It’s that time again. Time to pick our SmallGood Word of the Year.
This annual practice of choosing a word is something we started five years ago to help us reflect on the year behind us. And to find (and hold onto) focus for the year ahead. Choosing a word of the year is a practice we’d recommend to everyone, whether individually or as an organization. Whether you’re a nonprofit, a social enterprise, a big multinational corporation, a solopreneur, or a small branding and marketing consultancy like us, we have found it to be a way to remind yourself why you’re here and what you’re meant to be about. It’s like how when you’re camping, you’ve got to put stakes in the ground and lash your tent to them…a word of the year keeps you tethered and stops you from flying off where you don’t belong.
For 2020 our word was Antiracism. In 2021: Openness. For 2022 it was Compost. In 2023 we chose Unsettled. And last year it was Powerful.
And now it’s 2025. Whew.
This feels like a year of profound uncertainty.
Every day, we read about wars, political upheaval, and worldwide economic instability. We hear about the ways our climate is changing – in surprising ways - and not for the better. (Lenora, who lives in Asheville, NC, went through a hurricane this year. A hurricane…in the mountains, miles and miles from the nearest ocean!)
We’ve been reading about 43.7 million refugees worldwide and over 750,000 people houseless in the U.S. Every other day it seems like there’s another mass shooting - 500 some people were killed by mass shootings in this country last year.
And then, of course, there’s the rise in antisemitism, racism, anti-immigrant crimes, and, you know, your basic threats to democracy. The national poverty rate continues to increase as the wealth gap widens.
As if that weren’t enough, the new/old president is moving into the White House. Women and girls, people of color, queer people, people who are involved with the criminal legal system, and the people many of our clients support are bracing for impact.
It’s hard not to want to hide under the covers and watch kitties doing cute things on TikTok, but who knows what’s happening on that front.
What seems clear to us is that we need a word that can help us confront apathy and fear, a word that can help us keep showing up, no matter what, a rallying cry to help us keep trying to grow more good in the world.
The word we’ve chosen is Resist.
And yes, it feels a little badass. But hey, who says we can’t be badasses?
Resist is a strong call to action, and as folks who work in marketing, we know the importance of a good call to action. It feels like we need, we all need, a strong call to action right now.
To resist means to refrain from doing something tempting to do. Tempting because it’s easy, popular, safe, feels good, or seems expedient in the moment.
To resist is to refuse to go along, to be “nice and cooperative” (how often were we told to be that as little girls??) - if what we’re being asked to cooperate with is wrong.
As we post this, on January 20, 2025, the day of the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States and a day we’re celebrating the birthday and life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, we can’t help but remember what King once wrote in Love, Law and Civil Disobedience:
Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as the cooperation with good.
So, what exactly are we going to resist? And how do we do that? Our clients so often inspire us, and 2024 was no exception. Here are some lessons we learned from them about resistance that we’ll take with us through 2025.
Resist Despair. Embrace Tenacity.
This past year, Lenora finally listened to her doctor and added some strength training to her routine. She's been following a protocol called Super Slow, which involves slowly and methodically lifting and lowering the heaviest weight you can. She feels like every time she begins, she's pushing against a brick wall. She often feels I can’t do this. But guess what? She can. And she does.
Everything worth anything takes work.
Usually harder work than we expect. Definitely harder work than we want. And every worthwhile endeavor comes with obstacles. It’s tempting to abandon the fight when the road gets tough. But resistance means digging deep and pushing forward.
We have seen this power of persistence and been inspired in our quest for tenacity by so many of our clients, but one immediately comes to mind.
The Midwest Innocence Project is a new client we took on in 2024. And we have been blown away by the work they do to free innocent people from unjust incarceration. Many of these wrongfully incarcerated people spend years and years in prison, and The MIP stands with them and fights for them - all along the way. The average process takes over ten years.
And they don’t always win.
This past year, one of their clients, Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, was executed on September 24. A horrible miscarriage of justice. The grief and sadness the MIP team felt over this loss was deep. They had worked so hard for so long and had every right to feel discouraged. But they didn’t let their grief send them into despair. They didn’t let it keep them from working as hard on their other clients' behalf. They didn’t let it keep them from advocating for change in a clearly broken system.
We’ve learned from them and others that tenacity isn’t about ignoring the setbacks or ignoring the losses. It’s about learning from them what you can. And pushing forward, even when you don’t believe you have the strength to do so.
Resist Isolation. Embrace community.
In a hyper-connected world, it’s ironic how isolated we often feel. Loneliness has become a national epidemic. And when you’re alone, you can so easily fall for the palace lie that you’re not seeing what you’re actually seeing, and you really don’t know what you think you know. And when you feel like you’re the only one, you can easily feel overwhelmed and powerless, and your efforts don’t matter.
According to Robert Putnam, who 25 years ago wrote the monumental book, Bowling Alone about how we had become a nation of loners, not joiners, says the issue has only been getting worse. And this sense of disconnectedness from others is not only bad for individuals, it’s bad for our country, it’s bad for democracy.
To resist, we have to find community, create community, nurture community and hold onto it like a life raft.
We’ve so clearly seen the power of community at work with our clients. Just one example: recently, we began working with Revolution Workshop.
