If not me, then who? I’ve heard some version of this question repeated in small corners all over the world: sitting on a plastic chair in India with a paper cup of steaming chai; clutching a sweating water bottle on the edge of a zucchini field in Maryland; riding in the back of an open air bus in Colombia, the wind whipping my hair. When asked about the origin story of their movement, whether it be dismantling systems of human trafficking in red light districts or providing dignified jobs to adults with intellectual disabilities or pulling cocaine plants from fields to plant coffee beans, the founder humbly shrugs, I noticed injustice. I saw an unmet need. I witnessed corruption—and I decided to do something about it.

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard dozens of times over my twelve-year tenure as a BitterSweet Monthly contributor as we interview the founders of non-profit organizations, community programs, and social movements. The circumstances vary, as different as the cultural context or the global latitude and longitude, but the story arc—long and incomplete—travels the same trajectory. Someone noticed. They were overwhelmed with sorrow, with outrage, with righteous indignation. And they had the audacity to believe that the actions of one person could make a difference, or at least it was worth the effort to try.

These movements rarely started with funding or a multi-step plan, and usually, they admit, their earliest methods were flawed. But they acted anyway. Willing to lift the wheels off the ground while still building the plane fueled by any number of what if questions. What if I took my granola recipe and started a company that employs refugees? What if we stood up to the brothel owners? What if I found surgeons willing to remove cataracts without pay?

The word resist conjures images of raised fists, shouts, crowds. And while that certainly has its place, I’ve found resistance often looks like unfurling raised fists to shove them into garden gloves, weeding a community garden where drug dealers once reigned. Sometimes it’s quiet, spoken not in shouts but poetry, stanzas written and shared over readings and slammed into a microphone. It looks like breaking from the crowd, driving alone into the desert, lugging water jugs across arid land to create hydration stations for migrants in danger of dying from thirst.

Year after year, story after story, we’ve met the people doing just that. These portraits of resistance celebrate the seemingly unremarkable people who show up week after week, committed to serve food to their neighbors, drive refugees to doctors appointments, buy produce grown by farmers in recovery from substance use, fight for the potential of a better future for themselves—to choose hope.