How We Push Back Against Fear – Lessons from Harvard

It's easy to let fear take over and prevent you from taking action. At Harvard, I learned not to avoid fear, but how to move through it.

Teaching in a time of political peril

In 2025, the Trump administration revoked Harvard’s ability to host international students under the student visa program, a move that threatened over 6,000 students and academics with displacement. Federal grants and contracts, worth more than $2 billion, were frozen as the university refused to submit to political demands over hiring, speech, and ‘ideological audits’. This meant that the very act of organising put waves of students and faculty under real material threat. This is not to say risk was greatest at Harvard. Risk was likely far greater for people of colour, trans folks, undocumented people, and vulnerable federal workers than for those within one of the world's most powerful institutions.

At the time, I noticed patterns emerging – patterns I have experienced in my own organising work back home. First comes: 'This might pass', then ‘We can't do anything, there's too much danger’. Very human. Then, with deeper listening and questioning, a protective instinct emerges: ‘We must keep everyone safe’. Again, deeply human. Practically, this looked like faculty and students self-organising legal sessions and know-your-rights workshops, supporting each other to memorise loved ones' numbers in case they were stopped and detained.

However, in these support-based sessions a harsh reality became clear: no one can promise safety, and the law has limits. Perhaps safety depends on us building and having power. We couldn't guarantee that nothing bad would happen, but having more collective power could make us safer and give us more choices. The same is true in daily life.

From fear to courage

I remember a moment vividly from class. A number of teams were questioning whether it was right to be taking action in light of the continued onslaught of the Trump administration. Our goal as educators was never to shut these conversations down. We are all learners in the classroom, and we wanted people to bring their challenges and to work through it collectively.

Some of the students who had US citizenship were sharing that they cared deeply about not putting international students at risk. One of our international students took to the microphone and shared that their friend had just been detained. We did not know why or for how long. With shaking conviction, they said, 'in my country, people are in prison for taking off their headscarf. My friend was put in prison last night because she chose to wear one in America. I will no longer be afraid.'

Students comforted them and conversations started to shift from what we lacked to what we stood for and what we were going to do. A story of us as a class. What I found so moving about that moment was that this student was not telling others what to value or what to do, but they were making clear that they would act. It created a moment of choice in the room for all of us. It also agitated my own internal talk. I had been feeling so conflicted about what my duty was to the learning of my students, to the outcomes of the course and to their care and safety. This student's courage enabled me to find my own. My job was to continue to create brave spaces, to give the best I could to those who wanted to organise and stay in conversation with my peers. I was frightened of making a wrong choice, and in that moment I realised that there was an ‘us’ in this room who could figure things out. Safety could not be guaranteed, but our courage would come from each other.

Practising leadership in uncertainty

Stepping closer to courage whilst acknowledging the risks surrounding us isn't easy. In fact, it's frightening, and fear is corrosive and exhausting. Fear creates problems, it doesn't solve them. The risks are not the same for everyone involved. It is critical to recognise how the power dynamics of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, where you are born etc., shape experiences of risk, access to resources, and capacity to act.

The best thing you can do with your leaders or students during these moments of fear is to engage – in fact this is when we need you to engage the most. As organisers, educators, people working in the world of change, this is not the time to silence others or try to control outcomes by getting them to ‘keep their heads down’. In my own practice, it is so hard to find space to engage as a team. We are working so rapidly and to carve out time feels like an uphill battle. But in structured and boundaried ways we need to share our fears, figure things out and make choices together. We cannot remain paralysed by fear nor promise absolute safety, but we can build community and care for one another. We can embrace our full humanness, choosing an alternative path based on collective courage. So if fear limits our choices, how do we expand them? Or simply put: how do we become free?

Stories are resources for courage

Just like that moment in class, stories are moral resources that support others to act and bind communities together. Our narratives are how we make sense of the challenges we face. Good stories are emotional containers that hold our deepest values. They help us to transform chaotic moments into clear moments of choice, then into meaningful action that reflects what we truly care about.

As Marshall shared at our event in May, 'you don’t counter fear by telling someone 'don’t be afraid', instead, you counter fear with hope.' Hope is not something you have but something you do. Hope is a practice requiring constant cultivation through relationships, narrative, and collective action. Hope is not waiting for someone to save us or provide a five-point plan. This underestimates our own capacities, experiences, resources and relationships. As organisers, we should be working with others to reclaim their voice and agency so that we can in turn reclaim our power. 

In our classroom, I watched this transformation happen repeatedly. When students could articulate their ‘story of self’ (why this work mattered to them personally) they found strength. When they connected that to a ‘story of us’ (what we could accomplish together) they discovered hope. And when they painted a ‘story of now’ (why we must act at this moment) they moved into courage and developed campaigns to tackle the world and move further to the world it could be. 

In times of terror, violence, and censorship, those who control the dominant narrative control people's sense of what's possible. But when we reclaim our stories – when we tell them with authenticity and power – we reclaim our agency. Or, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, hope ‘is an axe you break down doors with’.

