By now, many of you know Amanda Ripley, a journalist and Monitor friend. Her latest column is a must-read. It’s called “The Protest Trap,” and it asks one of the most important questions of today: How do we create change? (I recently explored the same question here.) 

Protests can help, Amanda says, but they can also fool us into thinking toting a placard is enough. Instead, change comes through relationships. Movements that change the world “create a web of rapidly replicating relationships that expands geometrically,” she writes.

Transformational change, then, doesn’t start with a “them.” It starts with an “us.”