How We Rise, With Sarah

10/21/2025

We have our guest with us today, Sarah van Gelder. She’s a writer, she’s founding editor of Yes Magazine and her Substack, “How We Rise,” is a beautiful exploration of resistance and protest and solutionary thinking for how we move forward in the moment that we’re in. Welcome to Nonviolence Radio, Sarah van Gelder, It’s very nice to have you here.

Sarah van Gelder: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Stephanie:  …I was thinking about the title of your substack, which is “How We Rise,” and this “how” mentality seems urgent and important to me that it’s not the going to the protests or informing ourselves about what’s happening because you know, we do those out of urgency, but when we talk to each other about how. How do we build this future together that we need? How do we reform an entire political system? How do we galvanize power amongst us? I feel like you are someone who’s really been thinking about that. How do we do it? And I’m just curious of what are some of the ways that you see that happening or where do you see work that could be done in answering that “How?” question?

Sarah: Yeah, I think that is exactly what I’ve been agonizing about and thinking a lot about all my life, but especially since the election and there’s both a short term and a long term answer to that, but I think in both cases,

We have power over things like keeping our local election system fair. In the United States, elections are not run by the federal government, they’re run by state and local officials. So we can do a lot of work there to keep our elections fair.

We can do work locally to support our immigrant neighbors and coworkers and friends against ICE raids. There’s certainly some limits to what we can do, but all over the country, as I’m sure you’ve seen in the news, there are people who are observing, who are protesting, who in some cases are videotaping even making it very difficult for ICE to simply kidnap people off the street and disappear them. And it’s absolutely essential that that kind of work continue as well.

But the other thing we do is build the resilience so that we support one another and keep our own energy strong because we have a long ways to go. To me, this is a moment when the collapse of the American Empire is becoming very clear. I think a lot of us thought it would happen eventually, that we would no longer be able to dominate the world as we had in previous decades, that our wealth would have to be more in proportion to the rest of the world and not necessarily extracting so much from the rest of the world, not necessarily extracting so much from Mother Nature, that we were going to have to come to a different relationship with our world. And the way to do that, I believe, to reinvent the kind of world that we want to have post-empire, is also local. And whether or not we wish that was happening, some of us really wish we would live in better attunement with the natural world and what the natural world can offer. Whether or not we wish to do that, Mother Nature in the end will enforce that. So it’s far better if we do the work locally to build resilient and sustainable communities now. And then we’re in so much better condition as this transition occurs.

And one other piece of that is that, a lot of our communities, we hear that they’re very polarized and some of that is true, but I don’t think it’s nearly as true as it is being projected by the national media, especially things like the Right-wing influencers. I think at the local level, we have a lot more in common. There’s a lot more things we all want. We want our schools to be good. We want our drinking water to be drinkable. We want to get along with each other. We want to deal with, support each other through the difficulties that life creates for people everywhere. We want to be able to support each other and get support, and I believe that we can, even though it’s tough, we can create the kind of nourishing communities locally that attract people and that attract them to the notion of being inclusive and supporting everybody regardless of their station in life.

I think that’s actually what people really yearn for, and it’s only when they despair and believe that isn’t possible and that all the others are violent and will prevent them from living a decent life, I think that’s when people are willing to resort to the kind of Right-wing “me first, I don’t care about people who are different than me,” I think that’s what brings that out. So at the local level, we can create beloved communities. We can actually create a sense of belonging, of joy, of fierce love and resistance that’s very attractive, that really can draw people in.

And we can especially do that if we take people where they are. We don’t necessarily expect them to share all of our views, but we’re willing to build a foundation based on our common humanity.