Overview
Our strength lies in what we can do together.
There are people and institutions whose drive for profit threatens to destroy everything we have. We can summon the courage to challenge them, to meet our own needs, create our own realities, and defend what we create. Collective courage is about choosing to stick with the hard work of fighting together, even when it may mean giving some things up.
We borrow the term “collective courage” from our friend Jessica Gordon Nembhard and her book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Economic Thought and Practice. It is a phrase that can come to life in many contexts. Whether it’s creating a mutual aid network, campaigning for a policy, protesting discrimination, registering new voters, organizing a community meeting, or running for office, our work cannot be neatly separated into issue areas. It is the work of survival and thriving, and it means innovating and evolving to meet the needs of each moment, and supporting each other when obstacles arise.
A community can hold a vision and an awareness of what could be, but they must choose to bring it into being and respond to the consequences that arise from its creation. Any project that challenges the existing power structure will provoke a response from those in power. Choosing collective courage means leaning into the strength of our communities and preparing to meet that resistance together, despite the odds.
It may be harder to build strength in a collective than retreat into the supposed safety of isolation, but the collective is our power. We can work to trust each other in a society that makes us unsafe, to confront our suspicion and our fears of one another. We can join with other members of the community despite our differences, working and grieving and celebrating together. We can do the hard work of crafting a strategy that integrates different approaches and groups of people in the building of a cohesive vision for our future.
We must be clear about what we’re fighting for and against, so that we don’t end up fighting each other. When those in power try to pit us against each other, we resist because we know that we are stronger when we’re together.
Choosing collective courage means organizing from our roots: being so grounded in our experience and in our place that when we turn toward one another, we can see that we are not alone. It is understanding that we must begin by changing our reality close to home. It is choosing to do the work, together, right where we are.