Resistance Communications is a women-led creative force of storytellers, practitioners, visionaries, strategists, time travelers, and artists.
We have over two decades of extensive global experience in over 20 countries combating violence against women and girls, gender inequity, and in working towards racial equity and liberation.
We support partners to use visual media and story to effectively address issues of injustice at their root and create pathways towards new, unbounded futures.
Our Programming
Vision Not Victim
Girls unleash their power, voice, and visions for the future while building skills, being mentored, and using creative photography and media to challenge social norms and create safer more supportive communities for adolescent girls.
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Reclaiming Herstory
Through Reclaiming Herstory, groups of women and girls participate in a series of storytelling workshops that document, recreate, re-cast, reframe, and step back into stolen moments in women’s history. Participants create media around and elevate the unheard stories from their communities as a form of connection, learning, hope, and resistance.
Collaborative Design & Thought Partnership
Looking for support to operationalize your ideas and vision? Need an infusion of creativity to refresh or reinvigorate existing work? Our experience, across environments, across rights-based issues, and across supporting opportunities for girls, women, and communities to thrive, allows us to center your particular context and needs, and to build dynamic programming together.
We collaborate with our partners to adapt and co-design approaches, projects, and desired results - because hello, it’s the right thing to do - and every community has a right to control how they are represented. Such a process upholds truth, ownership, and long lasting change.
All of our work begins and ends with our values of:
+ Gender Justice
We center women and girls in all of our policies, practices, and attitudes, breaking down the systems of inequity to ensure that every woman and girl can live her life free from violence and with equitable access, chances, and choices.
+ Racial Justice
We actively break down the imbalance of power and push for systematic, equitable, and fair treatment of people of color. We believe and trust women and girls of color.
+ Collaboration
We prioritize working with people, centering those who are at the intersection of oppressive systems in the design and implementation of what we do. We enforce rigorous standards of informed consent.
+ Community
We don't sit outside the movement; we work in the thick of it - supporting the work of clients and communities fighting for social justice.
+ Story
We believe in the power of story as the foundation for the fight for social justice.
+ Joy
We find, promote, and savour the joy and pleasure that comes from this work together.
+ Culture
We center and value local knowledge, culture, history, and approaches as a foundation for truth and our work.
Services
+ Storytelling Strategy
Stories move the world, from uplifting truth, to changing behaviors and policies. We work with you to design powerful strategies and provoking content that raises visibility of key issues, shifts stereotypes and beliefs, and meets your goals.
+ Workshops & Facilitation
Immersive, experiential and generative, our practiced team of facilitators guide teams and communities through workshops on storytelling for healing, power, and strategy; time travel; among many others. We also create custom workshops for partners that help folks tap into their creativity, connect, heal, and craft together.
+ Visioning & Futurism
Through a series of creative workshops, partners/communities explore and design their vision for their community’s or organization’s future, and co-create media of these envisioned futures to use as a tool to raise visibility, create strategy, mobilize, and inspire target audiences.
+ Ideation Lab
From operationalizing your vision and ideas, to developing original solutions, our experienced team will center your particular context and needs to build dynamic products and programming together.
+ Collaborative Media Creation
Our team facilitates the collaborative creation of media, art, and dissemination strategies through interactive workshops, to support communities and organizations to create work that is an authentic, true reflection of your voice, ideas, visions, and solutions.
+ Visual Design
From graphic design, photography, illustration, data visualization, print, and installations, translating your ideas and content into one-of-a-kind, powerful visual mediums is our speciality.
Aisha Bain
Chief Architect, Co-Founder
Activist, artist, music worshipper, visionary, Mother Earth protector, spicy food smasher, global nomad.
+ More about Aisha
Aisha Bain is a black feminist warrior, social justice activist, smasher of patriarchy, and uses her imposing height and incredible stank eye to silence mansplaining in an instant.
Aisha is an inspiring leader with over 15 years of experience in senior leadership, and has managed programs and partnered with community organizations responding to violence against women and girls in prevention, mitigation, service provision, advocacy, and policy change in more than a dozen countries. As a filmmaker, artist and author, Aisha has a particular passion for using creative tools and media to further social justice movements, and to raise the voice and visibility of women and girls within those movements.
