Why recruit?

New rebels are the lifeblood of every team

We know we need numbers to win. We may think about it less, but we also need the energy, skills, community connections, diversity and fresh perspective new rebels bring us. Last but not least, we need our stretched coordinators to be able to take a break sometimes!

Sometimes it can seem like bringing new rebels into our teams just creates work. If the team is very busy, and takes time to induct someone who quickly leaves again, it is tempting to think "oh, we'll just do it all ourselves". However this can only lead to a viscious circle as, without a continual flow of new people, the team ends up consisting of very experienced, very stretched people with no time to show others how to do things. Then, when one of those experienced people needs to step back, things can really go wrong. A healthy team has a mix of people of all levels of experience, with a steady flow of newbies learning, moving on to more complex work, showing others how to do things and relieving the more experienced coordinators of work.

OK, great theory, how do we do it?!

Before you even start recruiting or doing outreach, think about how you will look after the people when they arrive. New people often find XR pretty bewildering and overwhelming. To minimise the chances they disappear as fast as they arrive, they will need a bit of extra care and attention at the start (typically for around a month). It is best that coordinating this work falls to someone who is not frazzled from doing a ton of other things and typically this will be the team's integrator.

This does not mean it is the integrator's job alone to make new people feel welcome! This is a job for everyone in the team.

Will our new rebels stay?

Of course no one can answer that question but there are some things you can do to make a 'yes' more likely. We had a People's Assembly and asked why people stayed. Some things came up a lot:

We felt appreciated
We felt part of a community
We thought XR was effective

And we felt part of XR when:

When we got to know people
When we worked together on something
When we got to know XR
When we gained a role in our team

So in other words, the kinds of things which encourage people to keep coming back include:

a friendly, non-cliquey environment where group members avoid XR jargon, take the time to explain things and listen to the views and experiences of the new person
a named 'buddy' who will look after the new person, answer questions and help them settle in
a tangible project the whole group can work on together
a role, or maybe some simple tasks to start with, for the new person
connections to people or projects or training you know the new person will find interesting
evidence of the impact of the things you are doing (this could be for example getting your local council to declare a climate and ecological emergency, getting good press coverage, having a successful event where you bring in more people etc)