We love Kelly Hayes for several reasons. We learned how to be better abolitionists thanks to her. Through her writing, we learned how to think about the actions and the community we build. We gave “Let This Radicalize You” to our kids for Christmas one year. She is a must-follow on Blue Sky, especially for local Chicago folks.

We don’t even know why you are reading this when you could be reading her “Organizing My Thoughts” newsletter. The tagline is “Kelly Hayes writes about things you should know if you want to change the world.” Hayes takes the individual threads of climate change, abortion funding, Sudan, Palestine, Christian Nationalism, and other issues and weaves them together. It’s appropriate because so much of what she writes about returns to a theme we are learning to embrace: community is at the heart of our resistance.

We can’t help but think about an article from July when Hayes asked a question we are now face to face with: how powerful will we choose to become as the world falls down, and what will we have the potential to build? When Hayes describes building the power we will need to survive this coup, she talks about building that power in our communities. This is the sort of power that brings long-lasting change. This is how we build a world without walls and prisons. This is how we imagine a world where everyone has basic dignity and needs met.

Why does that appeal to us so much? Why have we taken a page from Hayes’ newsletter and used community as an anchor for our work? Because it gives us agency to come together, imagine what we want our future to look like, and then take steps to make that happen. We can’t stop Elon from raiding the US Treasury. But we got together and decided that what we could do was write about the moment, create and share resources for people, and talk to folks around us about what is going on. We can have dinners and share food, ideas, and resources. We can use our skills and our creativity to help address this moment. We can help support each other and have fun in the process. Maybe something will come of it, maybe it won’t, but doing this makes us feel like we are taking an important step toward building something real and tangible.