2025 Organizing Director Reflections
2025 has not been the easiest year for many of our communities in Chicago.
For many organizations doing the work of building towards a more just and safe world through organizing, advocacy, and services, possibility feels just within arm’s reach. For some organizations, the window of possibility is, sadly, behind them. Across the field, we are seeing mass nonprofit layoffs of some of the most crucial sectors of the organizing landscape, from on the ground organizers to legal and policy experts. All this beastly system knows is how to strip us down to our bones.
At AFIRE, we are continuing to hold our focus in our solidarity, to continue showing up for each other, supporting each other, and protecting each other. We have been building up the power of our community through Community Safety practices (protocols to protect vulnerable community members at AFIRE events), Actualizing Community curriculum (collective learning to grow skills and practices important to organizing and advocating for systems change), and our Organizing Komite (future decision-making body around AFIRE’s organizing and advocacy efforts).
One year into this administration and we have seen 217 executive orders (as of 12/2/25) signed by the most (presumably) powerful person in government. All of our livelihoods, particularly those of the most vulnerable members of our communities, are being teased and puppeted for the entertainment of billionaires. From the deployment of chemical weapons on Chicago’s residents by Federal agents to the weaponization of food and healthcare access to gross endeavors of systematized kidnapping and trafficking of minors, it’s also important not to pivot our attention away from the fact that this country is harnessing its colonial powers from a network of sexual predators to bolster Israel as a global tech powerhouse. While we are being sold the idea of the convenience of digital IDs, biometric wallets, and smart health monitoring, those same companies were already testing that same surveillance technology on Palestinians in Gaza.
It’s safe to say that nothing good has come out of this administration except its failed attempts to extinguish the people’s resistance. Bridging the struggles of oppressed peoples and the working class, and bringing it to the forefront of our movements is the most necessary action we must take towards reclaiming our economic and humanitarian rights from this undemocratic circus of an administration. The forces of white supremacy are no longer sufficient enough to derail the movement, as we witnessed with Zohran Mamdani’s New York Mayoral win but also with the many local wins that would not be possible with the allyship of Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The control grid is well and alive but you can be part of the resistance. Join AFIRE, one drop in a sea of millions, in fighting back against oppression, violence, and war. We owe it to each other to continue building brick-by-brick, weaving the individual and the collective, towards a world that stretches beyond the systems we have inherited.
-K. Rial, Organizing Director
