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Vehicles navigating 10 lanes of traffic on a Los Angeles (LA) basin highway, which can look like this at any given moment and not just at rush hour. Navigating this kind of complexity is part of everyday life in so many places. Image by prvideotv via Pixabay.

Our family used to visit Minneapolis a lot when I was a kid. Driving in the city was very different than in the rural central Iowa town where we came from, so the uncle we were visiting was always giving driving-in-the-city advice.

“Pick a lane and defend it,” was the traffic advice he gave the most. Over and over. I don’t know if it’s the best city driving advice, but I do know I’ve followed it some over the years, especially living in the huge urban areas in the Los Angeles (LA) basin, and in the Washington, DC metro.

Picking a lane in complex traffic can be helpful to navigate the overwhelm.

In rush hour traffic in the city, it can be helpful to pick a lane and to stick with it rather than trying to jump back and forth. Honestly it can also help make the driving experience slightly less intense and jarring, because you’re not trying to switch lanes all the time. It can help to defend the lane, too, as far as that goes. Sometimes you need boundaries. And sometimes you need to put some effort in to keep those boundaries intact.

“Picking a lane” is good advice in general, to be honest. Or maybe picking a couple of key lanes. It’s good advice in navigating overwhelm and complexity in life as much as it is in traffic.

Picking metaphorical lane is about focus. It’s about energy. It’s about our forward movement.

It helps to find some clarity when a thousand things that are also moving seem to be happening all around.

Like in general — there are often several options for getting to a certain destination, but maybe we want to put our focus and energy on one or a few key things rather than wandering all over the place exploring all the options.

I like the metaphor because I think part of the challenge in this moment is how we navigate the rising and fast-changing disruption and instability happening in the society around us.

Picking a lane is a nice metaphor about going forward, with some intention, perhaps with some specific goals (where you’re going), with a decision (picking the lane), and possibly with some focus or priorities about how to do that.

Picking a metaphorical lane or two can be helpful for navigating the overwhelm of the moment we’re in. Tons of things are changing, across many aspects of the society and planet.

Picking a lane can help us find focus, and stay focused, as we find our way through the overwhelm, the complexity, and the big changes.

What does that look like?

Maybe it’s about where you put your time to volunteer, or for activism. Maybe it’s about the job you take. Maybe it’s about where or how you spend money. Maybe it’s about where you put your creativity. Maybe it’s about what news you track, or what social media you do.

Maybe it’s more specific. Maybe it’s about more specific details you want to focus on with any activism or volunteer time, or specifics about how you are able or willing to be involved.

Picking a lane is about going forward. It’s about going through.

It’s a tool any person or group can use to think about options and action.

Anyway. Sharing this metaphor idea here because it may be helpful for making some decisions or for thinking about picking a lane or two for navigating all this mishegoss. Even with the understanding that that will probably need to evolve and we’ll need to make more decisions about which lanes to pick later on, but making decisions now might help any of us get more focused.

Whether or not you and yours could stand to pick a lane, this Fierce Community nonprofit definitely could.

Since January, 2025, big change has been coming to the US in many new and different ways. Like many people and groups and… this organization has been trying to figure out how best to focus the work we’re seeking to grow here.

We’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern like a plane circling a set of runways in fog, because so much has been changing so fast and it’s not clear what the best approach is.

This nonprofit started 2025 with a series of “big chaos” zooms with some great engagement, helping folks get ready for uncertainty before 2025 was very far along. Soon it became clear that we were maybe not evolving fast enough to reasonably help with the sweeping changes underway in the US. We stepped back, shifted our name to Fierce Community, and set up another zoom series for fall 2025. We didn’t have huge capacity for recruiting participation, but got started on those anyway. It turned out that engagement was too low to keep holding space for the zooms. A few weeks later, I stepped back to take a short-term job in late 2025 to get more resources to keep this thing going. We’ve continued to be in a holding pattern since, because… what is the best way to help in this era, given our group’s capabilities and knowledge?

This nonprofit started off in 2022 hoping to grow and popularize civic/ community engagement… or even to grow a movement of such a thing. I had big dreams of helping to foment or catalyze a phenomenon, somehow. This engagement/activity was intended to help get people more involved in communities and in the places where we live, in part to just help our communities thrive and flourish but also to help inspire people to vote. Voter engagement is very low in this country, and this seemed like a great way to reach voters in different ways. It was a gap area that other nonprofits and activist groups did not appear to be focused on, so we were hoping to grow it. I was hoping that we could get voters fired up who were not typically engaged in politics, and that perhaps the country would go a different direction then it has.

