Low Demand Activism

Seeing ICE agents tackle people in the streets of Chicago and feel your blood boil? Reading headlines about special education employees at the Department of Education summarily fired with no protections for disabled learners and feeling terrified? Watching the Supreme Court dismantle our voting rights and hearing the president declare that he wants to be King and feeling hopeless? Yeah? Me too.

Rage, fear, anger, dismay, unease, terror. All happening.

This blog is about how you can tap into your activist spirit in a low demand way that honors your lived capacity and your current reality. Because I know you. You can hardly get up to go to the bathroom without a meltdown, much less make it to a protest. You feel completely swallowed up in caring for your one family with so few resources and so much expected of you every day. But you also care deeply about your neighbors and fellow humans; you pay attention to the news; in another life, you’d be working at the nonprofits or writing the news articles or leading the marches. So it doesn’t feel good to just doom scroll and feel powerless.

And yes, parenting is political. 

The core of politics is the Greek understanding of the “polis” — the body of citizens who make up a place. Politics is how we treat each other, How we meet our shared needs, and how we tend to this body of humanity. I don’t believe in individualism, the idea that it’s just me and my family all alone and we have to get what we can get for ourselves. I believe that my wellbeing and my children’s future is bound up in yours; that we belong to each other. Politics is how our mutual belonging is organized. 

Politics is whether we have support when our kids are in crisis. Politics is who cares for our kids’ emotional and mental health while they are learning in school. Politics is whether we go bankrupt on therapies and treatments. Politics is who gets to access health care. Politics is whether we can take our dogs for a walk and play at playgrounds safely. 

And activism is how we go about shaping this political body of humanity into a place where we collectively thrive.

Let’s talk about low demand activism – ways to get your power back and to join the fight without burning yourself out further.

Step 1: Pick ONE THING

First, you need to choose ONE area to focus on. I know it feels impossible because part of the way we’ve been socialized and marketed to and pressured is with the idea that “Everything Matters.” Perfectionism and all-or-nothing-thinking are rife in activist circles. 

Things you might be hearing… 

Don’t even bother donating to someone’s mutual aid campaign if you’re still buying stuff off of Amazon.

Sure you’re helping your elderly neighbor navigate their changing Medicare benefits and get to their appointments, but what are you doing about immigration, huh? 

Silence is complicity. You’ve got to speak out about (fil in the blank with every single thing you need to be speaking about all the time).

But this is another tool of oppression. Perfectionism says that if you can’t do it all, if you can’t do it perfectly, you’re a failure. So you might as well go hide in a cave and pretend you don’t exist. But we are all humans, and none of us are perfect. Perfection is a lie meant to keep us small and scared. So we bust out with our imperfect activism, and we decide on ONE THING that we are going to focus on.

And loves, please don’t focus on something related to buying more stuff. We are not going to save the environment by buying more eco-friendly gadgets. (This is another trap). Buy stuff if you have to, but this is not activism.

• Your one thing might be supporting the special education teachers in your school with extra hands-on support and advocacy with your school leadership, school board, and state legislature for more support for disabled students.
• Your one thing might be helping trans youth continue to access medical care by donating to a travel fund, volunteering with mental health call centers (that have also been defunded), or regularly encouraging a local family you know who is trying to figure out how to do the impossible in this awful climate.
• Your one thing might be identifying your local immigrant activist organization and virtually attending a meeting as they prepare for ICE to come to your city. If you are white, you may volunteer to be a support family for an immigrant family if they feel unsafe – helping them get groceries delivered if they can’t leave their house, or volunteering to walk a kid to school.
• Your thing might be donating to a state abortion fund in a restrictive state so that vulnerable women and families can continue to access life-saving healthcare even as our rights are being systemically stripped away.

You may not know any of the specifics yet, but you know your one thing needs to be related to environmental activism, or Gaza, or supporting veterans, or voting rights, or helping queer youth. You’re honed in. You’ve let go of perfection and “everything matters” (so “I’m a failure anyway”). That’s the power of choosing your ONE thing.

Step 2: Let Go of Other Stuff

Second, now that you have your one thing, it’s time to let go of the other things. Make a little list of all the “shoulds” that you are going to release, drop, let go of, say goodbye to, so that you can do your one thing. (And if you can easily still do it, you don’t have to drop it! But I know that as an adult PDAer, I have a finite demand-capacity. I literally cannot do all the things. So for me, I have to let go of more than others might need to in order to create capacity for increased demands around the one thing that matters).

