Commencement Address 2025 (full text): “You are enough” by Sarah Augustine
Commencement address (as prepared for delivery) by Sarah Augustine, executive director and co-founder of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, at the 127th Goshen College Commencement on Sunday, April 27, 2025.
Read the Commencement story.
View photos from the Commencement ceremony.
View photos from academic receptions.
View photos from the Nurses’ Pinning Ceremony.
Good afternoon!
Well. What a pleasure to be here with you, in all of your brilliance. Yes, I mean brilliance. Look at you. Shining like a constellation. I am glad to see you. I hope to meet you, every one of you. And maybe even to know you. Welcome! I realize this is your campus and your community, but I want to welcome you to the next phase of your life, where you will cease to be simply consumers of information, and become creators.
I’m Sarah. I was asked to speak to you today, and I must begin by telling you I am an Indigenous woman, and I have spent my life working for liberation for my people. I tell you that because I think it might help you to know where I’m coming from. I have learned, after decades of struggle, that change is possible, no matter how improbable it may seem.
I don’t need to tell you, you already know. We are on the cusp of an era – change is inevitable, and not one of us knows exactly what this change will entail. More specifically, you are becoming creators at a time when our society is surrounded by wicked problems, the kind that can’t be solved with one election cycle or a 5-year plan.
Have you heard of a wicked problem?
A problem that is complex, and difficult or seemingly impossible to solve because it is not linear – it is made up of inter-dependent elements. Most of us are trained to think in straight lines of cause and effect, so wicked problems are unsettling.
For example, climate change is a wicked problem – there isn’t a mechanistic solution for climate change, (5 easy steps to ending climate change!) because the cause and impact are made up of millions of independent, inter-locking elements – some incomplete, some in flux, some difficult to define. Different elements at time seem to have opposite and competing interests. A wicked problem- a complex problem, feels like a giant, tangled ball of twine.
There are hopeful people in my generation who say, “don’t worry! This generation coming up will save us! The young people hold the key to our survival!”
People in my generation often don’t know how to send a gif or hook up a router – much less what to do with the tangled ball of twine of climate change.
But don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you “You are the key to our future,” or “your generation will lead the way.” That feels unjust to me – you didn’t create the complex problems that face us, and you were brought up in the same systems that all of us inherited. It is unfair to believe it is somehow your responsibility alone to save the entire world.
But it is our responsibility. And that means we have to imagine, create and build collectively. There are people of my generation who have been dreaming and imagining and building for lifetimes already. And we are ready to take you in, to walk with you, to listen to you, to be kin together. You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone.
Hear me: the antidote to despair is knowing you are not alone.
Solving wicked problems means letting go of linear, mechanistic solutions. There is not one policy change or one presidency that will solve everything, and we have to quit thinking that way. We have to make a commitment to each other – can I ask you for that today? To commit to me, and to let me commit to you?
We have to let go of putting ourselves at the center. It will mean stepping into thinking systemically. Which means your generation, your graduating class, is not the magic bullet. Because there is no magic bullet.
AND – I am so glad you are here because we need fresh ideas, we need fresh energy. We must, together, you and me, imagine a world that does not yet exist, and then build it.
That takes a lot of hope my friends. But that’s ok because we have each other! You can hope in me, as I hope in you. Look to your left. Look to your right. Look over here at your faculty, out there at your friends and family. There is our hope. And we have so much to hope for.
Solving the problems that plague us with worry today will take time – perhaps more than one lifetime. And that is OK – we have our entire lives to work on something so fantastic, so outrageous, the ones who are born behind us will laugh with delight when they learn about what we have begun. We have the opportunity to invent and build systems that are designed to create well-being for our communities. Simple words that are revolutionary – we can center well-being in the systems we dream and imagine and build.
You are going into different professions, taking different paths. That is fantastic. Hope needs each of you, all of you. Wicked problems are problems of complexity, remember? And our diversity is our strength.
My friends. Starting today, you are my colleagues.
We do not have to accept this world as it is. We do not have to accept the systems we have inherited, throw up our hands and say, “well, that’s just how it is.” No! We can decide what world we want to live in! And together, we can build it.
