We got in trouble this year. And it was beautiful.
Beautiful Highlights to carry us through the next year of Trouble
Let’s be honest. This has been a doozy of a year in so many ways, and we are heading into stormy waters ahead. So it's especially meaningful to toot our own hammerhorn and share with you some spectacular work we’ve done together this past year. You are part of these successes, and if something moves you here, please consider donating year-end to Beautiful Trouble to help us keep powering up social movements for big wins to come!
This year, Beautiful Trouble doubled down on what we do best: equipping everyday troublemakers with the tools to spark meaningful change. By supporting creative direct actions globally with the Get Up, Rise Up! (GURU) Fund, the release of Beautiful Solutions, and a whirlwind of trainings, 2024 was a very busy year for our small but mighty team. Let’s dive in.
A NEW BOOK, Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation
This long-awaited release is a love letter and map to the bold and visionary work happening in real life worldwide. The book is bursting with stories and strategies showing how grassroots movements are not just resisting but are building something better.
Written collaboratively by more than 70 contributors and born from the lived experiences of grassroots organizers, solidarity economy practitioners, and communities on the frontlines of climate and economic crisis, Beautiful Solutions demonstrates that a more just and democratic world is not only possible—it’s actively under construction. From food sovereignty to debt abolition, from folk schools to energy democracy – and from Argentina to Zimbabwe – Beautiful Solutions is an invaluable resource for anyone working towards a solidarity economy.
We launched the book with events at Highlander Center in Tennessee, the Worker Cooperative Conference in Chicago, and our own book event in NYC. (And we launched a new website for the book) In 2025, we’ll be adding many of these stories to our interactive online toolbox. Get in touch if you’d like us to come to your city or Zoom room for a book talk. Get inspired by these just-published book excerpts in this month’s Yes! Magazine and then order your copy!
EXPANDED TRANSLATIONS
This year, we made our toolbox even more accessible by expanding translations across resources in our Toolbox, books, and card decks! We've expanded translations in Arabic, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Russian, Burmese, and Portuguese, with more to come, supporting activists worldwide to drive resistance and action in their own languages. ✊ The movement for justice has no borders—and neither should its resources.
Beautiful Trouble was translated into Hungarian – you can download it here!
Belo levante! The Brazilian Portuguese edition of the Beautiful Trouble card deck is proving extremely popular. Revolutionary love and appreciation to Escola de Ativismo and Autonomia Literária for believing in and making this project happen.
Our card deck is now available for download in several languages, including Vietnamese and Italian, and over 1600 people downloaded our multilingual BATMo! training modules deck.
NEW WORKBOOKS & GUIDES
Can NGOs and social movements get along? We’ve been working on this for years, sharing learnings along the way. In 2024, our expanded work with Amnesty International blossomed into a guide and workshops designed to build NGO capacity to work well with social movements. Look for publicly available resources on our website soon!
And we will soon be releasing a workbook for Myanmar organizers and activists in Burmese and English in early 2025.
NEW TOOLS
Check out these new game-changing pieces in our online toolbox:
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
Is it possible to be an effective activist while balanced on the knife’s edge between optimism and pessimism? Andrew Boyd answers with an exuberant YES in this new theory entry adapted from his most recent book. He argues that we need both hard-headed realism and full-hearted idealism to change the world.
Inspired by migratory birds, this is a technique for sustaining activism for the long haul. You'll go far if you rotate roles to share burdens and allow members to step back from frontline roles without guilt.
Over 100,000 new visitors accessed our free online toolbox, and (drumroll please) our most popular toolbox pieces were Power Mapping, The Real Action is Your Target’s Reaction, Ladder of Engagement, and Spectrum of Allies.
NEW PARTNERSHIPS & EXPANDED PROJECTS
Beautiful Trouble took a leap with a global consortium led by Partners Global to launch The Powered by People program (PxP). Our role in this groundbreaking work is to ensure millions of dollars in earmarked funding reaches and serves frontline activists and their communities.
We traveled to the All African Movements Assembly (Ghana) and the Paradiso Convergence (Tanzania) working with movement communicators toward building Pan-African solidarity from climate justice to gender equity.
GET UP, RISE UP! FUND (GURU)
This year, our direct action fund took a giant leap forward. We awarded $45,000 in small grants to 47 grassroots groups, nearly doubling last year’s impact. (thanks to generous support from PxP!) Five new countries have been added to our grantee map, including Armenia, Bangladesh, Benin, Northern Ireland, and Romania. We expanded our grant application vetting team to welcome three new committee members who bring fresh perspectives and expertise from their own direct action experience in Cameroon, El Salvador, and India.
