Creating Change

Given the sheer amount of media available to any person with an internet connection, we have no shortage of “witnesses” to atrocity. Forcing people to behold injustice is not enough. Nor is the goal to simply generate a reaction—any reaction—to injustice; such noise can easily become a passing clamor. The goal is to pull people into an active

We are not simply “missing out” on knowledge; we are being robbed of it. To succeed in our movements, we must resist this theft and reclaim what has been stolen from us.

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.

one of my mentors asked me a question that helped shape the trajectory of my activism and organizing.

“What have you built?” he asked. I must have looked perplexed. So he asked me again, “What have you built?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I answered.

“Come back and talk with me when you’ve figured it out,” he told me.

We talked a lot about “new” models of engagement, even though the old ones would have served us just as well.

the cultivation of joy as a form of sustenance and a means of rebellion.

“I keep coming back to community as the solution,” he writes.12 To brave shifting conditions, we will have to strive to create communities “in which everyone’s basic needs are met,” because “leaving people out eventually costs everybody.” Interdependence and the social skills that facilitate that connectedness or cooperation are at the heart of

that shared sense of having been discarded creates a solidarity among some imprisoned people that’s about “refusing to throw each other away.” Put simply, Cosby explains, “We refuse to abandon.”