7 Small Ways We Can Resist & Rebuild

by Alx Espinosa

Do you think our ancestors knew how monumental their small, daily acts of resistance were? When you are living through them, revolutionary periods rarely feel as significant as they later become. Surviving under oppressive forces, our individual actions are often overshadowed by the scale of what is happening around us. And yet, when we look back, it is the consistency of those small actions that shaped our progress the most. The ways people cared for one another, kept each other safe, and shared what knowledge and resources they had.

The ways we refused to disappear.

When we think of periods marked by the expansion of fascist regimes, corporate greed, war, and genocide, we often focus on the destruction. But running parallel to that destruction are moments of cultural rebirth, awakening, strategizing, strengthening, organizing, and working our collective imaginations.

During Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance flourished, seeing the rise of Black poets, authors, musicians, and painters who brought visibility to both their suffering and their joy, creating spaces of expression, refuge, and cultural pride in the face of systemic anti-Black violence. Amid the Vietnam War, movements for civil rights and liberation took shape across the United States, as people organized against racial injustice and state violence, drawing attention to the global impact and lasting trauma of Western imperialism.

And today, as we navigate our own moment shaped by rising authoritarianism, we are witnessing that same pattern unfold through movements like Black Lives Matter, global solidarity for Palestine, and the ongoing fight for trans rights. In places like Minneapolis, where community members have organized in response to police violence and federal immigration crackdowns, we see renewed calls to abolish ICE and challenge the militarization of police. Even in the most oppressive conditions, people have always found ways to build together and to resist, not just to survive. Some of our most meaningful innovations and growth as a society have taken shape under pressure, in the moments when people were forced to imagine something better.

So what are some small ways we can resist the erosion of our communities under systemic collapse? How can we build a future society that is more loving, more inclusive, and safer for everyone?

1. Make Art, Teach Art, Create Spaces for Art

We are taught early on to compete with one another, to compare our skills and our work, to protect what we create as if there is only so much space to be witnessed. We learn to treat attention like a commodity, to believe that someone else’s success somehow diminishes our own. That mindset is not natural. It is inherited from systems that rely on assimilation, obedience, and the erasure of anything that pushes back against the status quo.

This is also reflected in what is taken from us early. The steady defunding of arts education has not only limited access to creative expression but has also contributed to a broader culture of anti-intellectualism. When people are discouraged from engaging with art and critical thinking, it becomes easier to narrow what is considered valuable knowledge. Creativity is treated as expendable, and with it, the ability to question, to interpret, and to envision alternatives begins to shrink. In many of our ancestral traditions, artists were an essential part of the community. They were storytellers and memory-keepers, people who helped others make sense of the world and their place within it. Art wasn’t so much of a profession as it was a way of life. Artists’ work was tied to the land, to their ancestors, and to the survival of culture itself. Rather than a luxury meant to decorate wealthy homes, art was how people stayed connected, how they processed grief, how they imagined futures beyond what was being imposed on them.

To create now, and to create together, is to return to that knowing. It is to reject the idea that our worth is measured by productivity or profit. It is to make space for expression that does not need to be optimized, consumed, or sold to be valuable. When we gather to make art, when we share it, when we support others in doing the same, we interrupt the logic of scarcity and remind each other that there is room for all of us to exist fully.

2. Start a Seed Bank or Community Garden

Growing food is a direct refusal to be fully dependent on systems that profit from scarcity. Corporate greed has reshaped our relationship to something as fundamental as what we eat. Many of the fruits and vegetables we buy in stores are genetically modified or engineered in ways that prevent them from reproducing, making it difficult or even impossible to save their seeds and grow them again at home. This creates a cycle of dependence, where people are required to keep purchasing rather than cultivating their own sources of nourishment.

Preserving heirloom varieties interrupts that cycle. These seeds carry histories. They have been passed down, survived disaster and blight, adapted to specific environments, and been cared for across generations. Saving them, growing them, and sharing them within your community keeps that knowledge alive and in motion. It ensures that what has sustained people for generations is not lost to systems that prioritize profit over access.

A garden becomes more than a source of food. It becomes a place where people reconnect to the land and to each other. A seed bank becomes a living archive, one that continues to grow as more people participate and contribute. Even something small, like exchanging seeds or growing herbs with friends, expands what is possible and cultivates a different relationship to the food we are putting into our bodies. It turns our attention from global and societal forces over our heads and gives us a greater sense of agency to tend to the very soil we walk on. We become more aware of what we are putting into the ground and the water, and how we can nurture the earth to make it more fertile. Growing food shifts how we understand abundance, and it reminds us that knowledge, like seeds, is meant to be shared.

3. Share Skills and Teach What You Know

There is a reason so much knowledge has been removed from our daily lives. Skills that were once passed down through families and communities have been replaced by systems that require us to outsource even the most basic needs. This creates dependence on mainstream education systems wrought with propaganda and biased interpretations of history. Sharing skills interrupts this pattern. When you teach someone how to cook, repair something, grow food, speak a language, or navigate a system, you are redistributing knowledge that was never meant to be restricted. You are rebuilding pathways that have been intentionally disrupted by institutions that profit from our disconnection and the ease with which we are influenced.

Skill-sharing also challenges hierarchy. It shifts the idea that expertise only exists in formal spaces or with formal titles, and reminds people that lived experience holds value. When knowledge moves between people freely, it becomes harder for systems to control access to it or gatekeep people from even sharing what they know.

