Organizing

In this chapter of the Occupation Handbook, we explain how to get started with grassroots organizing, facilitate meetings, organize assemblies and building effective disruptive teams!

How to start organizing a local group at your school/university to occupy

In Lisbon, Fridays for Future Lisbon is the organization calling out and structuring the occupations. To be able to occupy and grow, we developed a structure of local school/university groups which are articulated between them via FFF Lisbon. In this chapter, we will explain how to set up your own local group at school/university, what is it for and how to organize it. Read the original in Portuguese here.

A) WHAT IS A LOCAL GROUP?

A local group ("núcleo", as we say it) is the group of occupation organizers in each school or university. Its function is to organize the occupation in its school. Their existence is important so that all the occupations have a strong organizational capacity in order to ensure the preparation of the occupation and all that it involves: the resistance and resilience of the occupation, decision making among those who are occupying, making sure that the that the message gets out, that all the occupants are well and in a safe and inclusive space, and that as many people from your school as possible occupy. In addition, the local groups must have a good internal organization in order to facilitate the communication between the different local groups and FFF Lisbon (or the main structure). What makes our our occupations so strong is the cohesion within and between local groups.

In short, these are the functions that we assign to the local groups:

• Capacitate students to occupy;
• Facilitate articulation and solidarity with other other occupations, with the educational community and with society
• Define the roles that each student can have in the preparation and during the occupation;
• Disseminate and prepare the occupation within the school/university through meetings and conversations about the structure of the occupation and what steps to take until then;
• Make the occupation; and the conflict escalation plan.

B) HOW TO GET PEOPLE INTO YOUR LOCAL GROUP & START PLANNING?

You need to make sure that everyone in your school/university knows that the occupations will happen. It's okay if for now you are the only person in your school who wants to occupy, there are several ways to get more people interested in occupying with you!

1) VISUAL RESOURCES

Put up posters, stick stickers, and hand out flyers the occupation of your school/university in all hallway, classrooms, and spaces.

2) SPREAD THE WORD

It is important to have a constant buzz about the occupations inside your school. One of the best ways to do this is face-to-face, having recurring conversations with colleagues, teachers, and staff about the movement and how they can get involved. Always have flyers handy if people want to know more, and don't forget to keep the contact details of people interested an integrate them in the occupation group (ex: on Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc) to keep track of the next steps.

3) TALKS

Schedule a talk at your school! These are moments to talk about the climate science behind the climate crisis, about what climate justice is and how we can achieve it, and about the role of collective action in combating this crisis. To book the lecture, talk to your school teachers that may want to have space in their class to this lecture and invite other classes. To spread it around the school, talk also to your student associations or student groups.

4) STANDS / INFO POINTS

The stands are the best place to show from the beginning what is being prepared, and where people can ask questionsabout the occupation and learn more. They should have about three to four informed people who can pass on the message, always with the goal of talking to as many people as possible. The stands should also have several documents and pamphlets with easy-to-read information about what the occupation is. We have a complete guide on how to set up a stand, read the original in Portuguese here.

5) EVENTS

It's important to create opportunities in your school to talk about the occupations, inspiring students to occupy and promoting socializing and bonding among people who are interested. To do so, there are several events that your local group can organize, and the promotion of these events is indispensable.

• Debates: These are more relaxed conversations, with room for open and inclusive discussion. It can be about the occupation, the climate crisis, or on some other topic that can be can relate to why we need to take action and create disruption.
• Playful or artistic activities: Organize a fun activity for people to get involved in. Push your creativity: movie screening, socializing, painting banners and posters, workshops jam sessions, games, mural painting, etc. Theseevents attract people, and then you can talk to those who show up about the occupations and how they can get involved.

6) PUBLICITY ACTIONS

Organize small actions to spread the word about occupy in your school. school. This can consist of interrupting classes to announce the occupations, distribute flyers, hang banners, make small blockades so that the occupation is not ignorable, etc.

How to interrupt classes:

You need only 3 people: 1 to do a speech, the other to film/take pictures, and the other to distribute flyer. If you can, it's also nice to have a 4th person doing peacekeeping.

Materials needed: in essential you only need flyers, a megaphone, and a phone or camera to film/take pictures. As bonus you can get creative and do class interruption with instruments (drums, saxophones, etc), speakers, or even make it guerrilla-theater style and bring costumes.

1. Arrange together a date and time to do this action. Choose a strategic time when you know many classes will be happening in the same building.
2. Prepare a small speech to do while interrupting. The tone can be defined according to your strategy or talking points. We usually did an emotional 1 minute speech that started by "Hi, my name is xxx and I am scared of the climate crisis" and developed into why we need to take action now. Only in the end we mentioned the occupations. But you can play around with this a lot and choose what's best for your group :)
3. Plan which classes you will be interrupting. Choose lecture halls where many people are attending, over small classrooms.
4. Knock on the door and ask the teacher if you can get in - this allows for your presence to be more accepted and wins you a few seconds of confusion from the teacher. They usually let you in. If they don't, enter anyways.
5. Take the stage (as in, the place where the teacher stands in front of the classroom) and immediately start talking the speech. The sooner the better. While this is happening, one person is silently distributing flyers to everyone in the class. A 3rd person is filming. If you have a peacekeeper, go to the teacher and tell them you'll be out of their class in 2 minutes, it's very quick and it's for a greater purpose. They are usually accepting.
6. Once you finish the speech, thank everyone (the teacher included) and quietly leave the room.