They are a Chicago-based nonprofit working to restore dignity, ignite hope, and revolutionize lives by empowering people in underserved communities with the trade skills the construction industry really needs.
It’s clear when you talk to these folks that they see themselves as part of - not just an organization - but a family, in the best sense of that word.
When we held one of our branding workshops with them, pretty much all their staff attended. And truly participated. This organization understands the power of community! They respect and lean on each other; they listen to the people in the neighborhoods they serve; they listen to their partners and take their needs seriously. They value having all the voices at the table because they recognize that together, we have so much more power, resilience, and impact than we do alone.
Of course, building community takes effort – collaboration and partnership aren’t easy. How many times have we said, “This would go so much faster if I just did it alone.” But as the African proverb reminds us:
If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.
Resist the status quo. Embrace hope.
Let’s face it, as humans we crave the routine and the familiar. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes. But what if the way things are, the way things have been, is no longer working? Or only works well for a few... and not for everyone.
Some people, the brave ones or the ones who can’t take it anymore, begin to ask questions, challenge norms, and refuse to accept the status quo. To resist the status quo begins by imagining there could be something better and then by working for something better.
That is hope.
We also really like what some guy named Matthew on X/Twitter once said:
People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spiders’ webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, and the grit of cobblestone in her hair. And she spat out a tooth as she got back up and went for another go.
That is the kind of hope many of our clients have been teaching us about.
Lawndale Christian Legal Center is a prime example of an organization that’s constantly questioning what is and making their hope for something better a reality.
They’ve been working in one of the most violent neighborhoods in Chicago for almost 15 years, where 1500 youth (as young as 10 or 11) are arrested each year and more often than not, end up serving time. When LCLC started, they were simply a free legal clinic, providing high quality legal representation for young people, trying to keep them out of jail. But they have kept evolving, growing, learning, interrogating how things are, imagining and creating other ways to do things, and acting in hope.
That led them to recognize the need to not just represent their clients in court but to address the situations that were getting them arrested, to begin with. So, they added educational and mental health support, mentoring, job training, and more.
Most recently, they’ve been building the Dr Dennis Deer Community Justice Center, which will open in April. The Deer Center will be a residential workforce development center that will house 20 young men from North Lawndale and surrounding communities on probation as a real alternative to incarceration. They believe that if there are more centers like this nationwide, they could reduce incarceration in this country by half.
When the doors of the Deer Center open, it will be because the folks of LCLC resisted the status quo and fully embraced hope. And we’ve got to believe it will be a place where hope will be born in the young people who pass through its doors, too.
Resist Fear. Embrace Joy
Now your immediate thought might have been we need to resist sadness to feel joy. In truth, many folks consider fear to be joy’s opposite. Fear constricts us, closes us off, ties us in knots, keeps us cowering in the corner or hightailing it as far away as possible. But joy…joy is about opening up, loosening instead of tightening.
Joy doesn’t have a fist clenched in fear. It may, however, have one raised in defiance. In a world where fear rules, embracing joy is a powerful act of defiance. Brene Brown in her book Atlas of the Heart says:
Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon.
Now, we will admit we can come to the party with some fear. We live in a culture that is basically “fear-mongering,” using every trick in the book to amplify our fears and give us new things to be afraid of that we’d never even considered scary before.
So yeah. Fear is hard to resist. But leaning into joy doesn’t mean ignoring or denying the realities around us. It simply means that sometimes we direct our gaze in a different direction, toward the beauty that still exists, towards the people doing amazing things in the world, toward the good things in our lives, however small they may seem.
Another new client we’ve started working with this year, Bernie’s Book Bank, seems to really have a handle on this joy thing.
Every time we walk into their headquarters, we feel it. Founded in 2009, Bernie’s Book Bank is working to ensure all children have books in their homes and achieve literacy. They have been focusing their efforts on Chicago, putting over 10 million books into the hands of Chicago Public School kids, and have recently expanded to Milwaukee, with plans to go nationwide.
Volunteers who help sort and pack books are central to their work - and to the joy. When Mylene and cin volunteered there in early January, they were paired with the 50-Hour Club. These folks have sorted books for over 50 hours together. They volunteer together weekly and even met socially through Covid on Zoom when Bernie's had to pause volunteering. And there are a lot more like them. In fact, Bernie's has over 40,000 volunteers just from the north side of Chicago. They were some of the happiest, most committed volunteers we've ever seen. They were filled with passion, energy, and...you guessed it - joy.
So, yes, we are committed to Resist in 2025.
Committed to, as Tricia Hersey writes in Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto:
Resist anything that doesn’t center our divinity as human beings.
Choosing Resist as our word of the year feels like both a challenge and an invitation.
It’s a challenge to face down the forces that divide us and keep us isolated, to defy the messages and actions that leave us fearful and discouraged, and to confront the injustice and inequities that seem unbeatable, undefeatable.
It’s an invitation to come together with purpose, courage, and hope. It’s an invitation to get creative, be persistent, and find joy, wherever it may be, name it and embrace it.
Now we’re fired up. Who knows, we may even have to design some badass tee shirts.
Here’s to a year of meaningful resistance. Are you with us?
