Look at the sheer scale of ecological and economic disruption around us, or the destruction of human life because of authoritarianism. It is entirely normal to feel a heavy sense of overwhelm that stirs in the pit of your stomach. When we see systemic injustice hurting our neighbors, our first instinct is often to look around for a savior.
We wait for the charismatic speaker, the fearless organizer, or the perfect politician to step up to a microphone, tell us what to do, and guide us out of the abyss.
Waiting for a single visionary leaves the rest of us on the sidelines. Real and sustainable transformation requires leaderful movements, a model rooted as deeply in ancient spiritual traditions and modern grassroots organizing.
Depending on a Single Savior is a Trap
A leaderful movement is one where all people have influence and expertise to offer to improve the living conditions of their neighbors. As coined by Edmund Cheng and Samson Yueh, it is a decentralized organizing model where leadership, decision-making, and power are distributed across an entire community rather than concentrated in a single figurehead. It emphasizes participatory democracy, shared responsibility, inclusivity of diverse and marginalized voices and the lived experiences of those in need of liberation.
These movements involve everyday people who feel called to sow seeds of change. And for religious and spiritual people, it is a principle to stand in solidarity with those who are at the mercy of unjust systems and governments.
The narrative of the lone hero is deeply ingrained in us, and it creates a predisposition of silence and inaction because “someone else will step up or speak out.”
Societal norms teach us early a top-down leader model. We are trained to find the loudest voice in the room or the crowd for the person holding the megaphone at the protest. This model of leadership is exhausting for the one at the top, and may crumble under pressure.
If we pin all our hopes on one individual, what happens when they burn out, make a mistake, step down, or sell out? Movements that distribute decision-making sustain long-term resilience
True purpose and justice cannot be carried on a single pair of shoulders. There is great power in expanding the leadership circle, especially when discussing issues of justice.
The collective energy of multiple people working towards hope and change creates seismic shifts.
When we reject the idea that only a few special people are ordained to lead, we open up space for the rest of us to take part.
Leaderful Movements During Civil Rights Era
The “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” embodied the quality of leadership that should inform us today. Civil rights organizer Ella Baker famously said that strong people do not need strong leaders. She believed in building movements that did not rely on top-down authority but rather empowered everyday people to trust their own capacity to create change. This is the heartbeat of a leaderful movement.
Ella Baker’s leadership stretched multiple organizations, with contributions shaping the fabric of the civil rights movement. She also left behind a blueprint showing the importance of including collective voices. One of the most notable was her role in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most influential organizations of the time.
In the 1940s she worked as a secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), traveling the United States starting local chapters, engaging members, and fundraising. According to the SNCC Legacy Project, she pushed the NAACP to decentralize its leadership structure and to aid its membership in more activist campaigns at the local level.
Dr. Martin Luther King later hired Baker as an Associate Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC was formed after the success of the Montgomery Boycott, serving as a hub for networking, community organizing, and training on nonviolent resistance techniques. SCLC operated as an umbrella organization, helping coordinate localized social justice efforts.
While Christian in name, SCLC also benefited from the skills, labor, and knowledge of non-believers and individuals of other faith traditions, underscoring the necessity of spiritual pluralism for collective liberation.
Baker’s discernment of young people’s value to the civil rights struggle was apparent in her decision-making. In 1960, four African-American college students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College staged a sit-in at the F. W. Woolworth store lunch counter. Their activism reached national media attention and galvanized other students from colleges and high schools to engage in nonviolent protests. Within a month, thousands of demonstrations popped up across seven states.
In 1960, Baker convened young organizers at Shaw University. This is where Baker does something incredible. Baker reportedly resisted urges from Dr. King to engulf the new youth movement with the SCLC While Young adults and youth had differing views for achieving social change than those in the SCLC, they also sought more influential roles in the broader civil rights movements. Centering their voices, Baker pushed for its independence and autonomy, essentially ensuring a nationwide freedom movement including a youth perspective.
