The Beginners Guide to Social Change
“We are the leaders we’ve been looking for.”
— Grace Lee Boggs
Many of us care deeply about what’s happening. From inequality, to misinformation, to climate collapse… But when the issues are so big, it is really hard to know where to begin.
You don’t need to be an expert or an activist. You just need to understand the system you’re part of — and the power you already hold within it.
Wake Up: See the Systems, Not Just the Symptoms
Behind every headline is a pattern of power.Most of the information we consume is shaped by a small number of media and tech corporations. In the United States alone, six conglomerates control roughly 90% of the media market — a consolidation that has only intensified over the last decade. Globally, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Alphabet (Google, YouTube), and TikTok now mediate the news diets of over 5.7 billion people (almost 70% of the world population), making them the largest distributors of information in human history. Several of the most influential outlets — including Fox Corporation, and X — are owned by billionaires whose political leanings shape editorial priorities, content moderation, and platform architecture. Advertising, not public interest, remains the financial engine: over 50% of global digital ad revenue is captured by five companies, incentivising engagement and outrage over accuracy or equity.
This concentration of power reflects much longer histories of information control. Colonial administrations restricted who could publish, whose knowledge counted as credible, and which narratives of race, gender, and nationhood were legitimised. Today’s media oligarchies replicate these dynamics on a global scale: determining whose stories are amplified, whose are ignored, and whose realities are deemed “neutral” enough to shape the mainstream.
The first step in social change is learning to look underneath. Who benefits from things staying the same? Who is silenced when stories are simplified? Learn to trace the money and the motive.
💡 Build an intentional information diet: independent journalists, movement leaders, community organisations. That’s how you start to see the world as it is as it is, not as it’s sold to you.
“Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”
– African Proverb
Find Your Why: Connect What You Care About to Who You Are
You don’t need to fix every issue. Social change lasts when it’s rooted in something personal: the community you come from, the experiences you’ve had, the future you want for others.
Purpose rarely appears fully formed. It emerges slowly, shaped by identity, culture and lived experience. Try noticing what stories make you feel something — anger, sadness, joy — and ask why. That emotion is a compass.
💡 The goal isn’t to do everything — it’s to do something well, and consistently.
Understand Power: Know How Change Really Happens
Power comes in many forms. It’s political, social, cultural, financial, and relational. It shapes what we value, who we listen to, and whose lives are seen as worthy of care.
We’re taught to think power lives only in government buildings and boardrooms, but it also lives in how we tell stories, spend money, and show up in community. That’s why movements like Black Lives Matter or Women Life Freedom and MeToo began with people’s stories.
💡 Power grows when we recognise it and use it intentionally with care and accountability. Read our article on understanding power.
Start Small, Start Now: Begin Anywhere
The myth of social change is that it’s led by extraordinary people. In reality, it’s built by ordinary people choosing to act — again and again.
Research led by Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan provides evidence that no non-violent movement that mobilised at least 3.5 % of the population failed to achieve its aims. Success depended on sustained organisation, broad-based support, careful strategy, and resilience under pressure.
Movements grow from micro-actions: a conversation, a refusal, a repost, a reframe. One person’s courage invites another’s.
💡 Don’t wait to feel ready. Start with one meaningful act: share what you’ve learned, question a bias, amplify a voice, or volunteer your skills.
Find Your People: Change Is a Collective Practice
Power is contagious — but so is apathy.
Social change is sustained by relationships so surround yourself with people who are learning, experimenting, and showing up, even imperfectly. Movements endure because of shared care and accountability — the WhatsApp groups, the Slack channels, the community meetings that keep people connected when momentum dips. Collective spaces look different everywhere, from diaspora networks and faith circles to workers’ unions, mutual-aid groups. All are valid. All are powerful.
💡 Join a local group, online collective, or workplace network that aligns with your values.
Turn Practice into Progress: Make Change a Habit
Social change is something you build into the fabric of your life. How you show up in your workplace, your purchases, your language, your leadership — all of them either reinforce or challenge the systems around you.
💡 Ask yourself regularly:
Are my choices aligned with my values?
Who benefits from my silence or my spending?
Whose lives are impacted by the choices I make?
Where can I use my role or privilege to make space for others?
Rest and Repeat: Rest Is a Radical Act
We live in a culture that celebrates productivity and glorifies burnout — yet movement-building is a marathon, not a sprint, and burnout only strengthens the status quo. Rest, reflection, and joy are not self-indulgent; they’re acts of refusal against the conditioning that tells us our worth is measured by output.
In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey argues that rest is not leisure, but a deliberate interruption of systems built on urgency and overwork. Rest challenges the idea that we must be constantly productive to be valuable. It re-centres our bodies, intuition, and imagination: the very faculties movements rely on.
Liberation traditions have always understood this: moments of stillness, ritual, and collective pause were strategies for clarity and endurance. Rest protected people’s capacity to resist, organise, and dream beyond the confines of the moment.
💡 Create rhythms that ground you: intentional pauses, quiet, ritual, boundaries on your availability. They’re sustenance and you’ll need it.
Sustainable change comes from people who refuse to be drained into silence. Rest is not abandoning the work; Rest is what makes the work possible.
Your journey is just beginning
🧭 Next Steps with Comotion:
- Take the Social Change Archetype Quiz
- Complete the Begin Anywhere worksheet
