Letter to A Young Organizer

A Missive Across Time and Space

I wrote this to include in a zine of letters that young/new organizers wrote to their peers in fall 2023. After spending 8 weeks discussing organizing, community care, and taking positive action in the world, some members of the cohort wrote the letters. You can read & download the full publication here. Feel free to share it with others too. 

Times are hard. I have a lot of friends who are parents and many who work with young people in multiple arenas. Some have been asking me what they should share with them. The truth is that we should continue to be honest, to say that many things are uncertain [but this has always been true] and to promise that we will continue to fight alongside them [if that is true for you]. We should support the young people in our lives to acknowledge their fears/grief and to process them. Fears and grief must be processed lest they consume us. It's important that they be witnessed too. I've been reminding young people in my life of the values that we share and also of the relationships we have. I've been inviting them to lean into both their values and their relationships. This is a time-tested way we've survived difficult historical periods. 

If you are an educator, perhaps you can assign the zine to your students and have them write their own letters to their peers: letters that give voice to their political and social commitments, to their fears/grief, and perhaps to their resistance. The zine might also work with older people and could provide some inspiration for them to write their own letters to their peers.

Kelly and I's book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (2023) is currently available as a FREE E-Book at Haymarket Books. For those who work with or are young activists/organizers & would like to plan book discussions, we have a bunch of FREE resources (including a discussion guide and workbook) that you can use. Find those here.

Finally, I am often asked for suggestions of actions to take beyond voting and protests. There are many things to do. Here's a list that I adapted from Frontline Medics.

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July 2024

“Not to despair but to do” - Nell Painter

Dear Young Organizer/Activist,

I’m writing this letter during deeply unsettling and troubled times. We are living through extremely turbulent and horrific events, including several genocides, acute climate change, many wars, growing criminalization, increasing inequality, the rise of fascism, and much more. It feels like the world is on fire because it is. 

As an activist and organizer, you are sometimes called upon to be a firefighter and also to rebuild in a new and better way. We have to help people understand what is (the current (shared) reality), we must collectively imagine what can be (imagination of a future possibility), and we have to diligently labor for what must be (organizing to sustain life/livingness and for liberation) 

These days, people around me are using the word ‘despair’ with regularity. Perhaps you are experiencing the same. Given the stakes, I can understand being despairing. Yet I’m with Audre Lorde, who wrote that “despair is a tool of our enemies.” Why do I believe this? Because despair has a way of distorting, it often pairs well with cynicism, which I see as a way of being that contracts what’s possible rather than expanding possibilities. Rather than being enabling, I have experienced it as corrosive. Are cynical people builders? I haven’t experienced them as such. I’m with Horkheimer, who argues that cynicism is “another mode of conformity.” I heard writer Maria Popova say in a podcast interview that she lives in “defiance of despair.” This resonated with me. It’s my experience that taking positive collective action can crowd out despair. It offers a little bit of light and helps you to perceive yourself and your community more clearly. 

Art by Monica Trinidad

I’m regularly asked about hope. I’ve said that for me hope is a discipline: a practice that I engage in daily and on some days hourly. Sometimes people say to me that hope is a disposition and that you either have it or you don’t. I vehemently disagree. 

Some people seem to think about hope as ‘wishful thinking.’ For me, it’s not that at all. Rather, because I don’t know how things will turn out, I choose to take action in the direction that I want to influence. I devote my efforts to make what I want to happen actually happen. Nothing can happen if we don’t take action. As Annie Dillard writes: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” I would add that how you do anything is how you do everything. 

Action is a practice of hope. Put another way, hope is generated through action. ‘Doing’ allows us to derive experience and meaning - it is through doing that we experience feeling. I’m interested in a robust & active hope; the kind that has dirty and calloused hands. 

So I wake up every single day and decide to practice hope. The reason I do so is that this is something that solely falls under my control. I can’t control social forces, but I can choose to practice hope by taking my own considered daily actions. I have learned a lot from Joanna Macy’s concept of active hope. For Macy, active hope doesn’t require optimism. We can cultivate it no matter how we are feeling [for example, you can still cultivate hope while you grieve, while you feel despondent, etc…]. Hope makes room for itself, beside every emotion. Hope is not the belief that everything will turn out well - that’s optimism and I’m not an optimist. 

I’m also interested in how Joan Halifax invites us to lean into uncertainty and the unknown as we practice what she calls wise hope. We are always going to be surprised in good and bad directions. That grounds me. I know things change all the time, even though I never know what direction that change will take. 

I don’t know how things will turn out, but I am committed to something other than this - the current structure and state of this world. We can live differently. I don’t think we have to live the way we currently do. I think something else is possible. The social theorist Henri Giroux writes that “Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.” So I invite you, young organizer, to embrace uncertainty as a terrain of glorious possibility. Let this uncertainty ground you rather than make you fearful.

I know that hope isn’t something that everyone embraces and I respect this. I usually tell my loved ones who adamantly reject it, that it’s OK if they give up hope if they don’t give up trying. Don’t give up on taking action. Our present actions matter, even though we do not know how the future will turn out. I’m with Grace Lee Boggs who said:

“We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of critical mass. It’s always about critical connections.”

Every time we choose constructive action, it builds toward the possibility of freedom and liberation. 

So as long as I am alive, I’m going to keep trying every day. That’s my commitment. Every morning that I have breath, I stay rooted in possibility and I choose to act. And I remember that doing so doesn’t preclude feeling burdened or needing relief.  

There’s a poem by Brendan Kennelly that I appreciate titled “Begin” and I love this part in particular because it speaks to hope as a discipline for me:

“Though we live in a world that dreams of ending 

that always seems about to give in 

something that will not acknowledge conclusion 

insists that we forever begin” 

So young organizer, make space in your life to begin again every single day. Be astonished at mundane things in your world. Build positive actions into the fabric of your life. As Emily Raboteau has said, the “future is not foreclosed.” We’ll get through this together. That’s a promise. 

In peace,

Mariame

Words by Dan Berger, Art by Laura Chow Reeve [source]

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Projects for Your Year-End Donations

I am making year-end contributions to each of these. Please join me.

REBUILD - Funds are urgently needed to keep this program going in 2025. We need to raise $100,000 by December 31. I have committed to match up to $10,000 in contributions. Additionally, donations of $50 and more are eligible to enter this raffle by November 30. 

Prison Library Support Network - PLSN is pooling $15,000 to keep its reference-by-mail project alive. Since 2021, they’ve answered 3,000+ research questions from people in jails and prisons—entirely as volunteers. If you donate $1 by 12/31, it will be matched by $5 up to $15,000—that's potentially over $90,000 toward helping people in prisons access information they need on their own terms.

My comrade, imprisoned intellectual and organizer Stevie Wilson, is raising funds for an inside study group. Please consider supporting them here. 

The Sameer Project - This is a mutual aid project for Gaza led by Palestinians.

BX Rebirth - Please make a note that you are donating to the MK Birth Liberation Fund if you donate.

Palmetto State Abortion Fund - I am a monthly contributor and they are doing essential and needed work. Your donations get put to immediate use to support access to abortion.