· Julianne Miles · Blog article · 2 min read
What's Next?
Let's use the energy from our protests to make a difference.
Last updated: November 14, 2025
Resistance Roundtable summary
On October 25th, we had a follow-up meeting to our No Kings II demonstration in Abingdon. After 720 folks showed up for the rally, we had about 30 come to the Resistance Roundtable at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Highlands in Meadowview to share their thoughts for the way forward. Thank you so much to everyone who attended and engaged in thoughtful discussion.
First, we broke up by geographic groups and did some brainstorming about what we want to Continue, Stop, and Start. These broad categories brought forward several ideas.
Most folks were happy with continuing the newsletter, continuing to press in our local communities for change, and continuing to grow our movement.
On the stop topic, the general feeling was that we need to stop the negativity and focus on positive messaging and concrete, local issues.
New actions to start that were proposed included an Arts/Music festival, workshops on how to talk to MAGA, Preparing for the midterms and candidates for local elections, Concrete actions to help local people, diversify our social media presence, expand the organizing committee, plan public outreach discussions of topics of interest to local residents such as Farmers, Miners, Union members, etc.
We took these ideas and broke them down into some key topic areas and broke into different groups.
Communications: Expand reach of the Newsletter, Create Content teams, distribute more print material, make more videos for social media.
Focus on Working people: Highlight local issues at rallies, take practical steps such as food drives to help families, plan additional rallies focused on working class issues such as childcare, minimum wage, APCO, food security, etc.
Engagement with local communities: Talk with pastors you know, recruit candidates for local boards and offices, find common ground, bring in speakers about topics of local interest, house meetings
Arts/Creative outreach: Pro-Democracy festival, banner painting, more cowbell!
Rallies/Protests: Have Keynote speakers, “Rally for” rather than “protest against,” do more than just the national protests.
These groups developed a long list of actions for each area, much more than listed here. We had several new folks also agree to do some organizing of these actions. Interested in getting more involved with one of these projects? Reach out to TakeAction.SWVA@gmail.com. We will put you in touch with lead organizers.
