Pieces & Parts - July 17, 2025 (Updates As We Remodel To Do Fierce Community)
“Pieces & Parts” is a collection of notes & updates on what’s happening with the work here & other random related stuff.
WE STEPPED BACK TO REMODEL, FOR THIS NEW ERA
Hi all! We’re in the midst of a big pivot here at this nonprofit, so the posts have been infrequent as we’re doing stuff behind the scenes. But! Progress!
When 2025 started, we did a bunch of “Big Chaos Preparedness” Zooms to get started in the uncertainty of the new administration.
As that administration has gotten going on huge big change very, very fast… we opted to step back here and retool so that we could better meet the moment.
Some of us have also been doing the whole “put your own oxygen mask on first in case of a loss of cabin pressure,” like the advice you get on an airplane. Because you can’t help other people if you can’t breathe yourself.
So. Now. We’re informally rolling out what we’ve come up with for ways forward. More to come in the next week or two but we are starting Zooms again July 28 with sign-ups coming on or before July 22. And we’ll build from there.
A NEW NAME: FIERCE COMMUNITY
One of the changes we’re making is renaming our work here to “Fierce Community” from “Shift the Country.”
Lots of reasons for that, but overall it just better fits the moment and what we need to be doing in this new era. We’ll talk a lot about it as we ramp up again so I won’t wax rhapsodic here.
The thing is, in a time of rising chaos we all need to be flexible, and to roll with the needs of the moment. Shift the Country was named in an era where we were hoping to be able to get funding and traction to be able to drive a major civic engagement movement that would have helped the country go in a different direction instead of what we’re doing now.
But now we’re here.
Now we need fierce community.
So now we’ll do what we can at this nonprofit to help people support, build, and do fierce community — in all kinds of ways.
Technically the nonprofit itself will still be called Shift the Country, but the work we do as an initiative will be called Fierce Community. We go forward from here.
OUR FOCUS
The updated focus at Fierce Community is to “promote civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, empowerment, alliances, leadership, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption.”
That’s the stuff. This work will include things like problem-solving and vision-building and working toward a more diverse, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable society where more people have a better chance to survive, thrive, and flourish.
Yet we’re in a time of increasing chaos, legalized meanness, eroding institutions, active harm, worsening disasters, and so on.
We need to put our hearts and our humanity out front. We may all need to defend and advocate for each other in ways we’ve not had to in recent history. We may need big courage. We may need to take big risks — or lots of little ones.
That’s fierce community. So this nonprofit work here will dig into how we can help bring that; in whatever ways we collectively find to be appropriate and helpful.
ZOOMS START JULY 28
We’ll be doing that in the next few months online via Zooms where we work together to talk through this stuff, to share, to brainstorm, to commiserate, to grieve, to encourage each other, and to in general find ways through together.
Zooms are planned to start July 28 and to cover a whole bunch of topics.
Sign-ups will be announced here on or before July 22.
Holler below in the comments if you’ve got something you’d like to see covered in a Zoom.
Zooms will be Monday nights for the early crowd and earlier time zones, and Wednesday nights for the later crowd and later time zones — although folks can join whatever works. Same topics for each night.
There will also be during-the-day Zoom sessions but still working on that plan. One goal of all this is to build fierce community ourselves with the people who join in. With that, we want a repeating schedule and regularly scheduled get-togethers that people can rely on so we can actually build some community.
FYI — all our sessions are free, because this is a nonprofit. I read something today about someone putting on get-ready-for-big-disaster seminars for a few hundred dollars for a short session. Like as if we can all afford that, and plus we’re all going to need to get ready for more disasters and disruption. Anyway: this nonprofit is a nonprofit because we want to help; we don’t just want to help the people who can pay. Bonus! If you’d like to help us help people, donation links are at the end of the post.
START IN ON THE PARADIGM-SHIFTING BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS FIXING TO GET DIFFERENT FAST
I wrote the other day that it’s time to Get More Ready for all this.
Change is coming. You can use a voice from the first Twister movie in the 1990s and correct that statement to say, creepily, “It’s already heeeeere.”
Yeah… the tornado has definitely arrived.
Congress passed a bill and Trump signed it into law on July 4 to heavily weaponize the US government against very many humans. We have probably never on earth seen so much money put so clearly and intentionally up front toward developing a massive law enforcement presence to take very dramatic actions that will harm hundreds of thousands of people, families, and communities. Plus the law shifts funding, defunds government capabilities and offices, and actively removes entire systems and processes for human health and healing — especially in rural areas. Plus, the administration has been actively taking apart government and capabilities since January. Plus, the courts have been actively weakening the rule of law, throwing out precedents, and actively enabling the administration’s priorities.
Life is going to look a whole lot different, and probably very fast.
People are going around acting like it’s a normal American summer but it’s not. It’s probably more accurately the last time US society, institutions, and communities will look like what we’ve been used to… so maybe people are soaking all of that up. Who knows. It does seem like a lot of folks don’t realize what’s been happening or what changes are coming. Denial is kind of an intoxicating drug, but it’s not going to help people get more ready for what’s unfolding fast before us.
We would do well to start making paradigm shifts that help us deal with this new era. To be fair, finding joy is important — and summer is a great time for that. Life can still have amazing pieces and parts.
Yet we will navigate this better if we recognize that change is already here and happening fast, and that we need to change too to deal with all of that more effectively.
We might be better positioned to get through it ourselves and to help others to get through it if we lean forward into it and get proactive rather than going with denial and waiting to be reactive.
WRAPPING IT UP
As always, I’m super fun at parties.
But for real — you and your people will likely do better over time in this era of fast rising instability and societal disruption if you make some changes now in anticipation of what’s coming.
We’ve got a hell of a lot of good people out here.
We’ve got a hell of a lot of deep values, and love, and humanity.
We’re going to need all that as legalized hatred, meanness, harm, and cruelty take huge swipes at real people and do actual damage.
I don’t know how we turn it around, but I do know that that love stuff is wicked awesome powerful.
If you’re looking for anchors and grounding, it’s a great place to start. It’s a great place to be able to breathe from.
We can love. We can go about looking after humans. We can go about looking after ourselves, the people in our lives, our neighbors, our communities, and also total strangers who we don’t know but who we know we can also love and look after.
This is going to be a long thing. We will get through it better if we bring our deepest values. And our empathy. And our hearts.
Keep the faith — in love, in humans, and in fierce community.
We can do and be so much. We already are.
Onward, through, and forward.
Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, empowerment, alliances, leadership, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. Email fiercecommunityteam@gmail.com to set up a conversation.
Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er for doing fierce community in a time of disruption and disaster. Ms. Burnett has a rare systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive that can help people and groups navigate this era of fast change and unprecedented challenges. 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. More about the author in this bio and on this page.
Inspiring and earth changing.
While not an US citizen, I realize how much everyone is impacted. Thinking more broadly while addressing the physical trauma responses of my body with the goal of healing from inside rather than trying to control the external.