She is the Co-Founder of Resistance Communications, a creative action agency that works with local power to elevate the voices and visibility of women, girls, and resistors fighting for social justice through radical storytelling, transformative programming, and art grounded in strategy for social change. She also co-founded Vision Not Victim, a global girl-driven program that provides creative platforms to unleash the power of adolescent girls, address the violence they face and work towards gender equality, supporting girls, parents, and communities to create safer and more supportive environments for girls.
In 2015, Aisha served as the Senior Program Advisor for the Women’s Protection and Empowerment Unit at the International Rescue Committee (IRC). In this capacity, Aisha led advocacy efforts, authored, and advised policy papers and events that directly resulted in policy change including the US government’s 2013 Safe from the Start Initiative; and the United Kingdom’s 2013 Call to Action to End Violence Against Women and Girls in Emergencies. Aisha also spearheaded research, gap analysis, and co-designed an innovative capacity building pilot program to address violence against women and girl refugees and immigrants in the US through a minimum package of response services, partnerships, and advocacy, with a focus on community based approaches and solutions.
Aisha has previously worked with IRC in a number of leadership roles, including as Deputy Country Director in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake, and has extensive experience leading emergency responses and responding to violence against women and girls in conflict and natural disaster zones including the DRC, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. Additionally, Aisha has worked on women's rights in India and the Maghreb, anti-discrimination in the Balkans, and environmental rights in Mongolia for Global Rights: Partners for Justice. She also co-directed a documentary she produced entitled Darfur Diaries: Message from Home, as well as a book she co-authored, Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival. The proceeds from the documentary and book went toward building schools in North Darfur in partnership with the Darfur Peace and Development Organization.
Spanning five continents, Aisha has danced with almost every community she has worked with.
Brandie Maxwell
Producer & Ops Manager
Tree hugger, music enthusiast, avid hiker, podcast aficionado, writer.
+ More about Brandie
Producer & Ops Manager Brandie Maxwell is a storyteller, writer, photographer, video/film producer, and is a part of the African diaspora (Liberia raise up!) bringing her unique perspectives and global NGO experiences from past lives, including several years working in challenging geographic areas such as Southern Sudan, Uganda and Iraq, into her desire to lift up untold, unheard stories in creative, beautiful and compelling ways. Brandie has more than 13 years of experience designing and managing complex programs in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America covering a wide range of social issues. Along with all of the above, Brandie has a track record in winning over $110 million in public and private sector funding for the implementation of these programs and brings her experience working with international private sector partners to the team.
Meredith Hutchison
Creative Director, Co-Founder
Photographer, dreamer, artist, sci-fi nerd, proud bad dancer, racial justice ally & defender.
+ More about Meredith
Meredith Hutchison is a fierce feminist activist, photographer, and photo-facilitator, collaborating with communities to create images that combat stereotypes, challenge oppressive systems, spark dialogue, and show that there can be change. Her work uses art, photography, graphic design, humor, theater, music, movement, imagination and love, to amplify the voices and visions of women and girls. Meredith has created and implemented processes of participatory and collaborative media in 15 countries, partnering with international nonprofits, UN agencies, and grassroots movements.
Meredith is the Co-Founder of Resistance Communications and also co-founded Vision Not Victim, a global girl-driven program that provides creative platforms to unleash the power of adolescent girls, address the violence they face and work towards gender equity.
Meredith’s work has been featured by a range of media outlets including the BBC, CNN, Newsweek, ABC, Le Monde, Ms. Magazine, Vanity Fair Italy, Buzzfeed, Refinery 29, The Washington Post, among others and has been exhibited across the globe in galleries and public spaces, including on Capitol Hill, at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, as a featured exhibit at PhotoVille NYC, at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, and at the United Nations.
Meredith holds a Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master's Degree in Economic and Political Development from Columbia University.
+ Our Roster Team
Our roster team of practitioners, artists, and an array of specialists are located around the globe supporting effective scale up for various client needs. They bring diverse expertise and match our values and vision, with a common fire in their belly for a just world.