One of the best ways to contribute to positive change is to join an organization. It’s a great way to build community, stay inspired and plugged in, and learn, grow, and become more effective. There are thousands of great organizations doing justice work: here are some suggested starting points. Many of these orgs also have local chapters that can help you explore your local movement ecosystem, where you can find a range of local organizations best suited for you.
350: We believe in the collective power of ordinary people taking action: we campaign and organize locally and globally to create a world powered by just and accessible renewable energy that will move us away from fossil fuels.
50501: Building momentum through community-building and protests: 50501 is a grassroots political organization protesting the second Trump administration.
Color of Change: Color of Change leads campaigns that build real power for Black communities. We challenge injustice, hold corporate and political leaders accountable, commission game-changing research on systems of inequality, and advance solutions for racial justice that can transform our world.
Federal Unionists Network: An informal association of federal unionists and our allies organizing to support each other in strengthening our unions, improving our agencies and building solidarity across the federal sector of the labor movement.
Indivisible: A grassroots movement of thousands of local groups with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda.
Mijente: We are a political home for Latinx and Chicanx people who seek racial, economic, gender and climate justice.
Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ): Mobilizing white people for justice across the country. Through campaigns, education, and action opportunities, SURJ moves people to reject racism and complicity– and to join movements for change.
Sunrise Movement: We’re a movement of young people fighting to stop the climate crisis and win a green new deal.
Third Act: Organizing elders to protect the climate and strengthen our democracy.
United We Dream: As the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country, our members advocate for the dignity and respect of all immigrants.
Working Families Party: Building a multiracial party of working people to transform our country.
ASO Communications: Applying tools from cognition and linguistics, we uncover where people are capable of going and how to use our words, images and stories to move them.
The Center for Story-Based Strategy: Center for Story-based Strategy cultivates imagination spaces where story, grassroots leadership, organizing, and democracy are interwoven strategies to build power.
Narrative Initiative: We collaborate with social movements to transform deeply held beliefs and values to make equity and justice the foundations of multiracial democracy.
Race-Class Academy: A 12-video introduction to how together we can beat dog whistle politics by building cross-racial and cross-class solidarity.
Reframing America:Reframing America is about questioning the assumptions in our public debate that restrict our thinking, and proposing new and better ways of talking about what’s happening in our country and in our lives.
Words to Win by Podcast: Takes listeners on a journey around the globe with renowned communications researcher and campaign advisor Anat Shenker-Osorio as she unpacks real-world narrative shifts that led to real-world victories.
Each of the pages below tracks a specific dimension of the resistance to the Trump administration, across a variety of tactics, institutions, and sectors of society. Most pages begin with a resource collection, followed by a news roundup. Collectively and at scale, these many forms of resistance undermine the pillars of support authoritarian regimes rely on.
Please share the Go Fund Me to for this project, so it can chart the Resistance for the entirety of this administration.
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR):List of immigration hotlines. (For reporting raids,seeking help if being detained or at risk of being deported, or reporting missing migrants.)
Connie M. Razza: “…we define mutual aid as an all-encompassing term for projects that provide direct and collective aid to people as a form of solidarity, often with an expressly political framework and the goal of long-term social change.”
Image from the SNCC Legacy Project, of SNCC staff singing freedom songs. (Singing is a powerful way to build strong community bonds.) Atlanta, 1963.
Although these books are not directly about activism or organizing, effective activism and organizing rests on the strength of the bonds we build together. A strong sense of community and connection supports the energy and emotional health of organizers, prevents burnout, keeps people invested over the long haul, and contributes greatly to growth, meaningful learning, and effective action.
Cornel West: “Optimism for me has never been an option. Because there’s too much suffering in the world.” Hope, on the other hand, is “an act of courage and imagination.”
Rebecca Solnit: “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act . . . Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.”
George Hrbek: “I always go back to the absolute necessity of community. When you’re part of a hope movement, if you’re talking about how do I keep up my spirits, and how does hope stay alive in my own life, it doesn’t come by me operating singularly. It’s within community, together with other people who also hope, and who provide encouragement to each other.”
Lynn Burnett: “If we pause to think about the Black Freedom Struggle saying, ‘making a way out of no way’, we can see that it expresses a teaching about hope: a teaching that possibility — ‘making a way’ — exists even within seemingly impossible situations: ‘out of no way.’ The phrase clearly acknowledges harsh realities, while expressing a commitment to keeping the spirit and the struggle alive. Hope is a path, carved between naïve optimism and pessimistic defeatism.”
Vaclav Havel: “The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope with-in us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
