This Was Not A Temporary Crisis

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed

-Lucille Clifton

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Survival deserves to be celebrated. Survival is not a passive thing. Survival is the standing in the room when everyone has left. It is what happens when people decide, repeatedly and deliberately, to remain strong in conditions that were not designed for them to thrive. Standing requires strategy under constraint; adaptation without surrender.

In 2025, those of us working in social impact did more than endure disruption. We learned how to operate inside it. The illusion that instability was temporary finally dissolved. What settled in was not a passing crisis, but a new operating environment.

By the end of the year, we were no longer responding to isolated events. We were responding to a pattern. And survival, in that context, was not small. It was disciplined. It was coordinated. It was earned.

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What 2025 Made Impossible to Ignore

In October, Hurricane Melissa tore through large parts of the Caribbean. Homes were lost, yes. But so were classrooms. Small businesses. Infrastructure that was already stretched thin. Recovery was not simply about rebuilding structures. It forced an honest look at how fragile the foundation had been long before the storm arrived.

At the same time, political violence escalated in places that once believed themselves insulated from it. The assassination of Charlie Kirk in the United States was shocking. Not only because of the individual involved, but because the conditions surrounding it no longer felt unfamiliar. Years of escalating rhetoric had normalized dehumanization. When violence surfaced, it did not feel random. It felt cumulative.

Across the Global South, geopolitical decisions continued to land without local consent. Late in the year, U.S. air strikes in Nigeria were framed as security measures. On the ground, they reinforced a familiar message: sovereignty is conditional, and ordinary people live with the consequences of strategies designed elsewhere.

And beneath these visible events was something quieter but just as destabilizing. Funding tightened. Humanitarian agencies spoke openly about painful tradeoffs. Nonprofit leaders were forced into impossible prioritization: deciding which urgent needs would be met and which would wait, knowing that waiting often meant worsening.

These were not isolated failures. Together, they described a world in which risk was being redistributed downward. Governments stepped back. Markets extracted. Civil society was expected to absorb the shock.

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What Standing in That Rubble Taught Me

I want to be careful here, because reflection can easily turn into abstraction. So I will ground this in what I actually observed while working with organizations in 2025.

I watched parallel systems take shape in real time. Diaspora networks moved resources faster than formal aid channels. Community groups circulated verified information before official guidance arrived. Volunteers organized logistics in group chats while institutions were still drafting statements. 

More people volunteered… consistently. Professionals offered pro bono hours. Creators used their platforms to educate, not just emote. Community leaders hosted briefings to help their audiences understand policy changes before reacting to them. 

There was a hunger for facts and an eagerness in advocacy. People wanted to be properly armed with evidence when standing up for communities under pressure. And many of those communities were doubly marginalized – vulnerable because of history, and newly exposed because of present political and economic decisions that threaten livelihoods and, in some cases, literal lives.

When systems falter repeatedly, people stop waiting for permission. They build alongside. They build around. Sometimes they build in spite of.

By the end of the year, it was clear that authority was no longer flowing exclusively through formal institutions. It flowed through responsiveness. Through credibility earned in real time. Through proximity to consequence.

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What We Actually Have to Look Forward To

I am cautious about optimism because optimism skips steps. What I do see emerging is a tightening. Fewer illusions. Less tolerance for waste. More scrutiny of who benefits and who carries risk.

This is visible politically as well. Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York represented a willingness among voters to test a different set of assumptions about affordability and public responsibility. Whether his approach succeeds is not the point (we hope it does, we pray it does). The point here is that people are reaching for alternatives because existing arrangements feel insufficient.

That reaching matters. It tells us that imagination has not collapsed, even when trust has.

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My Ambitions for 2026

I want to help organizations become fundable. Truly fundable: clear reporting, tight mission alignment, visible impact, consistent donor stewardship, and internal systems that make all of that sustainable instead of reactive.

I also want to interrupt the equation between overwork and value. In 2025, I saw capable leaders lose perspective because rest was framed as indulgence. That framing weakens judgment over time. If decision-making quality matters, then capacity matters. We cannot keep treating depletion as evidence of commitment.

Finally, I want to push power closer to the communities living the consequences. This is not a slogan. It shows up in governance choices, in who controls data, in how success is defined. 

Clifton wrote about shaping a kind of life with no model in sight. That feels like the work now. We are building inside constraint. We are holding one hand steady with the other. Every day something presses against the possibility of equity, stability, dignity, and yet, here we are. Still shaping. Still organizing. Still deciding to build systems that reflect the world we say we want. If survival was the discipline of 2025, then let building be the discipline of 2026. Come celebrate that with me.