Rebuilding Solidarity Means Knowing We Do Not Carry the Work Alone

What Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem offers us in a season of exhaustion, fear, joy, and rebuilding

At the nINA Collective, Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem has been more than a framework we admire; it has served as a guide. We have used it in classrooms, nonprofit spaces, community conversations, internal reflection, and our own attempts to understand how we are showing up to the work of social change.

It has helped us ask better questions. Not only, What needs to be done? but also, What role am I playing? What role is needed now? Who else is in the ecosystem? What am I carrying that was never meant to be carried alone?

So, when we began shaping this year’s CHOIR theme, After the Fire: Rebuilding Together, the Social Change Ecosystem felt like a critical addition. Rebuilding cannot depend on one kind of leader, one kind of contribution, or one person’s capacity to endure. It requires an ecosystem.

So we invited Deepa Iyer, writer, strategist, facilitator, movement builder, and creator of the Social Change Ecosystem framework, into conversation with our community. We wanted to think together about what it means to rebuild solidarity across difference in a time when so many people are exhausted, afraid, grieving, and still trying to care. In joining this conversation, we sought collective insight for these challenging times.

Backlash, burnout, fragmentation, uncertainty, grief, and fear are shaping the conditions in which many of us are experiencing. As a result, the question is no longer whether people care enough; rather, many of us care so much that we are depleted.

Deepa’s framework feels necessary in this moment because it gives us a way to ask a better question than “Am I doing enough?” It asks us to consider what is needed, what role we are playing, who we are in relationship with, and how we can stay connected to shared values without collapsing under the weight of the whole.

Deepa described the framework as “a tool and a resource for individuals, institutions, and larger coalitions to identify the roles that we can and should play that are in right relationship with shared values and the needs of our communities.”

That phrase, right relationship, matters. It interrupts the impulse to measure our worth by visibility, urgency, or sacrifice. Instead, it asks us to locate ourselves within an ecosystem with others, rather than imagining ourselves alone at the center of the work.

The Social Change Ecosystem is a circle of roles rooted in sacred values. Visionaries, builders, caregivers, healers, weavers, storytellers, experimenters, disrupters, guides, and frontline responders all belong. Every role matters. Every role depends on the others, forming a web of mutual support.

That can sound simple in theory. However, the real challenge comes when we apply it to our actual lives.

Many of us have been trained to value the visible role most. The person at the microphone. The person in the street. The person making the demand. The person with the public language. Those roles matter, and they still cannot carry the whole movement. Disrupters need caregivers. Visionaries need builders. Frontline responders need healers. People taking risks need people tending the relationships that make risk survivable.

Many of us are also playing multiple roles across multiple ecosystems. At work, at home, in family systems, in volunteer spaces, in movement spaces, in grief, in caretaking, in survival. Deepa named how often women, in particular, recognize that they are caregivers everywhere.

No wonder people are tired. No wonder new ideas are hard to access. No wonder resentment grows when role clarity is missing.

One gift of the framework is that it does not shame us for being exhausted. It helps us understand what exhaustion may be trying to tell us.

Maybe we are over-functioning.

Maybe we have been playing one role for too long without support.

Maybe the work is asking us to shift.

That kind of shift is central to rebuilding. In nINA’s language this year, we are asking what it means to rebuild after the fire. Deepa’s framework meets that question with structure and humility. Rebuilding cannot be carried out by a single heroic leader. It requires an ecosystem healthy enough to hold difference, grief, risk, imagination, and repair.

Deepa challenged the expectation that we will show up with the same vigor every day. Our capacity is not static. Our lives are not static. Any movement practice that ignores the reality of human life will eventually drain the very people it depends on.

This is where nINA’s parallel themes of joy and rebuilding come into sharper focus. In this conversation, joy was not treated as an escape; rather, it was held as part of our efforts to remain alive to one another. When Alia asked whether joy has a role in the ecosystem, Deepa placed joy alongside grief, illustrating how these emotions coexist and inform one another.

“One of the things that I have been thinking about a lot is how we skip over grief and how grief is an essential practice along with joy,” Deepa said.

That pairing matters. A rebuilding practice that skips grief will become brittle. A joy practice that cannot hold grief will be shallow. Deepa pointed out that in the U.S., people often rush past loss, even collective loss, before we have had space to name what is weighing on us. Before we can talk about solidarity or rebuilding as values, we need containers where people can say what is troubling them, what they are carrying, and what they cannot carry alone.

Joy enters through connection. Deepa described seeing joy when people map themselves in the ecosystem and hear how others see them. There is joy in recognition. Joy in familiarity. Joy in realizing we are not the only ones holding the work.

One of the strongest takeaways from the conversation was that, largely, we are not in relationship with each other. It is hard to trust people to show up when we have not built the relationships that make trust possible.

The remedy to exhaustion is not only rest, though rest is necessary. The remedy to fear is not only courage, though courage is needed. The remedy is relationships strong enough to help us remember that we are part of something larger than our own individual capacity.

Solidarity, then, becomes more than shared language. Deepa put it plainly: “…solidarity isn’t just a buzzword or a hashtag that feels good. It is actually a practice that requires us to take some level of risk.”

Risk will not look the same for everyone. Some people can speak, post, show up, demand, or disrupt with less danger than others. Some people’s bodies, jobs, immigration status, race, gender, class position, or public role make certain risks heavier. Solidarity asks us to be honest about that. It asks those with more privilege to consider what they can take on. It asks us to stop outsourcing the riskiest roles to the people already most targeted.

Toward the end of the conversation, Deepa lifted up one role she believes needs more attention in this rebuilding season: the experimenter. The experimenter tries something, learns, adjusts, and tries again. This role matters because rebuilding cannot mean returning to old systems that were already failing too many people. Deepa said rebuilding is about finding “the portals and opportunities for us to try out what it is that we want to see.”

That language feels right for this moment. Small experiments. Prototypes. New ways of working that let us practice the world we say we want.

For nINA, that has always been part of the work. The cooperative began as a prototype during a period of shutdown and uncertainty. The CHOIR community continues in that spirit: gathering people across roles, sectors, identities, and experiences to think together, practice together, and build the muscle of solidarity before crisis demands it from us.

Deepa left us with a practice. When scarcity, urgency, fear, guilt, or shame appear, pause long enough to notice them. Then ask different questions. What roles are needed now? Who else is in the ecosystem? What is missing? Where can we support one another? How do we make sure the roles we are playing actually serve the community we care about?

These are rebuilding questions. They help us remember that we are responsible, but not alone. We have roles to play, but not every role. Solidarity becomes real through relationship, risk, trust, grief, joy, and the willingness to try.

If you are longing for spaces where people are asking these kinds of questions, we invite you to join our Community of Practice. Each month, we gather to learn from organizers, educators, artists, strategists, and community builders who are helping us imagine and build another way. Come be part of our ecosystem and help cultivate solidarity together.