This is a very rough start for a guide to getting involved in activist work in your community. Please chime in with ideas! Many people are feeling at a bit of a loss as to how to get meaningfully involved and I wanted to try to offer some help.
The first step to becoming an effective activist is to become part of your community—something you cannot do online or in isolation at home. If you don’t know anyone locally you probably won’t be a helpful part of a network of resistance down the line except perhaps by lending monetary support online occasionally or phone banking for prisoners. In order to protect people in your community you need to establish yourself as a trusted part of it in some way shape or form.
Start small. Get involved in organizations that feed the homeless or provide meal trains for the sick, elderly, overwhelmed, or others that need it. Join a weekly trash cleanup crew in a local park. See if your local womens, lgbt, or homeless shelters need anything you can provide. One or more of these options usually exists even in rural towns.
- Check online for radical bookstores or community centers (some cities have lgbt clubs or community centers too) where you might start exploring local options or making friends with people who share your values. Even the local grassroots punk venue or garage show circuit might be a good avenue towards building community.
- don’t discount religious organizations only qua religion. Not all churchgoers (or church leaders for that matter) believe in god, and not every religious person supports the dark sides of their religion’s history. Often these organizations are the only already organized ways to get involved in very rural areas. Some church or mosque supported soup kitchens try to evangelize their visitors but some do not. Test out a few. Trust your guts. Unitarian, Buddhist, and Jesuit organizations are often among the more secular-friendly side of religious charity work.
- many religious organizations support/sponsor a number of refugees who may be at risk under the current administration. You can offer to provide rides if you drive (to the grocery, to ESL classes, a carpools to school), prepared meals if you cook, yardwork, woodwork, piano lessons, home repair, english conversation practice, etc.
Join existing activist groups. Join already active resistance groups. In an urban setting there are many to choose from. In a rural setting there will inevitably be less options.
- “Friends of the” river/park/community theatre organizations are one place to seek community connections that can solidify into important networks of solidarity down the line. Ask about volunteer opportunities in your area on nextdoor.
- Even if you are not an environmentalist consider volunteering for local branches of the sierra club or similar to build a network with other activists.
Stay safe
Trust your gut. If you go to the first meeting and they are talking about doing something you totally disagree with don’t feel like you have to go along with it no matter what theory they spout, you can always find something else more in alignment with your morals. If you find yourself doing something to prove authenticity or that feels like initiation/hazing that is probably not a healthy organization. If all decisions are deferred to one person and you are getting a creepy vibe from them that is probably a cult. Use your common sense. Use the buddy system.
- If you involve yourself in anything that might seem remotely sketchy to an ultra conservative government be wary of your online paper trail which could be used against you. Before engaging in online organizing, please learn the ins and outs of online privacy. Do NOT engage on platforms like ig/fb/twitter and other known bad actors. Ensure any platform you do use is encrypted properly. See the thread below by @Anahkiasen@lemmy.blahaj.zone and the reply by @ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net for online safety tips.
etiquette
- Don’t expect people to always be grateful for your offer of food/resources. People are multi-dimensional and have complex histories. If you work with displaced people some of them will be intolerant or sexist. Just be kind, polite, and respectful to each individual’s wishes once they make them clear. If they are abusive towards you exit the situation and let others in your group know. In many cases your group will be able to point out these individuals beforehand to avoid confrontation.
- Don’t try to immediately voice your opinions loudly, feel an organization out by watching and listening to decide if you’d like to be a part of it. How do they deal with internal disagreements?, What are their priorities (as demonstrated by their actions? Their words?), Are they trying to control their membership in a way that comes off like bullying or grooming?
- There will probably be people involved in every activity you check out that you don’t like or don’t understand, or don’t find helpful. Someone who is always virtue signaling or always condescending, or just a huge oddball. This is just part of being involved in these spaces, it’s okay if you don’t get along with or like everyone.
- If you attend protests but didn’t organize the event don’t talk to journalists. They are likely to misquote, twist, and misrepresent your words.
A project I’m personally working on now which I’m sure many people on here could also do is I’m making and distributing Tails live disks with prewritten guides on how to use them including how to use Tor and how to purchase illegal goods on it.
