Somebody Should Write About This—Why Not You?

The Connector wants to uplift and amplify activism in your state

By Martha Merson

The Grassroots Connector has published 370 articles since its debut in February 2024. Throughout the 2024 campaign, we told stories from Ohio and Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York. Activists from Northeast Arizona, Texas, and California chimed in to explain their challenges and their hopes. And in 2025, our writers set aside fear and focused on building coalitions, productive action, and expressing dissent.

As the map below shows, we have readers in 50 states, but we are missing stories from too many of them.

What kind of stories are we looking for? Here’s an example:

Recently Reveal featured a story about abortion rights groups in Alabama helping transport women out of state for the procedure. One such group was Yellowhammer. They were impressed by the work Jenice Fountain took to provide care to women beyond helping with funding for travel to an out-of-state appointment. Yellowhammer asked Jenice to take that approach to a new level. Abortion care, Fountain saw, didn’t stop with funding for travel to an appointment or even a medical procedure.

Helping women became wrap-around social services that could include assistance with temporary housing, car repairs, or diapers. I was struck not only by the solidarity, care, and determination of the Yellowhammer crew, but by the fact that grassroots activism takes such different shapes across the country.

We want to read more such stories. Grassroots work may be invisible to the legacy media, but what we do to create conditions for voter engagement, to create safe spaces for truth-telling, to fight back against the erosion of our freedoms makes for important stories that need to be told.

So this is a plea to anyone with ties to Alaska, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma … please get in touch and help us understand who you are, what you’re working for, and how it’s going. We want to know more about your small acts of solidarity with neighbors and coworkers. We also call out to South Carolina, Wyoming, and the Dakotas: our readers want to visualize, and help, with your work.

Maybe your work looks a little different from the common billboards or postcard parties. Maybe it’s a flyer on a church bulletin board, a bake sale helping a library add books or magazine subscriptions. Maybe there’s some intentional conversation at a high school basketball game. Consider Jess Piper, who has 84,000 subscribers to View from Rural Missouri on Substack. Your corner of the world is as interesting as hers. Tell us a story. We’re readers and we want to know.

Look around the grocery store. Check your in-box to remind yourself of what is going on and who is gathering people together. If you think: Somebody could write about this, let us know. Because you could.

Consider submitting an article to the Grassroots Connector. Or pitch the article and maybe we can find someone to write for you or with you. The first step is to review our Writers’ Guidelines.

Martha Merson writes and edits from Boston. She is a big fan of American stories told on The Moth, The Story Collider, and This American Life.