7) WRITE A TEXT ON WHY TO OCCUPY YOUR SCHOOL

Write a text about why they are going to occupy your school school/university. Think about what can mobilize the people in your school and how to create an emotional bridge with them about the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for action. Distribute and hang the text physically, share it on social networks, share it in your school newspapers, and send it to school newspapers.

How to organize your local group

Creating and maintaining active a local group

Now that you have already found several people interested in occupying your school through outreach, it's time to organize these people and involve them in the preparation of the occupation.

• Create a group (for example, on WhatsApp or Signal) with all the people who are interested in the occupation.
• Create social media accounts where you can spread the word about your next steps.
• Then, set up a meeting to start thinking about the next steps and define who is going to do what, andpublicize this meeting on social media.

It is through regular joint moments when you are meeting, through clear next steps, and through the distribution of clear roles between all the people in the local groups that ensures that people don't feel lost and stay involved.

The meetings themselves can be a space for recruitment of new people. By having meetings open and publicized, you ensure that with every public moment of outreach you have a next step to direct new people who want to get involved in organizing the occupation.

How to set up plans

At first glance, the occupation of a school may seem like a huge and unattainable task with so many things that need to be done, but it is through planning and calendarizing that youcan ensure that as the time approaches, the group gets everything done that needs to be done, step by step.

The first step in making plans is a creating a calendar. You can start by thinking about everything that needs to be done on the day the occupation starts. Then, you can think about what the intermediate steps are from the moment you are until the moment of the occupation in order for this to happen. Next, you should think about about who/what team should make sure that this thing happens.

• Example A: On the day the occupation starts, I must have blocking material that allows me to create disruption in such a way, and X people to ensure this. Based on this, you know that you need: a) a blocking plan b) trained and committed people; c) materials needed; etc. Then you can think about which date each of these things should be done, what other things are needed for this, and who is responsible is responsible for its execution.
• Example B: During the occupations, there has to be a team of people who are explaining to people who are not are not occupying what is happening. To do this, you need: a) talking points; b) people trained in communication and committed to the task; c) outreach materials. Then you can think about what date each of these things should be done, what other things are needed for this, and who is responsible for carrying them out.

From the moment you prepare a calendar to the occupations, it becomes much clearer what the next steps in the are in the immediate term, what are the next steps of those next steps, and who should be responsible for making sure that each of these steps happens (e.g.: blocking team in example A; or communication and design team in example B).

Example of a check-list on the week before the occupation:

• Do we have all the necessary materials?
• Do we have a plan of action and a plan of escalation and are we aligned with that?
• Do we have a good way to communicate with each other and to articulate with the other local groups?
• Do we have a media team?
• Do we have someone responsible for finance? Logistics team? Blocking team? Peacekeeping and care team? Legal team (including lawyers to support)? And do they all know what they should be doing?
• Do we have a way to make quick decisions by consensus?
• Has everyone had training in civil disobedience?
• Program for the first week of occupation?
• Do we know how many people to expect?
• Do we have a plan to make sure that the occupation continue to grow throughout the occupation?
• Do we know what we are communicating? And how do we communicate with people from the school and with media?
• Cool action to make sure that everyone in the school knows what occupation is?

How to structure your weekly plenary

In the following I will share how we in Aachen, Germany structure our weekly plenaries and explain why. I'm not saying that it is working perfectly but it does include some key learnings we've made in the past. I think the easies way to explain it is to share how a protocol of the plenary looks and then to walk through it. You can obviously decide for yourself what works for you. Everything that is written in italic serves as the explanation.

Terms used:

Flinta* - Women, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans, agender

Cis - A cisgender (can be shortened to cis or cissexual) person is someone who has a gender identity that matches their sex assigned at birth.

BIPoC - (Black, Indigeneous and People of color)

Protocol

Tasks during the plenary:

1. Moderation (Flinta*)
   1. someone has to moderate the plenary. We try to have a Flinta* moderating the plenary, because cis-men tend to speak a lot because of their societal upbringing.
2. Speech list (Flinta*)
   1. Since it happens a lot that some people, especially cis-men, talk a lot you can even introduce a speech list. Here you can keep track of whether a cis-men or a Flinta* person spoke. If after the plenary you notice that it is very unbalanced, you should maybe adress it next time.
3. protocol
   1. someone who writes the important things down. This way the spoken words are conserved and accessible for later on and for people who could not attend the plenary.
4. Awareness
   1. the awareness person is responsible for the wellbeing of everyone during the plenary. If someone observes or experiences for example discriminatory behaviour or a discussion which is very confrontative/agressive, he/she/they can speak up. This is the job of everyone attending. The awareness person pays special attention to this and can, if needed, take care of the affected person by for example going to an extra room for rest.
5. Postprocessing:
   1. It can be very useful to postprocess the outcome of the plenary. This can be a short message of what was discussed and what are tasks to work on during the next weeks or upcoming dates. This can then be shared on the platform you use (we use a signal group for example) with the purpose of informing people who could not attend. Of course the whole protocol will also be shared but experience has shown that only few people read a complete protocol. So in order to lower this burden and keep more people participating, we summarize the important things.

