2 min read

What we carry forward

Endings demand we decide what comes with us.

What did we learn to hold this year? What are we brave enough to carry into the next?

None of us are walking into 2026 with empty arms. This was a year that asked for patience we didn’t know we had, courage we weren’t always ready to show, and clarity in the middle of chaos. We witnessed moments that tested our resolve, and others that reminded us why we do the work we do; why we keep showing up for truth, for justice, and for each other.

This year taught me that clarity is a practice, not a revelation. That speaking truth—especially harsh truths that discomfort the powerful—requires the kind of security most of us are still building for ourselves. That trust is the practice of consistency built over time, which means the work of building anything meaningful is slow and unglamorous and absolutely essential.

2025 was a year of whiplash. Our timelines have resembled trauma tsunamis. We watched systems meant to protect us get weaponized against the communities they were designed to serve. We saw institutions betray their own stated values in real time. We learned again and again that ambiguity and the absence of accountability is always a tool to burden those with less power.

And yet.

In the cracks and margins, we also built. Small gatherings that became movements. Questions that became frameworks. Grief that became fuel for fearlessness. We figured out what security we need to tell the truth without fear, and some of us started building it for ourselves and each other.

We’re living in times that tempt us toward despair. But I’ve learned (again and again) that resilience isn’t a quiet thing — it’s a choosing to stay awake to nuance, ambiguity, and possibility.

Here's what I'm carrying into 2026:

The knowledge that people seek safety in small numbers, which means the most revolutionary work often happens in rooms we'll never read about. That revolutions are built on trust and faith, and neither are things to be rushed or performed. That courage cannot be canceled, even when they try. That tax-exempt status is not an identity—our work exists beyond the structures that try to contain it.

The understanding that love is a verb. That making meaning is a choice we get to make every single day. That the best way to heal moral injury is to trust your truth, even when the world keeps breathing as usual around your loss.

The narratives we tell, about ourselves, about each other, about the world, matter. They guide how our sense-making, who we listen to, and what we protect. Keeping stories rooted in dignity and truth isn’t optional; it’s essential.

The commitment to expansive democratic futures and joyful communities, because those have always been the point. Not the grant deadlines or the strategic plans or the partnership proposals, though those matter too. The point is the world we're building in the spaces between the work.

I don't know what 2026 holds. None of us do, really. But I know what I'm carrying into it: the grief and the joy, the losses and the lessons, the community and the conviction. All of it. This is the weight that grounds me.

What are you carrying forward?

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Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist. She is committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media and philanthropy. This is her personal newsletter.