vibes for 2025: Connection, Care, and Strategy
Welcome to 2025. This is a year that holds so much, both peril and promise. But before we get to that, we’re starting this email looking back with gratitude, to ground ourselves for the work to come.
We are SO thankful for the many helping hands that have come together at the end of 2024 to guide FCAC out of a time of financial stress. We are relieved to report that going into 2025, we are able to confidently continue our movement-building work as usual, and have even started the hiring process for two new positions! We couldn’t have gotten here without our incredible community, and especially individual donations, both big and small. We still need to keep building our local community of support though. The more local support we have, the more resilient and nimble we can be in the face of a still unstable funding landscape. If you would like to become an FCAC donor, click here.
Resourcing our movement in a sustainable way will be key as we walk into a time of assured political threat. And although there still remains much uncertainty about that threat, over the past two months of processing and resting for the work ahead, we have come out feeling guided by several core principles: connection, care, and strategy.
As we’ve seen already under the previous Trump administration, autocrats (and rulers with autocratic ambitions) rely on fear, isolation, and exhaustion to build power. We fight back by building trust, community, and resilience. As one of our New Year’s resolutions, we are committing to even more community building and opportunities for deep connection and support. We are starting off by holding a potluck with our friends from Northern Center and Fireweed Collective the day after Inauguration Day to hold each other and be in community as this next era begins.
Another lesson we learned from the previous Trump administration was about exhaustion. Probably many of us have seen cycles of engaged activists who quickly get burned out from tirelessly struggling against seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Perhaps we are those activists. Going into this year, it is critical that we recommit to self and community care. As Dr. Laurie Santos outlines in her work on activist burnout, we are far less effective when we are overextending and not taking care of ourselves. We deserve rest. But if you need more motivation than that, rest and care and recovery are extremely strategic for long-term movement building. At FCAC, we’re working to build in more opportunities for community care. One way to get involved is to join our upcoming Warm Cups and Connection events, held monthly at the FCAC office. These small gatherings offer members (or folks interest in becoming members) a chance to talk about their needs and concerns as a community member, brainstorm ideas for campaigns and actions, and find where they can best fit in our work. For more information, reach out to our Member Organizer, Erin at erin@fbxclimateaction.org.
Lastly, strategy. Since we know that the next 4 years will probably involve putting out a lot of fires, and we know there will be infinitely more fires than any of us can individually tend to, it’s important that the work we are doing is as effective as possible. We will not be exhausting ourselves with performative or symbolic action with no clear pathway to winning. We will not be playing it politically safe, requesting small concessions, and leaving power on the table. We will continue demanding the real structural change we know we deserve, and we will be doing it in only the most strategic ways. We will own our agency and use it. If you want to get involved in this work, now is a great time to join a working group to help guide our campaign strategy over the coming months.
We will also remember that we are part of a long legacy of political struggle under unbearable conditions, including the US Civil Rights Movement, Indigenous struggles against colonization in the US and worldwide, the struggle for Palestinian liberation, as well as all worldwide struggles against oppressive powers. We are not unique, and we are not alone. We will lean on our political ancestors and siblings and derive strength from the knowledge that insurmountable odds have been overcome, over and over, throughout history.
