Dear Z Community,

As 2023 comes to a close, we’d like to thank you – this is a truly incredible community of people committed to social change. 

Thanks to your support and engagement, Z’s spirit of resistance has been reborn. We formally relaunched one year ago and remain focused on continued improvements so that Z can better serve you.

Our community includes people from all around the world with diverse experiences and practices who seek to come together in looking around at the world with honesty, imagining better possibilities, and working to build them. 

Sometimes, and perhaps especially in 2023, this first step, the refusal to look away from injustice, to break silence wherever it smothers truth, is a heavy task indeed. The personal cost of engaging critically with the world can lead to heartache and burnout, repression, persecution, and isolation. But it can also lead to empowerment, understanding, connection, hope, and dare we say, change. 

Let’s be unafraid to admit that we cannot control outcomes, and that most of us experience many if not all of the above positive and negative side effects of activism. What we can control is our choice to engage, to inhabit our vision for a better world and a better life through our activism in all of its beautiful diversity, to become our true selves through resistance.

Perhaps the antidote to the heartbreak and difficulty of step one, speaking truth to power, lies in steps two and three, imagining alternatives and collectively working to build them. Living this revolution day by day together is the change.

As we cross the threshold into a new year, it’s a good time to reflect and consider what we might choose to carry with us. We’d like to recognize and honor the Palestinian concept of Sumoud (صمود), resilience in the will to resist. 

Sumoud is sometimes translated as steadfastness, but there is a danger in romanticizing steadfastness particularly because no one should be expected to stay strong without ever breaking down. Resilience is perhaps the more powerful meaning contained within Sumoud, as it implies a collective will to resist that cannot be broken because it allows us, in fact, demands us to take care of each other. Sumoud doesn’t deny the reality of breaking down, but it doesn’t see it as an end.

In this spirit and in gratitude for all you do, for your presence with us even through breaking points, we offer one final thought for 2023 and a first thought for 2024: keep going.

You are needed, don’t give up.

In solidarity,

The ZStaff: Alexandria, Arash, Bridget, Cooper, Fintan, Greg, & Matic

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