Happy 2026 + Top 10 Social Change Favorites
Happy New Year,
Every year around this time I like to send an update to friends, connections, and clients to express appreciation and reflect on the past year. In 2025, I had the pleasure of advancing housing justice, abortion access, immigrant justice, democracy, and more.
With authoritarianism continuing to rise globally, and the U.S. witnessing the rollout of all seven tactics in the Authoritarian Playbook—arguably crossing into fascism—much of my focus was on understanding fascism: how it happens, how to push back. And not just push back, but at the same time build a liberatory world so irresistible that systems of domination can no longer keep hold.
The good news is, we’re seeing what could be the beginnings of that world emerge from the pushback—in the solidarity, joy, humor, mutual aid, and determination to love and care for each other springing up all over. New (yet ancient) ways of being and relating. A recognition that there is no going back to what was before. That we don’t want to. I’m reminded of the quote from Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Ilya Prigogine, “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
I wrote a lil’ something: All Violence Is Interconnected: Violence Begets Violence; Healing Begets Justice, and I want to lift up part of it here:
I recently finished The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. The book documents the many ways humans have organized societies over the past 40,000 years—and debunks the belief that hierarchy and violence are inevitable. Instead, the evidence shows that large, complex, egalitarian cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures are actually quite commonplace throughout history.
Meaning, the world wasn’t always this way. It doesn’t have to be this way.
There’s a proverb that says a society grows great when elders plant trees under whose shade they know they will never sit. That’s how I feel about the work of this moment.
I want my niblings—or maybe it will be their grandchildren, or their grandchildren's grandchildren—to grow up in a world where their bodies know and expect safety. Where the stories they whisper at 13 aren't of rape, but of first crushes and wild dreams. Where the headlines aren’t about hurting each other, but about taking care of each other.
We may not live to see that world. But we can plant the trees.
Hope you enjoy this year’s social change favorites, and I welcome your thoughts. Want to chat? Just set a time: calendly.com/trinastout.
Looking forward to collaborating in 2026,
Trina
In 2025, the people showed up against fascism and for each other with massive public—and many quiet, private—displays of noncooperation/defiance and solidarity. Images via HuffPo, TikTok, and MPR.
2025 Top 10: Social Change Favorites
The below were either published or new to me in the last year:
What the Left Is Getting Wrong About the Right (webinar and project) – PowerLabs, Micah English and Daniel Martinez HoSang. Researchers found that most people do not come to the Right because they're searching for an ideology. They come because they're searching for meaning, a place to call home, and people they can trust. The Right is responding to people’s feelings about this moment, and offering belonging, sensemaking, story, and ritual. The Left…isn’t yet. Key takeaway: “Belonging comes before belief.”
Because We Need Each Other (essays) – Erika Sasson, Shilpa Jain, Celia Kutz, and Kazu Haga. A four-part series exploring the phenomenon known as “cancel culture”—how that approach impedes movements for social change, and what we can practice instead.
Who Is Organising Poor White Folks Towards Liberation? (essay) – Amahra Spence. “Who is doing the work of listening to their grief without shame, of transforming loss into radical grievance that points not at scapegoats but [at systems]? Who is reorienting them towards liberation and providing a political, embodied, and loving framing that grounds in realities and generative futures?”
The Fascism Barometer (podcast) – Ejeris Dixon. Part podcast and part learning hub, the Fascism Barometer is designed to deepen our knowledge of fascism and how it affects our safety, our rights, and our communities. Standout episodes: What Time Is It on the Clock of Fascism? – Tarso Ramos on the Urgency to Act and Grief Is the Healing – Malkia Devich-Cyril on Organizing Through Loss.
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)* (book) – Dean Spade. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—crises, ordinary people are finding ways to meet each others’ needs. This book is a primer on mutual aid: why it’s so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It offers concrete tools like how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.
The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook (Substack) – Scot Nakagawa. Clear and timely analysis, strategy, tools, and lessons from around the world on how to respond to authoritarianism.
Noncooperation Library (resource) – Freedom Trainers. Noncooperation topples dictators, and this suite of explainers, training curriculums, slide decks, videos, and more aims to counter democratic backsliding via strategic noncooperation education. All trainings are backed by extensive pro-democracy research and data, and are fused with popular education methods and direct action training.
Defiance Dispatch (Substack)– Jiggy Geronimo. How do we get millions of people into a place of mass defiance against a fascist regime? Normalize a culture of defiance such that people want to engage and join the movement. Make defiance fun and funny. Amplify stories of resistance to build social norms and social identity. Standout post: Top Defiance Moments of 2025.
Blueprint for Revolution (book) – Srdja Popovic. An accessible handbook on nonviolent methods—especially humor!—to galvanize communities, overthrow dictators, or simply change the world.
Municipalism Learning Series (resource) – Solidarity Research Center. With national governments failing us, municipalism is the emergent global movement to build lasting and scalable forms of power and participation in our local communities. Cities and towns are sites of change, where people can build alternatives to capitalism based on cooperation and solidarity, and neighbors can assemble to govern themselves.
BONUS – Two podcast series I really enjoyed this year:
Fela Kuti: Fear No Man (12 episodes to-date) – Higher Ground. Explores the life, music, and radical spirit of the legendary Nigerian father of Afrobeat. His hit song, “Zombie,” remains a relevant anthem in these times.
The Women’s War (8 episodes) – Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts. When the government collapsed, the people of Northeast Syria’s Rojava region drew from the political theories of an American anarchist and a Kurdish terrorist to build a feminist oasis in the middle of the world's most brutal war.
* With the caveat that the book contains some othering of people and groups of people (landlords, bosses, police). I don’t believe that othering can ultimately lead to liberation. Rather than people or groups of people as the problem, I see systems of domination and the beliefs and behaviors that uphold them as the problem. And people have the capacity to change their beliefs and behaviors. Indeed, we will need a broad, diverse coalition—including people who are currently in the Business and Military/Police Pillars of Support/Power—to defeat fascism as well as to move toward liberation.
Liberation for me means: 1) People are alive. 2) Our needs are met, especially the three core universal human needs: safety, dignity, and belonging. (Othering, oppositionality, coercion, domination, and oppression are incompatible with belonging.) 3) We’re taking care of each other and the land on which we all depend.