Ravi
Garla

Ravi Garla serves as an advocacy and narrative consultant. In this role, he established and helps oversee the Critical Mass project which works to build U.S. political will to address growing nuclear threats.

Garla has served in this role since 2020. In that time, he has driven innovative research on shifting public attitudes, built alliances with leaders in pop culture, and designed timely public engagement campaigns. Foundational audience research examined people’s understanding of the nuclear weapons, how that understanding has been informed by media in U.S. culture, and what it means for advocates seeking to rewrite the dominant narrative on nuclear weapons. In his work leveraging pop culture for social change, Garla has shifted global search results for nuclear imagery so that images signaling the possibility of change come up, instead of just mushroom clouds; partnered with social media influencers to reach millions; and helped build a bridge between experts and allies in TV and film including by establishing a creative advisory council. He also has developed and executed campaigns, including an annual partnership with the prefectures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to commemorate the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan, an award-winning campaign that leveraged attention around the 2023 film Oppenheimer, and another that secured a unanimous state resolution in Nevada in support of maintaining the long-held U.S. moratorium on explosive nuclear weapons testing.

Prior to NTI, Garla spent nearly 15 years advising and leading creative issue-advocacy campaigns on various social causes. Most recently, he served in leadership at Everytown for Gun Safety, where he helped launch and develop the organization into the United States’ largest gun safety organization. He conceived of some of Everytown’s most successful advocacy campaigns and helped develop new strategic directions, including to address America’s gun suicide epidemic. Earlier in his career he worked on Al Gore’s climate campaign and at the ACLU of Northern California.

None of Garla’s work would be possible without the support of many and a lot of luck. If not for the civil rights movement and the subsequent reform of U.S. immigration laws, his parents would not have been able to immigrate from India to the United States only to have their son watch some well-timed inspiration from Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing and choose to not become the doctor they hoped he’d be. Instead, he  graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in International Studies. He now lives in Santa Monica, CA with his wife and daughter.