“The kind of leadership that counts is the leadership that grows out of the people themselves.”
Her organizing philosophy demonstrates the strengths and usefulness of leaderful movements for collective liberation.
Mutual Aid is a Leaderful Movement
Mutual aid is one of the clearest modern examples of a leaderful movement in action. At its core, mutual aid is the practice of solidarity, not charity. It is a voluntary, community-led system where people work together to meet each other’s fundamental needs.
Unlike traditional nonprofits that rely on a rigid hierarchy, mutual aid operates on a “horizontal mode of organization, aiming to break down hierarchies and practice collective decision-making.” In this ecosystem, each person has something to offer and everyone is eligible to receive care.
The economic justice work of the Black Panther Party gives powerful examples of how mutual aid networks can fill community gaps for marginalized people. Although founded as a way for Black communities to combat police brutality, influential figures expanded its focus towards, “calling for the uplift and self-determination of African-Americans, and soon Black Power was part of theBlack Panthers platform.”
In the late 1960s, the Panthers began its free breakfast program at an Episcopal Church in Oakland, California, serving meat, eggs, milk, cereal, and fresh fruits. It quickly grew from serving dozens of children in one church to hundreds of youth across approximately 20 U.S. cities.
These solidarity economy programs helped oppressed peoples meet their basic needs, and instead of being ashamed about not being able to feed themselves, people built a shared analysis of poverty and racism, countering isolation and enabling them to work together for change.
The Biblical Blueprint for Sharing Wealth
While 20th-century movements formalized these tactics, mutual aid is not new. Long before neighborhood breakfast programs or decentralized activist networks, sacred traditions treated collective care not as optional charity, but as a core component of their faith identity.
There are countless stories that depict radical generosity that should inform modern-day readers to care for the most vulnerable among us. In the Book of Acts, the apostles regularly pooled their resources, shared their possessions and redistributed wealth according to community needs. These actions were more than help, it was a direct reflection and symbol of their faith.
When we look at the ancient practice of gleaning found in Deuteronomy, landowners were strictly commanded not to harvest the edges of their fields. The surplus was left in the fields for the laborers and those who lived in poverty, a juxtaposition to our modern-day Gilded Age robber barons, who build pipelines on ancestral lands and cloud skies with pollution in Black and Brown communities.
An article written by Brendan Low at the Cambridge University Law Societies includes a great summary of the Old Testament three principles.
- They were to leave the margins of their fields unharvested.
- They were not to pick up whatever produce fell to the ground in the course of harvesting.
- They were to harvest their produce just once.
The gleaning laws were bidding. The results, ensuring that the poorest in any community, were able to have access to food.
Sharing as a principle of economic justice is a through line of dozens of biblical parables, from wealthy businessmen giving away all of their possessions to their neighbors as an act of faith or the poor widow who gave everything she had in an offering being spotlight for her holy generosity. The prophetic message calls people to the practice of such redistribution, and is thus characterized as “good news” to the poor. (Ched Myers, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics).
How to Discern Your Purpose
If you are looking at your community and thinking that you want to help but do not feel like a leader, it might be time to redefine the word. You do not need a platform, a degree, or any other prerequisites to have a calling for social change. The needs are vast, but start small. Start by looking at what is already in your hands.
What skills do you have naturally?
What fills your heart with overwhelming emotion?
What brings you a deep sense of peace when you do it?
Your calling lives at the intersection of your specific gifts and the community’s immediate needs. I wrote a longer piece about exploring your life purpose and how it can eradicate injustice.
For some, it could be driving neighbors to the voting booth to participate in the election process, setting up a free water and lemonade stand at a protest for tired organizers, or breaking down complex political topics and policies into plain language for your un-engaged friends on social media. These quiet acts of faithfulness are exactly what sustain long-term liberation.
A liberation movement is powered by tiny acts for equality and justice.
When times get tough, the world turns dark, and the news is too harsh to bear, spiritually led people lean on their teachings and work towards just solutions.
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