Let This Radicalize You

Activism encompasses all the ways we show up for justice. It can take a multitude of shapes, depending on a person’s skills, interests, and capacity. An activist might conduct research, canvass, fundraise, or attend marches or meetings regularly, or they may simply practice a skill in their own home, such as art making, in the service of a cause or

people understand the world in stories. This means organizers must be effective storytellers.

Organizing, on the other hand, is a more specific set of practices. It is a craft that requires us to cultivate a variety of skills, such as intentional relationship building and power analysis.

As organizers, we are builders in an era of collapse. Our work is set against all probability—and it is in that space of cherished improbability where our art will be made, where our joy will be found, and where our ingenuity will fashion ways of living and caring for each other, even as the ground shifts beneath our feet. Life will be a scramble,

the idea of an important conversation that helped bring me home.

Organizers seek to impact all of these things—the way people reconstruct the past, the way we understand the present, and ultimately the way we envision what could be. Creating against the grain. What stories are we telling ourselves? What are we sowing into the world when we speak? Our politics are the product of this world-building process. And s

when we tap into the diverse spectrum of human emotion, we have an opportunity to inspire people to view themselves as part of a larger story—and to make moral decisions about who they are in relation to other human beings.

I have learned to take the construction work of organizing as it comes, creating things that I believe have to exist, and working with others to build containers, organizations, and projects that I believe the world needs. I am always dreaming up new ideas and making things, because the world is not transformed primarily by what we think of it. Tra

many of us accept the violence, limitations, and boundaries imposed by the system as though they are natural laws—inalterable, inevitable, and final—and view everyday people as an existential threat to control, contain, and manage.