Small Acts from the Field

By Sara Brenner

As we embark on another school year, I am reminded that my kids will take countless small acts this year that will help shape who they are and who they become. Like the process of learning, our social change work is a lifelong journey made of hundreds of small acts that shape the kind of change we make — incremental or transformational — and ultimately propel us forward to make big progress.

Below are three distinct examples of seemingly small acts that offer great learning and inspiration.

“Those small acts and moments remind us of the gaps between the world as it could be and the world as it is,” said Rami Nashashibi, IMAN’s executive director. Efforts like the MLK Living Memorial play a critical role in bringing people together, building momentum, providing space for healing and rooting the work in a common purpose. This collective endeavor helped foster a more tightly knit sense of community in addition to greater pride in and commitment to the neighborhood. By working together to create the memorial, residents of all ages made tangible connections between their community, the U.S. civil rights movement, and the continued struggle for justice. The community members’ journey helped reinvigorate the quest for a truly “beloved community,” to use King’s words.

The small act of modeling whiteboarding not only led others to adopt it but also led to changes in both governments’ structures: The city governments bought and installed more whiteboards, reorganized spaces to facilitate whiteboarding, and instituted reservations for whiteboarding spaces so team members could more easily access them. Today, the San Francisco and Oakland city governments are better structured to work collaboratively to solve problems and implement solutions — necessary practices to bring about change at the city level.

We celebrate not only these small acts but also the people who take them and the resulting ripple effects. These examples help us see the power of introducing new ways of working, helping others envision a future they want to create and sticking with a strategy in a disciplined and focused manner to make change that counts. We also observed a trend: In each of these examples, small acts brought about behavior change in institutions or community that shifted the way people worked or engaged with each other. These ripple effects deserve our attention. What we learn from them, we can use to fuel impact. While only the future will tell what will result next, there are promising signs that these small acts and the larger accomplishments that have already resulted will snowball into greater change.

What small acts inspire and teach you? Share your stories in the comments below.

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