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Recruiting and coordinating your team

Now that you have your initial action design in place, you can work out what roles need to be filled, what skills are needed and how many of each role you need. In short, you need to start recruiting!

You might be recruiting people to:

  • Help with planning
  • Take a specific support role
  • Take a specific participant role

(Separately, you'll probably want to encourage people to just turn up on the day)

Use this guidance to make sure you make your action accessible and inclusive to all: Access and Inclusion Checklist. Are there any accessibility issues that you might need to plan for? Ask if rebels have any specific needs and discuss how to adjust for them. This might mean adjusting your march route, or finding accessible travel options.

Take the time to speak 1-on-1 with your recruits to:

  • ensure they are bought into the action
  • make sure they are available
  • ensure they have any necessary skills or attributes and that you know about any adjustments that might need to be made to make sure they can take part.
  • Help them feel valued and part of the team.
  • Make sure they have time and space to discuss concerns about the action and don’t feel any undue pressure.
  • Make sure they have agreed to the Rebel Agreement.
  • Check participants have had NVDA training (highly advised!)

Roles

Below is a non-exhaustive list of roles. For simpler actions, many of these roles will either not be needed or one person can hold multiple roles.

Many of these roles fall under Action Support. You can find a load more information on these roles here.

Get your M&M and/or Comms roles in place right at the start.

Coordinators

  • Action planner
  • Budget holder
  • Media & Messaging (public)
  • Comms (internal)
  • On the ground co-ord
  • Action support co-ord
  • Protest liaison
  • Legal support
  • Programming

Crews

  • Stewards
  • Wellbeing
  • Deescalation
  • Back office / Police Station Support
  • Outreach
  • Creatives
  • Rhythms
  • Banner holders
  • Roadtakers

Media

  • Spokespeople
  • Photographers
  • Videographers
  • Livestreamers

Coordinating with your team

You will want to have a regular meeting with your core team. You will need an accessible way of communicating regularly, like Mattermost, Telegram or Signal for chats and Google Docs or Cryptpad for documents.

It’s also a good idea to hold briefings with all participants, so they can meet and feel part of the team. You might hold different briefings for mass participants, spicy rebels, action support roles, etc.

Lots of info and advice on which tools to use to coordinate with your team - and how best to use them - can be found on the Internal Comms page.

Open or closed organising

Closed organizing is a secure action that relies on the element of surprise. This usually means smaller numbers with a trusted closed team (eg climbing up an oil rig). This has the disadvantage of being less inclusive. Ideally you can reach out to those who you know and trust for secure elements of an action and ask them to use their networks of trusted rebels to recruit more people. However, this does mean that you aren’t being particularly inclusive to newer rebels, so you may want to try getting people vouched for (this means inviting people on open/public channels to take a role and asking those that respond to provide someone who can vouch for them who is known to the movement). This can be time consuming and does increase the risk of a closed action being compromised but it helps to bring more people into NVDA.

Open organising is where you openly say what you’re doing and anyone can come and join the action (eg a big march, or occupying some land and inviting the whole world to join). This can also mean opening it up to other groups. This has the advantage of being much more inclusive and you can reach out using any communication route available to you - Telegram, WhatsApp, email, press, open calls, etc.

There is huge power in telling the government, the police and the media where you will be and when, and then doing it. This is an act of pure defiance. We are too many to be stopped. We are reclaiming our power. It is also respectful to give members of the public / city transport management due warning of disruption.

Some actions have elements of both open and closed organising - where something spicy is happening and a march with loads more people comes to the location.

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