QUICK TAKE — Join a Zoom tonight or next week to brainstorm civic engagement ideas together for getting through this era of upheaval. Things are changing fast. We can bring people together to help us all find ways forward and through.
How are you doing today?
I’m sitting outside on friend’s patio on a cold, rainy day in an attempt to get this post out to you all before the day gets too far in (well okay it’s 54 degrees, so not cold). Because we’re doing a Zoom tonight to brainstorm civic engagement ideas together for getting through this era of upheaval — and we’d like you to join us.
Because things are happening fast, and it’s going to be increasingly important to get people together to think creatively about how we can all deal with this stuff.
So. This week and next week we’re hoping to get some people together to talk about how we could help Americans do civic engagement in various places and in various ways to help with the big changes that are happening.
What is civic engagement?
It’s getting engaged with other humans in community-oriented ways. That’s it. I made up that definition, but that’s because this doesn’t have to be complicated.
One of the ways a country gets into a mess like we’re in now is because the social fabric has gotten all threadbare and torn; because people are less engaged than they were.
One of the ways you find your way through this kind of a mess to a new way of being is that you have to get people engaged. Somehow.
It can be weekly get-togethers in someone’s apartment. It can be big community conversations. It can be ice cream socials. It can be picnics. It can be dances. It can be educational events about how the law works, or about how jurisdiction works in a system of federalism, or what your rights are, or whatever. It can be a music thing. It can be a creative art get-together of some sort. It can be community gardens. It can be skill-sharing. It can be mutual aid, or any volunteer stuff, or anything that helps people get through. Or it can just be fun. Or it can be about sharing and hearing and seeing each other.
Whatever.
The point is to get people more engaged in connection and community. To get creative. To lead. To empower each other. To build alliances, coalitions, and partnerships. To get more resilient, for this time of increasing societal disruption, upheaval, and instability.
This is the stuff we’re doing.
As everything gets more funkier, we’re going to need more of it.
Anyway. Join us. Bring your brain. Bring your friends. Bring your roommate or your partner or your kids or your spouse or people in your office or whoever.
Things are changing fast.
This work here is about helping us to navigate it, together, and to make change even while we’re doing that.
Keep the faith — in humans.
Forward and through.
Zooms and other Fierce Community efforts are made possible by people who donate to this work through ActBlue, through Patreon, and through paid Substack subscriptions. Thank you to everyone who has helped us get this far.
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Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. It’s through-finding by countering fear. Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive. She has over 25 years experience in resilience-building, civic engagement, coalition-building, critical infrastructure, systems thinking, big disasters, catastrophes, wildland fire, emergency management, incident management, land management, park rangering, homeland security, continuity of operations (COOP), continuity of government (COG), technology innovation, public communication, and disaster information sharing.