How Minneapolis is Responding so Quickly to ICE
How is Minneapolis getting community members to respond so quickly to ICE presence? Old school phone tree style. They have started with Street Captains getting the names and numbers of the neighbors on a given street. Street Captains in a given neighborhood then combine their lists for their neighborhood to make a larger neighborhood list, with a Neighborhood Captain being the central point of collection. The Neighborhood Captain then makes contact with the adjacent neighborhoods’ Neighborhood Captains, etc.
In this way, people can organize in small groups in their immediate area but be able to get the word out to the larger community instantly through Signal Chats, or the like. This allows more neighbors to respond where needed quickly.
“We change the world by changing the world around us. The answers lie in our communities. But there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for community organizing. Effective organizing is imperfect and messy; and every group, every neighborhood, and community must create a system that works for them.” (Roderick Douglass, Starting Somewhere: Community Organizing For Socially Awkward People Who’ve Had Enough)
Chicago and Minneapolis are more densely populated, which can make Whistle Watches more effective and easier to implement. We don’t have as much of that in Hillsborough outside of portions of Tampa. But we can borrow from what they are doing. Much of Hillsborough is structured in some variation of a developer driven subdivision.
Most subdivisions have an overarching name (Example: Heather Lakes). They then have smaller mini-divisions internally within Heather Lakes (like Woodbridge I, Woodbridge II, etc.). Within each of the mini-divisions are the streets where people actually live. So, how could we organize our example of Heather Lakes?
Step 1: Collect the names and phone numbers of neighbors on your street. (Street level organization). The person doing the collecting is the Street Captain. The Street Captain then forms a street chat so that if anything is happening in your immediate area, everyone can be notified quickly.
Step 2: The Street Captains in your mini-division can then combine their lists to create a larger distribution list for your mini-division neighborhood – Woodbridge I. The person who pulls this together can be the Mini-Division Captain (Ex: Woodbridge I Captain).
Step 3: The mini-division neighborhood lists (Woodbridge I, Woodbridge II, etc.) can then be combined to create a sub-division wide distribution list (Heather Lakes). The person who pulls this together is the Subdivision Captain.
Step 4: The Subdivision Captain can then coordinate with neighboring Sub-Division Captains.
To pull this off, we will have to talk to our neighbors, something not everyone is great at or comfortable with. But someone in your neighborhood talks to everybody. Get that person involved and help them. Don’t have that person? Do your best.
In denser areas, this style of organizing can be modified to organize by apartment buildings, etc. Modify/change as needed for your community.
“Life throws unexpected things at us all the time, and developing a tolerance for the unexpected and a willingness to be flexible will serve us well and increase our resilience. Flexibility allows us to see things from different perspectives and to come up with solutions that we might otherwise miss, like finding common ground on an issue with someone with whom we otherwise share little.” (Omkari L. Williams, Micro Activism: How You Can Make a Difference in the World (Without a Bullhorn))