With many lifesaving drugs about to become illegal in the US ( i.e. abortion pils, and drugs for gender afirming care) many people will soon have no option other than to turn to illegal sources for these drugs. While this is a far from ideal solution I am hoping to make the process as safe and straightforward for people as I possibly can for when they run out of other options. I have a background in writing manufacturing instructions where I take highly complex engineering doccumentation and break it down in such a way that any new hire off the street could understand it; so I’m hoping to apply those skills to writing these guides.
Unfortunately, while I used to know a fair bit about online security and how to safely use online black markets, my knowledge is about a decade out of date. I’m sure recomended practices and safety concerns have changed quite a bit. So if anyone wants to give me a hand with this I could use some more up to date info and more technical guides myself just to brush up on things. It would save me a ton of work in tracking them down myself. I’m mainly just hoping to traslate any existing technical information I can find into something the average person would be able to understand because that’s where my skillset lies. When I have these guides more fleshed out I plan to post them somewhere for community input and, after further refinement based on that input, for others to use and distribute.
Another aspect to this is just getting people in communication over secure methods. It’s harder for fascists to operate with an informed underground.
I will say though, the live tails disks is kinda sketchy. Nobody should be using random disks or drives they find outside. I think a full instruction set made from paper would be safer, after mitigating the issues with yellow dot tracking in printers.
Also using a one page booklet style might be a good idea. It’s small, easy to hide countless of them all over the place, and is light on resources.
The communication aspect is vital. Just getting people on anonymous forums where the can actually coordinate would do a world of good.
When it comes to the live disks, I agree, it’s 100% sketchy. Which is exactly why I’m not handing them out to random strangers. I’m only personally going to be giving them to friends who have frequently trusted me to have full access to their computers anyways. If those friends then want to distribute more drives to people who trust them then we might get a network effect going.
If other people started doing this the the only part I would be personally distributing to them is the guides and ideally those would just be hosted somewhere like github (but preferably not github specifically) for community input. If they don’t have enough knowledge to download and verify their own tails live disks then they don’t have enough knowledge to be trusted to hand out sketchy flashdrives.
Also the cheapest source I could find for bulk small flashdrives also happens to customize them for free, so I’m personally going with some business card sized ones and will have printed on the front in big red letters “THIS COULD BE A VIRUS. Only use this live disk if you received it in person from someone you trust.” After that disclaimer I should have enough room to add instructions for booting the live disk.
As I said, it’s very far from perfect. But if it’s someones only option then it’s there. The reason I am going the premade livedisk route is that there are plenty of people who aren’t tech savy enough to properly and securely configure their own setup. The preconfigured live disk eliminates all of that which also happens to be the most complex step. I’m aiming at making something that even my mom could use. As far as the physical booklet goes the reason I’m not going that route is mainly just from my personal experience writing instructions for factory workers, some of whom brag about being borderline illiterate. I’ve found that if you give people too much information in a single doccument then they tend to not read any of it. Remember, the average user on lemmy could almost certainly do this all on their own, they aren’t my target audience. When writing something that you want even the least savy average person to read and understand I’ve personally found that it’s better to split the instructions into several doccuments of ideally only a single page with lots of visual aids included. Believe it or not, but I’ve found that while people can read seperate short doccuments perfectly fine, if you put them all together and call them chapters or sections then a lot of people are suddenly no longer able to read it. It defies all logic but I have personally seen it happen over and over again. My best geuss is if a single doccument has enough sections then it starts triggering some ingrained textbook phobia.
Ah, that definitely changes things a bit. I hope that goes well for you and the people you know!
That’s very fair. I’ve noticed that tendency within myself as well. Though I feel that a one page booklet, if well designed could manage to be brief enough to help somebody through a basic installation and use of Tor. It’s not much more complicated than installing your average desktop application.
It’d just have to be very light on wording for each page, and primarily use pictures.
Perhaps, though it also might just be that dense or long documents quickly become overwhelming. So people just say “fuck it, I don’t care”.
That’s a great idea! I’ve been in the position where I had to source asthma inhaler cartridges online for a friend. A guide to doing so safely would have been really helpful, especially for drugs that might garner less sympathy than asthma inhalers to potential judges/jurys.