What does power look like?

Nicole, Shikara, and Dolly are working-class mothers living in rural North Carolina. They are also organizers — knocking on doors, running mutual aid, showing up to the rooms where decisions get made. Theory of Change follows them over the course of a year through a vérité lens, as they work alongside Down Home NC to build something their communities were told wasn't possible: collective power.

The film doesn't ask whether organizing works. It asks what it costs, and what becomes possible when people who've been surviving alone decide to do something harder together.

At a moment when poor and working-class Americans are being told their struggles are theirs alone to solve, Theory of Change is a film about what it looks like when they refuse that answer.