So amidst this hope, a few words about the days and weeks and years ahead. Growing and hoping together.
Hope makes mistakes.
That’s ok! The world is uncertain.
Leadership is a willingness to make mistakes, day after day, until you find the next step.
On this day, April 27, 2025, Sarah Augustine gives you permission to Fail! I want to tell you; I have been failing my whole life: my people are not yet free. But I have more hope today than I did at the beginning of my life, because I see the Spirit of Life moving in this world, leading toward justice and peace, and each day more and more of us give up our plans of self-interest and give up our plans motivated by fear and instead we follow the Spirit of Life.
Failure is you friend – discovery is a process of failure after failure – innovation is a lifelong process of trying things, learning what we can from each trial, and altering course. There is nothing in this world that exists that has been created or discovered by humans in any other way.
When I began the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, it was made up of three bossy Mennonite Ladies. I remember when we had our first dozen volunteers. We thought we could take over the world! And again when we reached a hundred volunteers. Then a thousand. Now there are thousands, across the United States and Canada. We are working toward tens of thousands, then tens of millions. Because to realize liberation it is going to take all of us.
Hope is Willing to try things.
Even when they seem unrealistic, or foolish. Hope is Willing to center what we long for, what we are searching for, our vision: and to de-center yourself.
Friends: commit to me today to set down your anxieties: anxiety that you are not good enough; anxiety that you are small and inconsequential, anxiety that you won’t be enough… Set them down! AND set down your self-congratulations. Set them down.
This world is not enhanced by your self-critique, your self-diminishment. It is enhanced by you coming fully alive, with all of your powers, with your bright outrageous spirit. That’s what hope needs – each of you fully alive, fully activated.
Can we imagine working collectively? Our collective is itself a system of complexity. Imagine millions of us, using all of our intelligence and creativity to try the impossible – to change the world.
Undoubtedly in your college career you have learned what a paradigm is – a pattern of thought, a model for creating reality. And I want to tell you this: to challenge and break and replace the paradigms that have gotten us in this state we are in today – on the cusp of change – will require paradigm-breakers. Visionaries. Revolutionaries. And these amazing, extraordinary, creative thinkers and hopers and believers will not come from Princeton, or Wellesley, from Harvard Business School – those who have been trained by power to ascend to power in these current systems that have brought us to this cusp of change.
The amazing thinkers and hopers and believers and creators will come from outside the halls of power, their vision will come from outside the systems that enslave so many. The ideas that will revolutionize the world will come from those who have hope, who have need, who see the desperate hope for change. These will come from places like Goshen College, where Justice and Peace are not lofty aspirations, but are assumed to be possible.
And so I send you out – you radical hopers, you radical believers.
The way Tela Troge and her collective of Shinnecock women send out the small sugar kelp plans they seed into the Shinnecock bay during the planting season.
Shinnecock bay, in Long Island New York, is the homeland of the Shinnecock Nation. The center of the economy for the Shinnecock is Shinnecock Bay, where the people have fished and harvested from the sea for untold generations.
Now, 99% of aquatic life in the bay is gone. It is an ecosystem destroyed by the sewage of one of the wealthiest communities on earth, who have refused for 50 years to establish a sewer system. The waste from these communities has nearly sterilized Shinnecock Bay. But Tela Troge, and her women’s collective, are planting and harvesting sugar kelp there as a means to shift the balance toward life.
Each year they plant sugar-kelp seeds in a research station, asking these tiny plants to grow in hostile conditions. They pray for the small plants, they sing to the small plants, they talk to the tiny starting plants. “We know we are sending you into a hostile environment,” Tela and the Shinnecock women tell them, “but we are asking you to grow, for the people. For the life of the people. You take our prayers with you. Please grow. Please succeed, even though it is hard. The lives of the people depend on it.” And season after season, sugar kelp starts grow big and strong. Slowly, over generations, Tela and the Shinnecock women hope against hope that the ecosystem is changing, coming back to life.
And so I say the same to you, in all of your brilliance, shining there like a constellation. We know we are sending you into a hostile environment. But we ask you to grow, for the people. For the life of the people. You take our prayers with you. Please grow. Please succeed, even though it is hard. The lives of the people depend on it.