“To believe is to become what you believe.” — June Jordan
We have been a bit quiet these last few months. This has been the quiet we need to listen to ourselves, to you—grassroots groups, artists, healers, other movement accompanists, our more-than-human kin, and a few funders too. It is the quiet of listening to the cries of anguish and grief, to the bold responses prefiguring a liberating future, to the laughter of connection and joy, to the soft whispers of a better future for all of us growing from the ruins of systems that never served most of us. As we move deeper into fall, preparing for winter, we are sharing some of what we have been hearing, the meaning we are making of this inflection point, and what has been guiding our own pivots, soft movements, and emergent leaps.
How might we….
How might we …
- … center imagination and dreaming as everyday practices?
- … contend with what’s urgent while acknowledging what needs to slow down?
- … maintain curiosity when what’s “wrong” seems obvious?
- … make room for grief and celebration and the simultaneity of life?
- … keep (re)membering our humanity and learning from the rest of nature to fuel our movements?
- … interrupt old patterns and create new, more liberating designs?
- … tap more deeply into our infinite power?
We are in unprecedented times, yes. In some ways, we have been here before. And in other ways, we have not. Some of the tools are different, our state of being is different, the legacies we carry, and the conditions themselves are different. We are at an inflection point, as a country and globally, and we are at choice in how we respond to this moment.
The above inquiries extend from questions posed mostly by organizers, healers, artists, and movement accompanists during our Prefiguring Futures Lab last April, and they uplift some of the key openings we have to advance our desired future while living it now. These questions call us into vision, strategy, culture, spirit, courage, and loving connection with ourselves, each other, and the natural world, illuminating what is clear to many across our movements: we must respond to this moment in ways that plant the seeds of a future we want—a future of interdependence and mutual thriving.
How might we plant those seeds? Extending from the Block & Build strategy, our movements need to be doing four things:
- Block: defend and protect people, communities, policies, rights, etc.
- Believe: vision and dream the future we want, tend to imagination and creativity, and be guided by it daily.
- Build: bridge and deepen relationships with each other, unusual partners, and those not yet engaged in our movements, working together to build liberating alternatives to systems that never served us.
- Be: tend to our well-being individually and collectively, embracing practices of liberation such that we are in continuous connection with our simultaneous stories/wisdom, our bodies, source, and our emotions (practices of liberation evolved from the work of Monica Dennis).
We are grateful to the grassroots organizers and strategists who continually share their brilliant political analyses and evolve the Block & Build strategy as our context shifts. If you haven’t already, we recommend taking a look at the framework articulated by Max Elbaum in Convergence Magazine in 2023, the Convergence Block & Build Syllabus compiled and shared in 2024, and the updated 2025 syllabus, as well as the Block & Build podcast (as just a few of the many resources related to this framework).
As movement accompanists, partnering with leaders, organizations, and networks for justice, we have found it imperative to name Believe and Be—not to create a new framework or critique the strategy as it’s outlined, but to spotlight the essential and often under-resourced work necessary to create the strong movement infrastructures needed for our visions to take root and be fed today while also advancing them for the long haul. Believe and Be are inherent within Block and Build, and also need explicit tending.
Believe and Be
Believe and Be are our movement’s connective tissue—the strong ligaments and tender cartilage weaving us together across issues, identities, coalitions, networks, policies, and practices. It is not our 501c3 status, grantee cohorts, or board reports that build our movements—it is our dreams and well-being, what we are doing, and how we be while we are doing it.
With intense violence and state threats pressing in, accessing the imagination needed to embody and build a just future can be difficult and even unsafe. And yet if we are to build something different than what already is, something that lays the groundwork for a future truly rooted in mutuality and care, we must be able to imagine it and view ourselves differently within it. Nurturing our individual and collective well-being supports us to see ourselves within an interdependent, thriving future in the present. When tended to, our vibrant dreams keep us building, adapting, and moving with purpose, together.
Seeing A Movement Ecosystem and Embracing Your Role
Many movement builders and supporters feel torn between defending and protecting communities and hard-won gains, building a vision for the future, and tending to relationships and long-term partnerships. Let’s be clear: this feeling of being torn about where to put your time, energy, and resources is a function of fascism meant to root us in scarcity, competition, chaos, and binaries rather than in the fertile soil of our wisdom, creativity, tenacity, and imagination. We need all of it—the being, the believing, the building, and the blocking. And we don’t all need to be doing everything. We can’t all be doing everything, every person in every organization and network. We need to be working in deeper relationship with our partners—understanding our movement roles and focusing on the one, two, or three things we can do well. We must understand and respect the value of all of the work and the combined approaches and ways forward. And we must remember that we all need access to our dreams and to our well-being, even if “the healer” or “the visionary” (see Deepa Iyer’s Movement Ecosystem Framework) isn’t our ecosystem role, or if neither believing nor being is our primary strategy.
Believing, Blocking, Being, and Building…our vision must extend beyond ourselves, and we must see our present beyond particular strategies, approaches, and fragmented views of ourselves. In liberation, in interdependence. In virtuosity and ensemble. With one another, we know the way.
With fierceness, with vision, and with care, how might we move boldly ahead, together?
“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” – James Baldwin