This can also be put into practice by writing and sharing knowledge online for free. With inflation and AI pushing many workers out of the job market, many people are searching for alternative streams of income, so it is understandable that people attempt to monetize whatever content they produce. But when we invest in our communities by sharing what we know free-of-charge, the payoff can be much greater and more sustainable than some ad revenue. Together, we innovate ways out of this loop of our productivity determining our worth.

4. Share Books and Physical Resources

Access to information has always been controlled. Many of the frameworks that could help us understand our current reality have been intentionally excluded from mainstream education. Histories of entire groups of people and anti-oppression movements have been erased from publicly funded websites and even national monuments. Sharing books and physical resources creates an alternative pathway for knowledge to circulate. It allows people to encounter ideas that might not otherwise reach them, especially those that challenge dominant narratives or offer language for experiences that have been erased.

Physical sources of information also must be preserved at a time when books are being banned, and even digital resources are disappearing from the internet at an alarming rate. A book passed from one person to another carries more than information and resists the disposability of digital consumption. Physical text creates a slower, more intentional relationship with information. And our mindset when reading a book is much different than our distractible, ad-bombarded, attention-fragmented daily scrolling.

5. Practice Barter and Non-Monetary Exchange

Capitalism teaches us that value can only be measured through monetary gain. That everything must be priced, quantified, and exchanged within a system that determines who has access and who does not. In reality the value of a service isn’t determined by currency. Bartering disrupts capitalist logic, creating space for true relationship building rather than just consumption. It recognizes that people have something to offer even when they cannot pay, humanizing service exchange as an act of care rather than a faceless transaction. This kind of exchange also builds trust. It requires communication, flexibility, and a willingness to meet each other where you are. Over time, it creates networks of reciprocity and regeneration that exist beyond this system of resource and energy extraction.

6. Show Up for Your Friends with Children or Ask for Help with Your Kids

The nuclear family is a construct that was shaped and reinforced by systems that benefit from individualism. It creates a contained unit that is easier to market to, easier to govern, and easier to control. It concentrates decision-making within the household, often reinforcing patriarchal dynamics, while reframing community as something secondary to the primary family unit.

Community was never meant to function that way. Across cultures, raising children has always been communal. Knowledge, responsibility, and support were shared among extended family, neighbors, and the people who lived on the same land. There is a saying that to have a good village, you have to be a good villager. That means allowing yourself to be supported, just as you support others. For many of us, especially those raised in systems that prioritize independence and self-sufficiency, asking for help can feel uncomfortable or even like failure. But the truth is, relationships are built upon reciprocal acts of care, not one way contribution. Showing up for your friends with children can look like cooking meals, helping with daily routines, distributing resources, offering space, helping with transportation, or simply creating moments where someone is not carrying everything alone. And for those raising children, it can also mean reaching out, inviting others in, and trusting that care can be shared. Treating childrens’ safety as a community priority is also a direct and tangible resistance to this system that has uplifted those who have harmed children the most.

When we begin to both give and receive support, especially in helping us raise the next generation, we start to rebuild communities for generations to come. Thriving communities balance upon a network of care that extends beyond the household, where children are held and protexted by many, and where adults do not have to navigate everything on their own.

7. Support Local and Community-Based Economies

Global systems of production often rely on extraction. Resources, labor, and profit are pulled from communities and concentrated elsewhere, hoarded or made available only to the wealthy. This creates instability and makes it more difficult for local economies to sustain themselves. Supporting local vendors and small businesses helps counter that pattern. It keeps resources circulating within the community and strengthens the relationships that make economic survival more possible. It also changes how we understand consumption. It becomes less about convenience and more about intention.

These actions are not grand on their own. They will not always feel like resistance in the moment, but history has never been shaped by singular, perfect acts. It has been shaped by people who kept showing up for one another in consistent ways, even when they were tired, even when they could not yet see the outcome. Resistance is a demonstration of hope for a better future.

We do not need to have all the answers to begin. Most of us are learning as we go, piecing together ways of living that feel more fulfilling, more connected, more sustainable than what we grew up being taught. The work often starts at home, in the relationships we nurture, in the ways we choose to spend our time.

Over time, those choices accumulate. They form networks. They become the culture.

Resistance is more than just recognizing what we are up against. It is also about what we can build in its place.

Further Reading

For those who want examples of what this can look like in practice, these resources offer guidance:

• Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown
  Shows how small, relational actions can create lasting collective change.

• Mutual Aid – Dean Spade
  Explains how communities can meet each other’s needs outside of institutional systems.

• We Do This ’Til We Free Us – Mariame Kaba
  Explores abolition as a daily practice.

• Elite Capture – Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
  Examines how justice movements are often coopted by those in power and why collective approaches matter.

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – Omar El Akkad
  Reflects on how history softens complicity and challenges us to consider where we stand now.

• Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer
  Reframes our relationship to land through Indigenous knowledge rooted in reciprocity and care.

• Farming While Black – Leah Penniman
  Connects food sovereignty to ancestral knowledge while offering practical ways to grow and steward land.

• Seed to Seed – Suzanne Ashworth
  Provides a practical guide to saving seeds and preserving heirloom plant knowledge.

• Hunt, Gather, Parent – Michaeleen Doucleff
  Explores Indigenous parenting practices that center on cooperation, trust-building, and shared responsibility

• Restoring the Kinship Worldview – Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows)
  Reimagines child-rearing and education through relational, land-based Indigenous perspectives.