“I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I'm changing the things I cannot accept” - Angela Davis
“A strategy is like a stairway that takes us from our present position to where we want to go. Tactics are like the individual steps.” Lee Staples, Roots to Power
When I was growing up, my grandparents, cousins, and people from our church would live with us when they were sick or needed a place. My mom is a nurse with a big and generous heart, and even though we were already a family of 9, it always felt like the more, the merrier. The piles of laundry were high, the kitchen table a little sticky, there was crayon on the walls but we had our priorities straight. We learned to show up for each other.
I was 5 years old when my Gran lived with us, tucked into my parents bed, living with late stage kidney disease. I’d climb up on the tall bed in the early morning and my Gran and I would share a piece of toast while my mom prepared her dialysis. Gran would always give me the bigger half of the toast. Our mom taught us how to make someone feel at home, and safe and cared for, and we learned to find ways to make that real in the larger world. Love meant taking action and showing up like this.
This week we have seen new plans to cut essential food and health care programs at the state and federal level. We've heard attacks on immigrants and LGBTQ communities that are frightening, unjust and devastating. We see proposals that would undo decades of hard-won progressive change. This is the opposite of love in action or the caring community we envision. We feel disoriented and scared. While there are many tools we have to hold the line and we will, it is understandable to feel this way. The number of attacks coming at our communities all at once is daunting.
It is also true that so many generations before us have faced what felt like insurmountable injustices. They came together and organized, they took great risks, they cared for each other in the midst of hate, they danced and sang, they wove together the resources they had to share with each other and built strong movements for change. I believe we have the capacity to do all this and more. Love means action, we’re going to show up.
How can we all bring more light each day to our efforts to achieve equal justice?
At Maine Equal Justice, we focus on the right to health care, to food, to shelter, to economic opportunity and the right to live free of racism and discrimination. Much of the work we do in the next few years will be in defending these rights, and we will do all we can to continue advancing them as well. We’ve been here before. With your help, with community leaders from around the state, we’re going to use all our collective experience to stand for a future of shared prosperity and equity.
What work could we do this year, together?
Looking at our work on the national level, we’ll advocate to protect Medicaid (MaineCare), SNAP (food assistance) and housing supports like the Section 8 program. We’ll also be watching the national immigration debate closely as it impacts so many of our partners, community leaders, friends and family living and working in Maine. We remain committed to building a state where all can live with economic freedom and free from hate.
Here in Maine, we have two more years under Governor Janet Mills. We will be working hard to make sure rent relief, state funding for SNAP (food assistance), income support (TANF) and General assistance are protected. The budget process in the Maine legislature is a key part of getting there. Maine must pass a budget that achieves greater equity, rather than increasing inequality. We will also work to make our tax system more fair, passing an expansion of the Child Tax Credit and pushing the current administration to finally end tax breaks enjoyed by the top 1% in order to pay for things our communities desperately need in the midst of a housing crisis.
Let’s organize for change and learn together
There are 5 leadership practices for organizers developed by Professor Marshall Ganz of the Kennedy School and a network of organizers around the globe known as the Leading Change Network. Deepening our leadership and skills can help us do more together. And they are great ideas we can work on as a team.
It can feel like we must rush to put out all the fires right now, and that we don’t have time to organize. That’s real. But we exhaust ourselves and we neglect building an ever-growing base of community members ready to lead when we don’t slow down enough to build a foundation of strong relationships and teams.
In 2025, MEJ’s organizing team wants to share this model of organizing with all of you in training and practice sessions. Interested? Sign up here for our first session on February 25th.
The following comes directly from the experience of veteran organizers at Leading Change Network and Marshall Ganz. Organizing is leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want.
Community organizing is all about people, power, and change – it starts with people and relationships, is focused on shifting power, and aims to create lasting change.
Organizing people to build the power involves five key leadership practices: telling stories, building relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, and acting.
In order to build teams and organizations strong enough to face the challenges ahead, we can learn:
- How to tell a story of why we are called to this work, who is the community we will act with and why we’re united, and a story of why we must act now.
- How to build trusting relationships as the foundation of collective action.
- How to create a team that shares power and responsibility and prioritizes leadership development.
- How to turn the resources we do have (we aren’t billionaires but we each bring unique resources, gifts and talents to the work!) into the power to achieve clear goals (our strategy or plan of action).
- How to translate strategy into measurable, motivational, and effective action.
Stories, relationships and building teams build power. Strategy and action helps us effectively use the power we have built in order to create change.
Will you join our team to put up our best defense and build for the future? Sign up here.
This year and in years to come, it’s going to take all of us standing strong together. We have experience from the past to bring to this fight. There is a role for all of us and it will take all of us. We can shape our future together. Let’s do all we can to add light to every single day.
Maine Equal Justice focuses its work on many of the issues that affect people’s daily lives – access to adequate health care, housing, transportation and childcare; food and income security; and higher education and training. Maine Equal Justice is a 501 c 3 nonprofit organization. Our EIN is 04-3346273. 