• Supposed to be composting, but really want to be attending an anti-ICE protest? Goodbye composting (for now). It’s not that you don’t matter, but you’re not my one thing.
• Feel like you should be figuring out how to get off Amazon but the idea of sourcing all of those things locally is a huge, huge ask? It’s OK. I give you permission to source what you can, when you can, locally, and get the rest delivered to your doorstep with next day shipping. And then use that increased capacity for your one thing.

A big one I want you to consider letting go of is consuming social media activism. It’s really hard to stay focused on our one thing and doing what we can where we can when we are bombarded by messages about all that we should be doing. Perhaps when you see a post or Story or headline that makes you want to stick your head in the sand, use that as a clue to stop reading/scrolling/watching, and return to your one thing. What is a small step you can take in that area? Let the urge to shut down be your cue that it’s time to move into collective action.

Remember, the Powers That Be control the social media algorithms now, and they want us powerless, overwhelmed, apathetic, and scared. When you feel the urge to scroll onto some cute dancing animals to soothe the fear, rage, terror, put the phone down and turn to your real life neighbors instead. We need each other more than ever right now. And I have real fears about how our social media engagement and activism is a part of the problem, not the solution.

Step 3: Name Your Guardrails

Once you know your one thing and have let go of the stuff that’s getting in the way, it’s still important to name your guardrails. By this I mean the helpful boundary-markers that keep you from careening off the road. 

This is where you get to meaningfully take your real life into consideration. 

• Get absolutely laid out by the idea of a phone call? Don’t promise yourself you’re going to use the 5 Calls App daily, no matter how easy it apparently makes these advocacy calls. It’s not worth the cost and you won’t be able to sustain your activism if it costs you too much. 
• Honestly can’t leave your child’s side? Name your guardrail that it has to be able to be done from your phone with your ameba child plastered to you. I promise there is still meaningful work to do that fits with your guardrails. 
• In debt and living paycheck to paycheck, look at what resource you do have in abundance. Maybe it’s your sense of humor or your rugged determination or your intimate knowledge of how much poverty sucks. Your guardrail is that you can’t give money, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have so much else to offer. 

Naming these guardrails for yourself helps you say yes to the right stuff (and sustain it) and no to what doesn’t have your name on it. 

Step 4: Serve, Don’t Save

Particularly if you are white, this one is for you. White people have a clear, documented pattern of stepping into activism with major blind spots around all the work and leadership that has already been going on and will go on long after you. Especially if you are just waking up to a particular area of pain and injustice, and feel that newly burning righteous anger that something must be done, it is so tempting to barrel into the fight, guns blazing. 

But it is so important to FIRST look around and see who is already leading the fight, who has been caring about this for years while you were ignorant, who has been living this pain every single day? Follow and serve those leaders. You don’t need to save the day. (Please don’t try to save the day).

Your involvement is likely not going to move the needle in massive ways. Even for that one elderly neighbor who needs someone to read their Medicaid bill for them and explain why their coverage is changing, they also need someone to walk their dog and listen to their stories, and they also have a bad hip that probably needs some tending to. Don’t expect yourself to solve it all or make a massive difference. Those kind of expectations will make you into someone’s savior (toxic) and burn you out (unhelpful). 

Do one small thing. Don’t try to get any credit for it. Tell one person you trust, and celebrate your capacity to do that one thing. 

Low demand activism means that we live within our exhaustion, overwhelm, and sensitivity. But we break free of the paralysis and perfectionism that hold us captive. We do what we can, in the small ways that we can, while paying attention to the things that drain our capacity and energy. We don’t try to save the day or dominate the scene. We don’t try to “buy” or “learn” our way into activism, because that’s just more passive consumption. We don’t go to extremes and say that all we can do is tend to our own needs or our own family right now because our deepest reality is interconnection and interdependence. There truly is no me/us apart from the collective “we” of the human family.

Citing my sources (where and how I have learned what I now know)

• Locally, I learned so much from training and activism with Durham C.A.N., which grows from the roots of community organizing with Saul Alinsky (book: “Rules for Radicals”).
• For books, I love “My Grandmothers Hands” (by Resmaa Menakem– about how racial trauma lives in our bodies, and what healing through action looks like), “What It Takes To Heal” (by Prentis Hemphil– about how social action and deep healing are intertwined).
• And I am always, always drawing on the Christian deconstruction/re-imagining training of my divinity school years from Dr. Willie Jennings, who taught me that if we want to change the machinery of this world, we have to be willing to descend into the boiler room to see the engine so we know where to start throwing wrenches.