This is why narrative work is not optional, it's foundational. Without stories that connect our values to our vision, we get tactics without strategy, anger without direction. To know what you love, what you are willing to make sacrifices for, are learnt in our lived experiences which can then be communicated through stories. To share a story requires us to be vulnerable. You can not be brave or courageous without practising vulnerability. Vulnerability means to take risk, to engage with uncertainty. These are the fundamentals of leadership. To share your story to people who know very little about your life is a brave choice. It is also a requirement of doing public organising work. Students would coach and support each other to strengthen their moments, with teaching fellows guiding them to dig deeper into where, why, and with whom they learnt to care about what they care about. This is a generative and raw experience of being vulnerable with each other and realising that we are all incredibly unique and also share many experiences. We have all experienced hurt and hope. We can be both teacher and learner by sharing our stories. By engaging in the heart of narrative we learn what we will fight for and who we will fight with. It becomes our source of courage to act in the world.

We should want power

To act on our courage requires us to understand power – a significant learning curve for most people, not just our students.

Central to Marshall Ganz’s organising philosophy is a fundamental reframing of what power really is. He believes that 'power is not a thing you have; it's an influence created through interdependence.'

Some people believe knowledge is power. Knowledge is certainly an important resource, but it is not power. To know of an injustice is one thing, but to love something enough that you act to change it is another thing entirely. Some people say money is power. Again, another important resource, but if no one wants what you're selling, do you really have power? 

Power flows from our interdependence. When those interdependencies are mutual, they can be a source of shared strength, but when one party controls the resources others rely on – and uses that control to override others’ choices – it becomes domination. The task of organising is to shift relationships of dependency into relationships of shared power.

I watched students assume that if only the mayor understood the impacts of climate change, they would change their mind. But it's likely the mayor already knows about polluted air and the dominance of the fossil fuel lobby – we have to make it in their interest to change it.

We're conditioned to think of power as something external to us, something we lack and should aspire to, rather than something we can already access and build. This keeps us trapped in relationships of dependency, hoping those with power will choose to be kind rather than building our capacity to make change inevitable.

Power is not something you can charitably give to others, it is something each of us have to take for ourselves. But that power has to be engaged with, claimed, and acted on. There is a serious danger of counting on virtuous, charismatic individuals to act courageously alone. This neither builds sustainable movements nor is any one human able to change the world on their own. The tearing down of individuals who fail to meet all of our expectations in our movement is well documented, as well as the horrific abuses of power that happen when leaders are viewed as gods who are above human reckoning and accountability for their abuses.

This is why organising is critical to building mass collectives. We need virtuous collectives and organisations to act courageously in times of fear and domination. The stories of what they share and the fights they speak out on are critical for us to reimagine what is possible and move towards a society where all life flourishes.

When student teams engaged their power and took collective responsibility for it, their capacity to act grew. Team norms, decision-making practices, and roles and responsibilities all gave structure to their actions. It is easy to say ‘we are all serious people who don’t need rules’ but when you have to make tough choices that demand you act on your courage those team agreements really matter. Those that did not make practices explicit, or ignored what they had agreed, struggled to maintain their collective courage.

The trap of organising around powerlessness

We cannot let fear shrink our strategies. Fearful organising keeps us small and reactive. Across the UK, I see groups retreating, reforming strategies to be about survival rather than ambition. When we become obsessed with managing risk – believing that documents, and not boots on the ground, are going to get us somewhere – we lose sight of the world we are trying to build.

As organiser Doran Schrantz shares in Hammer & Hope: ‘We’ve all had experiences that say to us, you should be small, you have to defend yourself. That means you’re not in the driver’s seat of your life, and your life becomes about protecting yourself instead of living out your free creative purpose.’ Organising around a lack of agency does not foster courage. Speaking as though the story has already been written is neither accurate or useful for effective organising. This is not a time for fearful caution but courageous action.

In Britain, we’re watching a rise in political rhetoric that feeds on division and fear. The far-right party Reform UK has led every major opinion poll since April 2025. In this climate, many are retreating into defensive strategies: mapping legal risks, monitoring social media surveillance, sporadic mobilising. These are necessary tools, but they are not exercising power. When our movements become preoccupied with risk management alone, we lose sight of the world we’re fighting for. The danger is not just that fear will silence us, it’s that it will shrink our imagination and weaken our movements. Like in the Harvard classroom, we must choose to act not because we feel safe, but because our shared values demand it. Safety might not be promised, but solidarity can be practised.

Our fears can not become bigger than our aspirations. Reform UK’s rise in 2025 shows how fear-based politics thrives when political courage retreats. But we don’t have to accept that story. As Reni Eddo-Lodge reminds us, 'the fight is not only about resisting what is wrong, but about imagining and building what is right.’ Now, I am not saying that we should live in the world of imagination. We need to demonstrate that our organising results in tangible material changes in the lives of everyday people. That requires us to act in the world as it is, in all its flaws and moments of beauty. And in the world as it is, risk is real. But it’s also a measure of what we care about. The question is not whether we can avoid it, but what we are willing to risk for the greater good.

Finding courage in times of fear

Those who sow fear dread courage most. Courage breeds hope, solidarity and action. Action with intention can create a gateway to a better future. A story of not just what we oppose, but more importantly, of what we stand for as a country and as human beings. It’s created not by one brave leader, but by a courageous movement standing together.