Tomorrow, Our Seeds Will Grow

Sarah Medina Camiscoli was in her final year at Yale Law School when George Floyd was murdered. She had started a youth-led nonprofit six years earlier aiming to integrate New York City’s schools. She planned to qualify as a lawyer and build a legal arm to the initiative, taking the integration fight to the courts. But she underestimated the impact of Floyd’s murder on her younger colleagues. “Things changed really quickly,” she told me. “The young people did not want the former ED—a Latina with white skin and middle-class privilege who now had two Ivy League degrees—to come back and lead.” In the storm of the pandemic, Sarah found herself ejected from the organization that she’d founded.

When the Indian author Arundhati Roy described the pandemic as a portal in April 2020, many civil society leaders in the US shared her sense of possibility. Perhaps, through this discombobulating experience, we could remake our world. The racial justice protests of that summer added urgency and direction. But then the flame of hope flickered. Parts of our movement became mired in in-fighting; some nonprofits went into meltdown. Despite the painful ousting from her own nonprofit, Sarah kept going. There are others: Black and Brown women, queer and trans folks (the very people being targeted by the new administration) who found a way through the storm of 2020 and have been quietly building since then. As we face an even more horrifying reality in 2025, they teach us something about how to sow the seeds of a future beyond fascism.

Unnecessary Ruptures

In 2020 thousands of small fires burned across the progressive movement as the country faced a terrifying health crisis, a profound reckoning with anti-Black racism, and an intense battle for the future of democracy. Through the year nonprofit cultures became fractious. Staffers—locked down in their apartments and emboldened by uprisings on the street—kicked back against their leaders. Debates flared about how to meet the moment. Generational schisms opened. Some of these rows spilled out into the public eye, like those at the Sierra Club, the ACLU and Color of Change. Nonprofit CEOs were scared stiff of the righteous rage that showed up in their Zoom calls and Slack channels. 

According to one common reading of events, it was a year of junior employees of nonprofits coopting a moment of racial reckoning to raise quotidian workplace issues and overcorrecting for historic abuses of institutional power, stymieing the movements they were part of. In 2022, Maurice Mitchell wrote in this publication that “identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces.”

But underneath the ugly incivility in civil society, something else was happening that year. In some corners, anger begat action. As more people of color than ever stepped into leadership roles, the old order was disrupted; power shifted and new practices flourished. The protagonists of this alternative story found ways to overcome obstacles, new ways to persist. Sarah Medina Camiscoli was not stupefied by the moment, she was spurred by it—much like another woman on the other side of the country.

Mutual Aid is Survival Work

“Overnight I had $20,000 in my Venmo,” Ali Anderson recalled. She didn’t mean to start a nonprofit in the middle of the pandemic but the fulsome response to a crowdfunder she posted on Instagram left her with little choice. She was working on a farm in California at the time, and wanted to raise money to get food to Black families affected by carceral violence. Ali’s crowdfunder post was shared by adrienne maree brown and others with huge audiences and she ended up raising nearly ten times her target of $10,000. Ali became one of 2020’s accidental founders as her modest mutual aid project grew into Feed Black Futures, a food justice organization investing in Black farmers, growers and producers across Southern California. 

The murder of George Floyd had stirred rage in Ali. She was also inspired by the blossoming of mutual aid across the country. She saw a need and was moved to meet it. “A lot of the folks we were getting food to weren’t going to grocery stores. A lot of them were immunocompromised. Many were elders or caring for a lot of folks,” she said. The activist and academic Dean Spade describes this kind of mutual aid as survival work.” Ali described her focus as “learning how to feed ourselves and be free of the racist capitalist white supremacist system.”

Mutual aid is not a quick fix or a panacea, though. Living under racial capitalism creates deep wounds that traverse generations. Ali explained that “the people closest to the problem are traumatized, and tired, and caring for kids. It’s sometimes hard to get work done, when there are ramifications from ancestral trauma—and the trauma from last night.” 

Many women leaders of color find healing and hope in the wisdom of the ancestors. In talking about her work, Ali often conjures her elders and forebears. They are her guides and sages, her motivation to keep going. She had been in Jamaica just before COVID came. “My grandparents emigrated and worked very hard so I would not become a farmer on the land they had left,” she said. “But that’s what I needed to do,” She spent time on Source Farm, a Black woman-stewarded farm, immersing herself in African and indigenous farming methods while learning about the impact of imperialism on the food system. The land may need repairing from centuries of extractive colonial agriculture but it can repair us too.

