A new pattern for a new year: compete, collide, or cooperate?

Right now, America as an idea and Americans as people are both struggling. Democracy feels chaotic and fragile. Civic life feels uncertain and unproductive. And communities all over the country are suffering. In the context of social ethics, love is the persistent attention to and care for the suffering of others. If we can suspend our fear, frustration, and indignation just long enough to love the idea of America and love the people who are our neighbors, we might could see our way to relationship and community. Building power everywhere it is needed to heal damaged systems and build new structures capable of reinvigorating community and reclaiming civic life is how we care, how we meet his moment. We are both unique and unspecial: each of us both necessary to the circle of community, desperately needed in this moment, and no better or worse than any other link required to complete the circle. And it has never been more important to be a link, to be connected: no one else can step into the space meant for us if we don't take it. And if we don't, the circle remains incomplete.

When the world feels fragile, when things feel on fire, we look for support – we look for water. And we try to remember: the world is full of allies.

We are constantly organizing in the same communities as other people and organizations with the same values but different priorities. Building power is a distinct activity from using power. Using power requires timing and opportunity and the serendipity that emerges from diligent preparedness. Rather than the standard operating procedure of social change of rushing into community with fixed priorities, of colliding or outright competing with folks who should be our allies and accomplices, of knowing of each other, but not being in relationship with each other, of people and organizations making their priorities the only priorities, of separating themselves from the work around them, what if real deep cooperation was the standard?

Helping communities build the power they need to affect all the systems and cultures they rely on could be a collaborative, cooperative enterprise shared by people and groups focused on the ultimate goal of transforming this country, broadly and comprehensively. Co-organizing is the expression of a deep embrace of our "inescapable network of mutuality"¹ in our practice of community organizing. It is the pattern of assuming that our work must be collaborative and cooperative by default when we organize in a place or a community and that we seek to be accomplices in each other's work, not just allies cheering each other on, but in relationship, actively showing up and contributing to each other's power building, knowing that the power is for the community, not for us, the work is for the place, not for us, and the priorities come from the context, not from us.

Too often our habits of organizing and philanthropy are too narrow and too self-centered and more often than not put us in collision with people with whom we should be allies or in competition with organizations who should be accomplices in our work because of some combination of self-centeredness, self-interest, zero-sum thinking, bad habits, or just plain fatigue. What if collaboration was the easy path? What if co-organizing was our standard operating pattern for helping communities build power and the using of that power was something we shared when opportunities arise? What if people and country and impact came before existential organizational questions and donor priorities? What if relationship was the answer to closing the distance between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads"²?

"I may not have come for this, but I am here for this."

Co-organizing is not doing our individual work in a group setting. It is group work, collective work, shared work. A deeply held belief that your work makes mine easier and better. That my work changes and improves your work. It is the commitment that my work and your work are our work in the context of building and using power to transform the systems and cultures that communities rely on to thrive. What makes it our work is not our priorities or practices but our shared principles and common commitments to what we believe and how we work.

And in this way the people and places drive the priorities of the circle. We all build power. We all organize and share resources and energy, and progress on one priority reduces the friction for the next. And community guides us on how to use the power we build and to what purpose. We trust that guidance because we are in constant relationship, constantly present to and for each other. We can trust that if we do what is ours, everyone around us can do what is theirs, and we can collectively trust that our work will be guided by the needs and priorities of the community as an abiding practice of investment in and trust in self-determination and that the priorities that animate us, that we bring with us will be met when opportunity presents itself, not as a demonstration of will or show of force but as the expression of our work coming to full expression.

Co-organizing is how complex, interconnected communities do all the work required to reinforce and reimagine all the different elements, systems, and cultures they require to thrive. There is too much for any one person or organization to carry, no matter how powerful. The myth of the magic intervention, the domino, the butterfly wing that begins a perfect cascade of transformation is a beautiful and seductive lie. We may now, suddenly in the context of thousands of generations of humans, feel like this is a strange new pattern. But it is actually our silos that are strange, that don't match that pattern of creation. It's our singularity and atomic modernity that misleads us. We are complex and interconnected, and the circles we occupy are incomplete without us – and without all the others committed to the places and people we love. If we narrow our focus to our small, essential arc of the circle we may convince ourselves of our importance and even claim success, believing we're on a straight line of self-reliant impact, but we leave the circle incomplete by failing to remain in true contact, true relationship with others, and our work, the real full transformation and thriving of the people and places we love is never accomplished.

We do our work together or we fail. Familiarity and recognition, allyship and celebration are an insufficient beginning if we hold ourselves separate from the circle, different, independent, colliding irregularly and randomly in moments of high intensity. We become accomplices when we come to community with a deep commitment to the interconnectedness of our work, sitting together in the circle all the time, comfortable or not, easy or not, completed by each other, strengthened and changed by each other. Being in relationship means that we are kind mirrors for each, revealing our uniqueness while also being constant antidote to the most dangerous thought in the world, that "I am greater than you" that separates us from each other and from the circle.³ We are meant to be in the cirlce together. Safer together. More powerful together. More capable and more creative together from the deep adaptability that emerges from loving difference and embracing other as source as opposed to the stale false comfort of sameness that comes from seeing other as threat.

Perhaps in this solstice season as we reflect on our country, our lives, and ourselves, perhaps this is the moment for rediscovering a pattern that might feel new but is actually how we have always meant to be. Being in relationship and doing shared work together gives us community. Even if the rest of the pattern – the wisdom of spirit and ancestor feels too remote or out of reach. Community gives us kinship and deep shared experience that is a bulwark against the now habitual distrust and lonely uncertainty of seemingly disparate realities. Kinship gives us a commitment to community that demands we celebrate and struggle together, that we make "others' conditions our own."⁴ Perhaps in the new year ahead, we are can come to the work of transformation as interconnected accomplices in shared work: our work.

¹ Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963.
² Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion, 1922.
³ Tyson Yunkaporta. Sand Talk, 2021.
⁴ M. Scott Peck. The Different Drum, 1998.

Last updated: 31 Dec 2025