What Happens When We Refuse to Give Up

“Our job is not to finish the work, but to move the work forward.” – Omkari Williams

In towns and cities, in forests and neighborhoods, groups of ordinary people are showing us what happens when we work together. In a time when many feel hopeless about the future, people are showing up anyway. One small action at a time, they are removing barriers and helping communities thrive.

This is not theory. These are real stories unfolding right now.

Communities Healing Waterways

In Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, Tlingit forestry crews have been working with the U.S. Forest Service and the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition to remove logging culverts that have blocked salmon streams for decades. These barriers, relics of industrial exploitation, prevented fish from reaching their spawning grounds. With careful ecological planning, the crews opened waterways again. Salmon returned. Their effort combined Indigenous stewardship, cultural healing, and scientific expertise into a powerful restoration project.

When Midland, Michigan hosted its annual River Days Festival this summer, it wasn’t just music and festivities. Groups including the Midland Area Community Foundation, Rivers are Life, and the Chippewa Nature Center teamed up with volunteers to clear trash and debris from the Tittabawassee River. They paddled, hauled, and sorted, side by side. The result was not just prettier riverbanks, but a community taking pride in restoring its natural spaces and its collective power to protect them.

Along the shores of Lake Erie, the Conneaut Port Authority partnered with local residents to complete a marina and shoreline cleanup as part of its broader Coastal Resiliency Plan. Together, local people, consultants, and officials are shaping the long-term future of their waterways and planning how their community adapts to climate change.

Three very different places. Three very different groups of people. One message: when people collaborate across differences, life returns in many different forms. And hope returns, too. 

Quiet Resistance for Democracy

While we celebrate the many demonstrations across the nation this year, the same kind of collaborative energy is happening in quieter ways around the U.S. to oppose an anti-democratic agenda. Communities are employing the tools of strategy, law, and community care to counter actions that undermine civil rights and democratic values. It’s happening everywhere. Let these examples inspire you.

Federal workers facing sudden and unjust layoffs by the administration are not alone. The AFL-CIO and We The Action launched the Federal Workers Legal Defense Network, recruiting volunteer lawyers to provide pro bono legal support. Federal workers now have a resource to call on, help in understanding their rights, and real support in a time of confusion, fear, and vulnerability.

Meanwhile, legal activists and watchdog groups are pursuing accountability through The 65 Project. They are filing disciplinary complaints against lawyers who helped undermine the 2020 election. Using effective channels—the state bar association complaint process—is ensuring that the people behind the anti-democratic agenda receive public scrutiny and professional consequences for their actions. 

As ICE continues to bypass due process and violate constitutional rights, it is spreading fear in our communities. Groups around the country are responding proactively. In Los Angeles, CHIRLA, SEIU 721, and United Teachers Los Angeles built rapid-response systems. Together, they are monitoring public spaces, holding know-your-rights workshops, and coordinating safe hubs, backed by civil rights lawsuits from the ACLU. In Chicago, neighborhood leaders and faith groups swiftly activated similar response networks and coordinated legal support.

In response to the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and affirmative action, the National Urban League, at its summer conference, declared a state of emergency for civil rights. Leaders called out the erasure of diversity as part of a broader effort to dismantle civil rights protections. By naming the crisis, the League is empowering people in schools, workplaces, and communities to confront systemic discrimination.

In Providence, Rhode Island, local residents are meeting in grassroots assemblies to address systemic injustice. They gather in church halls to plan, strategize, and make collective decisions to support their neighbors. These meetings are not headline-grabbing protests. They are the patient work of democracy—neighbors building the skills, trust, and solidarity they need to show up for each other.

Different issues, different communities, and yet each effort is a kind of guardrail. Nothing can stop every harmful policy or raid, but showing up slows the agenda. These efforts remind us that people can and do take care of each other, even in the harshest conditions.

What Does This Mean for You and Me?

In a recent conversation with Omkari Williams, author of Micro Activism, she told me, 

If we believe that what we do only counts if we’re successful in accomplishing a big goal, a huge goal, often we won’t even start because we feel all the limitations that come with being human.

But if we commit to making a difference, to advancing whatever cause we care most deeply about, then we will stay in the work, and we’ll make progress. We need to value progress, not just meeting the end goal because, honestly, we may not live to see it, but moving things forward…that we can do, and that matters. That’s the work.

If you’re watching the current administration’s actions in a state of disillusionment or despair, join us in turning your attention to the people choosing to show up for what they care about and making progress. The residents in Ohio didn’t participate in a coastal cleanup because it solved climate change forever, they did it because it matters. Tlingit forestry workers didn’t dismantle culverts because it would make headlines, they did it to honor their ancestors and safeguard the future for salmon.

Likewise, even though this administration’s agenda seems unstoppable, lawyers are still assisting federal workers who need help now and communities are organizing because their neighbors are worthy of rights and dignity.

The scale of the crisis does not stop them. They act anyway. As Omkari Williams says, “Our job is not to finish the work, but to move the work forward.”

Here’s What We Know

Old culverts fail. Old ways fail. We do not know which action will arrest the current administration’s agenda. We can’t know the day or the hour, but we do know that it will eventually come. The administration’s plans are devoid of love or life, and a house of cards built on fear and greed will crumble and fail.

The stories above share one essential truth: progress happens when people show up. While no single action or person will fix our democracy or heal our planet, when we act with love, integrity, and shared values, a better future is inevitable. 

So here is your invitation: commit to showing up. Take one action each week. Or three, if you can.

It doesn’t matter where you start, because every barrier removed, every guardrail built, every act of care and solidarity we offer brings that day closer. Open our latest Checklist here.

We Are the River

Together, we are powerful. And together, our individual actions form a collective effort carving a path toward the just, thriving, and compassionate future we know is possible.

In solidarity,
Jen Hofmann and the AoCC Team