Stamina for Conflict

Having been shown the door from the organization she founded, Sarah might have chosen an easier path—a stable job as a public defender, perhaps. “Yes, it was extremely painful. Yes, there were lots of conflicts. But the schools were still segregated,” she said, explaining why she stuck with it. Through a process of mediation and restorative circles, Sarah and her colleagues agreed to separate into two projects. Peer Defense Project was birthed as a separate entity to provide free legal education to young people who face injustice. 

Avoiding interpersonal conflict is a natural impulse for many, perhaps even more so for people who have been traumatized by society. As the leaders of the Movement Alliance Project explained, “if we face and embrace conflict, it might mean that some of our fears could come true. We might get hurt.” Conflict avoidance is about not facing the truth. But 2020 was a distinct truth-telling moment: white supremacy is still rife in America—and the schools are still segregated. That year, conflict was not avoidable. How people worked through it was a different question. 

“To be a worker-directed organization trying to dismantle racism and adultism in the nonprofit industrial complex is a paradox,” Sarah explained. Trying to tear down a system and survive within it can feel like a Sisyphean task. Sarah and her comrades underwent training on conflict resolution, exploring the trauma they each carried in their bodies, and the fears of past abuses recurring. Their guiding question was, “How do we create the stamina to work through conflicts in a generative way?” The new team was clear they wanted a democratic and egalitarian culture. They adopted a worker self-directed nonprofit model. Today, each role in the org chart is fulfilled by a dyad: a young person and an adult attorney working together. They make consensus-based decisions, doing participatory budgeting and setting their own conditions. 

By 2025, Sarah’s new organization had developed an array of training and tech tools including Youth Defense Nights where young activists share legal needs and questions to plan for direct action and protest. Topics include walkouts, doxxing, and surveillance. The plan is to build a Freedom Law School to train up a cohort of Peer Advocates to defend other young people’s rights in housing, immigration, and protest. Sarah is also co-counsel in a lawsuit, IntegrateNYC vs The City of New York, that asserts a right to an antiracist education. As a mark of the success of their reparative process, the very organization that forced her out a few years earlier invited her to represent them in this case.

These Are Planting Times

At the beginning of 2025 Sherrilyn Ifill, former President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, reflected on the moment we’re in: “We have experience with authoritarian regimes, because that is what existed in the American South for the first half of the 20th century,” she said, “and we weren’t doing nothing!” She cited the work of civil rights lawyers Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall and the first Black labor union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whose members brought political ideas from the North back to their hometowns. “People were planting,” she said of a period when fundamental rights were not yet won, the South was still segregated, and lynching was still widespread.

In Collective Courage, political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard documents Black-led cooperative activity in the same period, like Citizens Cooperative Stores in Memphis, Tennessee; the Colored Merchants Association in Montgomery, Alabama; and the proliferation of Black credit unions in North Carolina through the 1940s.

How incredible it is to bet on the future when the odds are stacked against you so fundamentally—like choosing to conceive children in the midst of war or while in bondage. It may not have felt like it, but we’ve been in harvest times for decades, reaping the rewards of those diligent planters of the early 20th Century. No more. Harvest is over.

In 2020 we were coming to the end of Trump’s first presidency and in the midst of an exogenous crisis. We met the moment with an almighty crescendo of resistance but also discord and breakdown. Five years later we are at the beginning of Trump’s second presidency and in the midst of a constitutional crisis—a pandemic of fascism. Many in the movement are exhausted but the resistance is taking shape. 

As federal jobs are slashed, immigrant families hounded, and the cost of living soars, we will need mutual aid more than ever. We will need a solidarity economy. In Block and Build 2.0, the editors of this publication called on organizers to work in “principled alignment” with people they may disagree with. This calls for sophisticated relational skills. These skills are part of the foundations of a movement that must be broader and more durable than the country’s current chaotic descent into fascism. They will better position us to contest governing power in the years to come.

Sarah and Ali made it through the tumult of 2020 by drawing on ancestral wisdom, working through conflict, healing the wounds of racial capitalism, and taking critique as an opportunity to grow. These tools are part of a suite of essential resistance practices. They are modules in the Trump 2.0 fightback curriculum. And they are what we need in planting times. 

Featured image by Kimmie Dearest