Here are just a few stories of creative resistance:
Myanmar – Protest as Streetwear: Activists turned t-shirts into tools of resistance, defying military repression with slogans that couldn’t be silenced. In the face of severe and deadly repression during and after the 2021 coup in Myanmar, activists pushed back with a unique initiative known as “The Sling Streetwear.” This campaign emerged as a powerful amalgamation of art and activism, seeking to amplify the voices of the oppressed and make daily life a protest to counter the violent and deadly military crackdown.
Uganda – Actions to fight the East African Crude Oil Pipeline: In a powerful display of unity and determination, Youth for Green Communities organized a University Day of Actions on July 3, 2023, in two key locations in Uganda: Hoima and Kampala. Students from various universities nationwide came together to raise their voices against the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline project. This initiative aimed to shed light on the project's devastating impacts on local communities and the environment while also advocating for change. Read more…
Argentina – Offshore Drilling Disrupted: A “sonic strike” using oil tanker sound simulations forged new alliances for climate justice. A group disrupted the progress of an offshore oil and gas exploitation project off the coast of Buenos Aires by creating instruments mimicking the sound of oil tankers to gather public support and protest. The action involved 50 participants and formed new alliances between diverse movements focused on the climate crisis.
Mexico – Gaza Clothesline Memorial: A group constructed a clothesline with children's clothes, each item representing a child's lost life, to visualize the genocide in Gaza. This activity focused on calling for an Israel/Palestine ceasefire, attracting significant public attention with more than 300 attendees, increasing social media following, gaining new group members, raising awareness and support for Gaza, and collecting approximately 400 items of children's clothing for donation.
Tanzania – Creating Climate Awareness: A mural was posted to create conversation about stopping fossil fuel in one of the five villages along the East African Crude Oil Pipeline route. Over 250 people engaged with it in the first two days, creating more advocates for change.
TRAINING & WORKSHOPS
We engaged with nearly 1000 activists – organizers, students, labor unions, and NGO staff – in over 25 trainings across the globe on creative disruption & strategic action to build our collective power on issues from reproductive justice to Palestine, health care to housing, student rights to community resilience.
Beautiful Trouble facilitated a webinar for activist writers hosted by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Panelists included Firoze Manji (who wrote on Neoliberalism and Poverty for the Beautiful Trouble toolbox at our activist jam session in Zimbabwe) and friends from Waging Nonviolence. We also shared our expertise in other venues, including an Emergency Response Grants for Social Movements and Activists webinar hosted by the Climate Emergency Fund.
BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE IN THE MEDIA
Check out the Cocktails & Capitalism podcast, where Beautiful Trouble Trainer Rae Abileah stirred the pot (and a cocktail). Tune in on Apple podcasts or Spotify for the full interview.
Beautiful Trouble Trainer Dan Glass premiered his film Beautiful Trouble in Europe and the UK, bringing our ethos to the silver screen.
Troublemakers podcast: We partnered with ActionAid, Global Platforms, and TCDC to release new episodes on activism and creative resistance.
We shared the new award-winning documentary Where Olive Trees Weep to help educate our community on the reality on the ground in the Palestinian Territories and the long legacy of creative resistance to oppression. You can still view the film via donation to Beautiful Trouble at the button here.
Our digital presence remains a vibrant force for change. Over the past months, some of our most shared and impactful pieces have been about divestment—exposing the power of strategic economic pressure—and the transformative tactic of school takeovers as protest, where communities reclaim spaces for justice.
These stories resonate because they highlight what Beautiful Trouble is all about: ordinary people wielding extraordinary power through bold, innovative actions. Your likes, shares, and comments are more than clicks—they’re acts of solidarity that amplify the work of grassroots movements worldwide.
Together, we’re sparking conversations, mobilizing allies, and proving that the struggle for justice thrives online and off. Let’s keep building the toolbox for a better world: one post, protest, and win at a time.
LOOKING AHEAD
Every grant, training, podcast, and protest is a brick in the road to a transformed and healthier world. With your support, we’re building the kind of world we all want to live in—bold, just, and beautiful.
Inspired or goosebumps by any of the above? Help us help you keep making trouble by making a donation to Beautiful Trouble today. We are powered by $20 donations that really add up to help us bring trainings & tools to the movement frontlines!
Published: 12/23/24
