Explainer Civic Strategies helps government agencies, nonprofits, community organizations, and candidates turn complicated work into clear communication the public can act on. We draw on more than 20 years working with and inside communities across the country to map the institutional changes that rebuild trust and produce the work that delivers.
we’ve been where you are
Most consultants have read about your situation. Laura Rodriguez-Carbone has seen it from a 360 degree view. Over more than 20 years, she has run communication campaigns inside and alongside federal agencies and in communities across the country for non-profits and issue campaigns, managed political campaigns, and run for office herself.
During the federal COVID response, she drew on a long history of community outreach, organizing, and communications architecture work to help earn trust from underrepresented communities that contributed to the first ever FDA approved vaccine to treat COVID-19.
At the U.S. Department of Education, she turned civil rights protections, the ADA, Title IX, and Section 504, into language people could understand and that parents and students could use to better advocate for their rights, contributing to more oversight of civil rights in public schools and universities and better outcomes for students with disabilities.
Laura has also served on no less than 20 boards, task forces, and think tanks across the country and in Northeast Ohio, leveraging her partnership and advocacy expertise to improve the lives of people taking public transit, facing racism, on the transplant waiting list, fighting hunger, and influencing holistic approaches to health equity and community connections.
Few strategists have been on all sides of the governance equation. Rebuilding public trust is the hardest work in it, and it’s the work Laura does best.
what strong communication can do
Our work helps clients:
Clarify who they are
Explain their value
Strengthen their public presence
Reach the right audiences
Build stronger community trust and understanding
Deliver difficult messages
Build better communications and engagement practices
Create more effective outreach systems
the best time to get clear is before you need to be
Communities trust people who get out in front of the message work early. If you’re weighing a run for office, planning a campaign, or rethinking how your organization interacts with, or talks to, their community, this is the moment to talk.