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.

Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling. If their role in your story feels like “doom appreciator,” most people will recoil, retreat to their own smaller story, and keep the focus there.

not every action, speech, or conversation about climate should be an apocalyptic snapshot, for the same reason that not every protest against police brutality should be a die-in.

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.

Shana McDavis-Conway, the codirector of the Center for Story-Based Strategy, about how to build a different kind of political messaging. Story-based strategy, a participatory approach that links movement building with an analysis of narrative power, positions storytelling at the center of social change.

“Being an organizer, to me, means seeing the kinds of things that people either are doing or might be able to do, given what their energy and excitement or vulnerability is, and helping people achieve a goal that undoes some aspect of what makes life too difficult or makes it not precious,” says Gilmore. “So that can be anything from organizing

What we offer as organizers is not simply alarming information, nor is it the guarantee of success in a particular campaign. We must offer people a vision of how things could be and the opportunity to connect with the people, projects, and movements that can bring this vision to fruition. That is the organizer’s unique gift: an invitation to

Our personal realities are patchworks of things we’ve seen, been exposed to, and potentially come to understand, bound together by belief. Our interpretation of the information and stimuli we are given is the product of many influences. Remove any one of those influences, or add another, and one’s worldview may change drastically. Or it may not. We

will have histories that have not been written yet. Possibility is the hope we wear when we charge into battle. It is stronger than assumption or reaction because it is intentional.