General remarks: Since nobody wants to spend a lot of time determining who wants to do these tasks at the beginning of a plenar (especially if you have a large group with >20 people), we determine at least two people who are responsible for moderation + speech list. Besides moderation and speech list, their task is also to notify people in our communication platform (e.g. signal group) where and when the next plenary is. They are also responsible for the postprocessing. Other responbilities are listed below.

After one month two other people will have these responsibilities. This way it is clear who is responsible for the things which will always come up and also people are encouraged to take responsibilities and to be engaged.

0. Check In (5-10 minutes):

1. name, pronoun, Flinta*?, ​​​​​​​extra question
   1. We do a short introduction at the beginning of each plenary to get everyone comfortable and set in for the plenary. This can look like: My name is Jan, my pronouns are they/them, I am Flinta* (important for the speech list), the extra question can be something fun like: Which vegetable would you like to be? Or what are you looking forward to? The purpose of this is to break the ice a little ;)
2. Explanation of handsignals
   1. The person who moderates quickly explains the hand signals we use - In order to show appreciation for something that was said or for quick votes, we use handsigns. They were introduced by the occupy movement and can be found here. Note: We try not to use the "Dont agree" handsign when someone is talking because this can be very discouraging.

Important general note: In order for new people to feel welcomed, it is very important to explain new things.It can be for example new to people to say the pronoun with which they want to be adressed with. Or they dont know how to use other pronouns out of he/she him/her. So you could for example say something like: "We now do a short introduction where each one states their name, the pronoun you use and how they are doing. We state our pronouns in order to not exclude and discriminate people whose gender assigned at birth does not match their true gender." Especially if you are active in a lot of leftist/activist space you might think that this is trivial and unnecessary. I have made the experience that for a lot of people who are new to activist groups this can be a component why they feel like they dont know enough to actively participate. Loosing people or have them participating less can be a major reason why we loose in the long run or some of us burn out. Thats why, in my opinion, we should avoid this whenever we can, without diluting our message. Our task should be to educate people about things they dont know and help/give them the chance to learn and therefore politice themselves. The same is true with the handsigns. If you are new to a group where you're the only one who doesnt understand why everyone is shaking their hands, you will have feeling like you are not part of this group.

1. Anti-Racist-Input (10-20 minutes):

There has been a lot of criticism from BIPoC (Black, Indigeneous and eople of color) about the racist and eurocentric narrative and behaviour from the european, mostly white climate movement. Since in Aachen we are a predominantly white group, we want to start every plenary with a 10-20 minute input about anti-racism. We therefore read a text or other inputs together and discuss them. We are aware that this is not enough and encourage every member of the group to educate themselves. We either pick out texts ourselves or take for example from here:

https://padlet.com/antira_decolonizeluetzi/antira-input-f-r-l-tzi-v3cv2dfc26jsof5k

Note: Make again sure that words which are not clear to everyone are explained. Picking out an input is again the responsibilty of the two persons. If you are a group of >20 people, it can be helpful to do this task in groups of 4-5.

2. Plenary-TOPs:

In this phase we discuss/adress things which are relevant for everyone. We try to have most of our discussions/votes in our signal group because it is extremely exhaustive and discouraging to have discussions in a group with more than 20 people. We try to keep this phase as short as possible

3. Work in Groups: (about 40 min)

This is where we actually work and get things done. We try to work in small groups because it is way more participatory and you can get a lot more done. Getting things done empowers people and gives everyone the feeling that we are actually doing things. If a group still consists of too many people, just define tasks within that group and split it up again. You might ask how we decide in which groups we split/ what to work on. We have one ongoing document/pad where all the protocols are. Between two plenaries people can write down things which they would like to work on. It is the responsibility of the two plenary persons two sort these things. If there is still need for a quick discussion, we do it here.

Break (10-15 minutes)

Obviously you can do breaks whenever you want. Just make sure to do them, otherwise everything feels heavy ;)

5. Big plenary - Gathering of small group work (about 30 min)

We meet again in the big plenary where every group presents quickly which they did

6. Conclusion

What are upcoming events?

What are ToDo's which have come up during the small groups. Who will do them?

7. Check Out:

How are you? How did you like the plenary?

We are done :)

Plenary Person Responsibilities

moderation + speech list, prepare anti-racist input, sort the proposed working group topics, postprocess the plenary outcome, notify everyone when the next plenary is happening and tell them where they can add their topic.