Marie Condron on Her Love of L.A. and Its Creative Problem-solving

Marie Condron is principal and co-founder of a Los Angeles communications consulting agency advancing social justice causes.

For more than 25 years, she’s used the tools of communication and organizing to give more people equal access to the knowledge and power to change their lives and communities and solve problems like housing scarcity and homelessness.

We talked to her about what makes the L.A. area special, the changes she’d like to see in her lifetime to make it a great place for everyone, and what she’s grateful for right now.

What do you love about where you live? 

What I love most about the Los Angeles area is the welcoming, creative spirit of its people. We come from all over the world to make a life here, creating an ever-changing, incredibly diverse, web of resilient communities. I've lived here 26 years and it feels like home, and yet there are constantly new places and things and ideas to discover.

I also love the sweeping scale and variety of the L.A. landscape, which inspired our company name, Ocean & Mountain. I just moved to Pasadena a couple years ago. It has the cozy feel of a mountain town in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, and yet I'm 20 minutes from downtown L.A.

What’s your aspiration for the Los Angeles area?

I love that L.A. is a laboratory of policy experiments to make our systems more just and equitable. There's amazing work being done that, scaled up to meet the need, will be transformational. My hope is that I'll see more change in my lifetime to make our community a place of greater prosperity for everyone, revitalizing and caring for each other and our shared spaces in new ways.

That would look like a big increase in affordable homes—especially homes offering special support to those exiting foster care and incarceration, homes for older adults, and homes for those with special needs. It would include radically expanding access to home ownership for people of color, to repair the wrongs of the past when they were deliberately excluded. It would include moving toward all renewable energy to further restore our air, water, and land. And it would look like closing our central jails and juvenile detention centers and replacing them with the models of care and support that we know would make all of us safer.

What are some of the dominant narratives you’re trying to change and obstacles you’re navigating? 

A lot of our work at Ocean & Mountain is building understanding of how economic systems and policy choices built over the past decades created the crises we experience today, and that other choices are, in fact, possible.

For example, the root causes of our housing crisis include intentional underbuilding over decades as our population grew, which helped create the housing shortage and affordability crisis we're experiencing today. So, it's about how our systems are failing us, rather than narratives that place blame on individuals for not being able to afford housing when the average full-time salary can no longer support the median rent and basics of living.

The good news is there's a lot of understanding of this in L.A. due to a concerted effort of a lot of smart, engaged people across sectors. But you still see otherwise progressive individuals who push back on new, much-needed housing in their neighborhoods, blocking needed resources and undermining our collective progress.

How are you making the case for your vision of the future?

Our team of strategic communications consultants advises clients who are advancing social justice. Our clients are leading system change inside of government or in the community as nonprofit organizations or through the courts as civil and human rights lawyers. We help them tell the story of what they are trying to accomplish.

Whenever possible, we try to lead with vision and define what the stakes are for decisions being made right now. Sometimes it's a vision of a future where everyone can afford a home or a health care system where everyone has equal access to quality care or a system of community safety that enables us to do a better job of taking care of each other. And in nearly all cases, a key part of the vision is repairing the harm done to people of color by our systems.

Would you share your best Strategic CaseMaking™ moment with us?

Over the past couple years, we have worked with a collaborative of 50 community organizations and digital marketing agencies Voxpop and Swell to build shared understanding of the causes of our housing and homelessness crisis, that we need to do more to meet the scale of the need and do more to get to root causes by addressing our housing supply.

The initiative was funded by the Hilton Foundation. We built relationships and alignment of messaging for over a year, drawing on skills we've learned from Strategic CaseMaking™. The work culminated in a public education campaign that on Nov. 5 helped pass Measure A, which will greatly increase L.A.'s investments in our affordable housing supply.

This project showed me how long-term, collective relationship development among a group of organizations can help drive change. I'm excited about how we can learn from this and do more of it over time.

What’s your favorite Strategic CaseMaking™ tool or skill?

I'm at heart an optimist, and I need to believe Marin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a long arc of the moral universe that "bends toward justice" and Rebecca Solnit's view that social change often happens in fits and starts over centuries.

So, the Strategic CaseMaking™ principle of leading with a vision of what's possible makes so much sense to me, and I need it now more than ever after the 2024 presidential election. My favorite way of embodying it is making sure that not just the words but also the images in our work communicate solutions, instead of reinforcing the problem and the status quo.

It's probably the most common mistake I see in activism circles, now that I know to look for it--to show images of someone in a tent (the problem), when what you're trying to do is advance solutions that put them in a home (the vision). So that's a practical example of a lofty idea, one that gives me hope in this moment in history: that there may be moments of backlash, but in the long run, love wins out over fear, and tapping into our shared humanity and vision of collective wellbeing is ultimately more powerful and lasting than fomenting division.

What can journalists and communicators learn from CaseMaking?

This is something I think about a lot: the subtle version is how everyday reporting decisions have such disproportionate power to reinforce outdated narratives. Sometimes we see media stories that reinforce old stereotypes and create a sense of hopelessness, which is especially unfortunate when it's contrary to facts. I'm thinking of a recent story in the L.A. Times. We helped a client call out a reporting choice that leaned on stereotypes about people experiencing homelessness.

But the scarier version is the proliferation of communicators who are not even trying to be grounded in facts, and how critical it is to understand how and why they are succeeding and what can be done about it. At a time when a lot of America can't even agree on what is true, I think CaseMaking is a valuable practice and shows a way to be both grounded in data and persuasive.   

What are you working on next?

I'm excited about the ongoing work to resolve our housing crisis in L.A., especially our new countywide affordable housing agency which will tap into new tools to help people stay in their homes and also preserve and expand our housing supply.

I'm worried about what seems like a loss of momentum in our county's commitment to close the central jails and the state's order to close the failed juvenile detention centers. I'm glad we get to work with clients like Liberty Hill who are holding the government accountable to those outcomes.

And I'm grateful to be part of a community of kindred spirits here with a shared purpose and meaning. Our vision is something that whoever's in power in D.C. can't change. I imagine we are going to work together in new ways here, and with partners across the U.S., in the coming year to protect our way of life. I'm grateful for the tools we have to do that, and I have a lot more to learn.