CMN5 consulting & creative, llc · New York City
Story is not decoration. It’s a working tool.
CMN5 brings together research, strategy, writing, advocacy, and original media—turning complicated ideas and difficult problems into clear, persuasive, useful work.
The work
Three ways to change the story.
CMN5 is one company with three complementary practices: help for people, strategic work for organizations, and independent media built to ask harder questions.
Plot Twist
Coaching & Advocacy
Practical, individualized support for people navigating difficult decisions, institutions, communications, and systems. We identify the real problem, map the options, and decide what to do next.
Plot Device
Consulting Group
Grant strategy, proposal development, research and synthesis, editing, institutional writing, program development, and complex narratives that need both rigor and persuasive force.
Plot Hole
Media
Original nonfiction, cultural history, editorial projects, podcasts, and public-interest media about queer life, mental health, technology, memory, and what official stories leave out.
Selected work
Making complexity readable—and actionable.
Selected samples will be added here. The work spans funding, research, institutional narrative, public writing, and the editorial labor that turns a giant mess into something people can actually use.
Grants & proposal development
Funding strategy, application architecture, persuasive narrative, review, and revision for research and mission-driven work.
Briefs & synthesis
Source-grounded research that finds the pattern, names what matters, and makes the evidence legible to decision-makers.
Reports & strategic narrative
Self-studies, program materials, reports, and other high-stakes documents that must speak clearly across multiple audiences.
Essays, editing & public writing
Developmental and substantive editing alongside essays, cultural criticism, poetry, and other public-facing work.
Plot Hole Media
Original projects.
A growing body of editorial, cultural-history, and media work—some ongoing, some in development, all connected by curiosity about how people survive the systems and stories around them.
The Reluctant Cyborg’s Mental Health Desk
An editorial and public-interest project examining how people are already using AI for emotional support, self-understanding, and mental-health care—and what users, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers need to understand as the field changes.
The AI & Mental Health Field Guide
A practical, research-grounded guide to the rapidly changing landscape of AI-supported mental-health use: evidence, risks, practices, possibilities, and the questions nobody has answered yet.
The 5:02 Club: Life Out Loud in the Analog City
Two longtime queer friends provide some very specific answers to that age-old question: What did we do before the internet?
Two for One
A cultural-history project about gay male happy hour in 1990s New York and the social world built in the hours between work and night.
Plotted Meat: Rough Cuts
Personal essays, cultural observations, grief, queer life, memory, and unfinished thinking in public.
About
Carl Niedzielski
Carl is a writer, researcher, editor, grant strategist, and former research-program leader. His career spans philanthropy, nonprofit research, higher education, grants administration, institutional writing, and public-facing communications.
He founded CMN5 Consulting & Creative to bring that experience together with a growing body of independent writing, media, and cultural-history work.
Contact
Have a project, problem, or strange idea?
If it calls for rigorous thinking, strong writing, a strategic point of view—or somebody willing to find the plot hole—let’s talk.
Email CMN5