We didn’t really get enough resources or have the capacity to grow a national movement for all that. It’s a good vision. I remain sold on it. But of course now here in mid-2026 we’re in a different set of parameters.

All that was in The Before. Before the 2024 election. Before January 2025.

Now we’re in a new era.

Civic engagement as we were talking about it before now brings a few additional specific challenges and complications, including a quickly shifting risk landscape for many groups of people that we might like to have be involved in community stuff. Lots of folks are more vulnerable to being out in the open and in shared community spaces than they were before. Some of it is changes to healthcare support and programs. Some of it is specific groups of people being more targeted by intolerance — whether by people or other groups or even laws and ordinances. A lot of it is that many of our community members are now very actively vulnerable to being targeted by law enforcement in relation to immigration enforcement attempts that can be very complicated and which are sometimes quite damaging to the person, to their established life, to their family, or to their community.

As such, the focus here at Fierce Community has shifted. More on that in a minute.

It is very, very important to note that many communities are leveraging civic/community engagement in very powerful ways especially in light of these changing risks and sometimes very specifically to actively address those changing risks in communities.

Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and numerous other cities have shown incredible creativity, persistence, fortitude, and organizing capacity when it comes to leveraging civic engagement for this moment. Arguably, the metro area of Minneapolis / St. Paul (MSP) took all the community engagement ideas other cities had used to the next level over this past winter, when very heavy law enforcement activity targeted thousands and used shocking and unprecedented methods.

Minnesotans countered that activity with epic and beautiful community engagement, in wildly creative ways. People looked after people. Communities pulled together. Neighborhoods tightened. Organizing progress that had been overhauled following the large responses to the killing of George Floyd in 2020 operated with stunning elegance and efficiency to help people coordinate, look after each other, and find ways through. Minnesota people picked lanes… and they sure as heck defended them.

If there was ever guidance on how to do civic engagement up in this new era, Minnesotans showed us how to get it done to meet the moment.

Obviously there are tons of other community engagement things that could be done in communities and especially in different types of communities like small towns. For lots of reasons — not just for those in reaction to law enforcement activities. Community engagement can do such a huge array of things for communities, for connection, and for all kinds of actions, celebrations, vigils, creativity, festivals, art, music, food, dancing, protests, or just gatherings of people getting together to be together.

But the thing is, community engagement has now shown itself to be an absolutely incredible tool for meeting these troubled times.

It’s less obscure and more proven now very recently as a concept that works to get people in communities very involved with community, even with modern tech and many risk factors. People and groups are working on evolving community engagement now; sharing lessons learned, doing trainings, sharing advice, and so on. It is very cool, and there will be more. It is not very cool that people needed to iterate and innovate in this way, but the fact that people did and have in city after city shows incredible fortitude, creativity, love, and persistence.

With all of these kinds of changes, our tiny nonprofit here has found ourselves wanting to shift our focus a bit. We want to better meet the moment.

We don’t need to work on things that other groups are actively pursuing.

What we want to do is to take on work in gap areas where others are not as focused.

That’s where this nonprofit started — trying to find gap areas for how to reach and energize voters that traditional organizing methods weren’t reaching. Civic engagement emerged as an idea worth pursuing to do that. The nonprofit’s approach mixed community engagement with a few other things like trying to get news coverage of said engagement to help drive the news coverage and national narrative and conversations… to help drive a movement. Ideally, to help drive a phenomenon. To shift communities. To shift the country.

At the heart of it, though, it was always about trying to get people more engaged in the places where we live to help our communities to better thrive and flourish. In more equitable, just, inclusive, sustainable, resilient, and caring ways.

One thing I’ve learned in several years of growing a tiny baby nonprofit mostly out of thin air is that you absolutely have to have a team, and an involved team at that. So. We’d like to get input from folks on what we write and the direction we’re headed. We’ll have more in the coming weeks on how we’re going to do the work here and how we can grow a team of volunteers to do the neat stuff we’ll be imagining together. Still brainstorming behind the scenes now to start, then we’ll do more public events to imagine more and then to do it. For now, leave comments here with any thoughts… and subscribe to keep up on any announcements for next steps.

Picking A Lane

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