community empowerment

Jun

2026

Tools for community mapping and monitoring: CoMapeo

Attending the heart-warming Livingmaps Network 2026 Conference in these chilling times.

One highlight so far: a very interesting demo of CoMapeo, a mobile and desktop tool for collaborative mapping and monitoring.

What stood out to me was its potential for community empowerment, such as documenting threats, mapping ancestral territory, collecting biodiversity data, fostering intergenerational knowledge sharing, and helping safeguard territories and culture for future generations.

Check it out: https://comapeo.app/

Jan

2026

From Minneapolis: The Power of Collective Courage

A dear friend from Minneapolis sent me this heartfelt message about the resilience of her fellow citizens in the face of the ICE crackdowns (shared with permission):

“I’m so proud of my city right now. Everyone is in it for the long haul. Every shitty thing they do, more of us come out to witness, record, object. I’m expecting it to get worse before it gets better (if that’s even a thing anymore ‘better’), but we won’t go down quietly & we will win the narrative war.”

As an eyewitness account of the power of community she recommended:

https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/from-minneapolis-ive-never-seen-unity

Its author really captures the spirit of what’s unfolding:

“The resistance to ICE in Minneapolis is strong, generalized, and sustained. It’s also entirely decentralized and leaderless (or “leaderful” if you’d like).

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