Chapter 30: Building Welcoming Movements
Photo via fxfuel.
This is Chapter 30 from a book project called "Rough Waters Ahead: Holding on for Young & Rising Climate Change Activists".
If I’m honest, I think we got lucky with Mat.
Mat was my brother (and still is, lol). When I brought him to his first Rising Tide meeting, my friends there treated him like gold. Even though my brother may have muttered things like ‘treehugger’ or what have you (my brother likes to mutter), there were smiles all around. My Rising Tide friends, Will, Keith, and Avery were especially kind, saying how glad they were to meet him.
Mat was offered the red carpet. Perhaps it’s a funny thing but family members don’t seem to come to a lot of these kinds of things. And by these things I mean, activist meetings. Perhaps it’s because activist events are where we find our chosen family. It’s where we call people ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ or maybe just ‘comrade’ - but it’s because we choose each other. So, when a real actual brother shows up, it’s a big deal.
And yet: I wonder what would happen if we treated Mat like we do everyone who shows up for the first time? I wonder what would happen if we went out of our way to recruit more ‘Mats’ to our meetings—people who disagreed with us but otherwise had hearts of gold—what if we welcomed the tense introductions, the mutterings, flare-ups, etc?
What if activist meetings weren’t just where we found each other—fellow pre-baked seekers of justice? What if our movements acted as ovens themselves?
Randall Smith’s been looking into these questions too.
Randall believes that movements that specialize in welcoming are bound to grow, hold on, and become big enough to pull on the levers of power. Welcoming, for Randall, is one of the lost arts of movement building.
In Randall’s view, welcoming is where Munson’s magic takes place—by helping feel genuinely held you offer them the space to feel safe transforming their views from fear to love, from denial to hope.
It’s why when Randall works with upstart movement groups, he advises them to create welcoming committees - working groups where volunteers go out of their way to welcome new members into the flock. Randall draws a bunch of his tips from the world of mega churches: places which have clearly figured out how to build dense, sticky movements.
For these welcoming committees, it starts with greeting new members when they show up. Like the Rising Tide Vermonters who were eager to meet my brother, it starts with simple ‘hellos’ and curiosity. It means paying attention to whoever seems askew, looking around as if they don’t know who to chat with, and spending time with that person.
But greeting is just the beginning.
In mega churches, there are people whose specific role is to greet people who arrive on Sundays. These folks are stationed in the parking lot and the lobby, helping guide newcomers in and feel welcome. These volunteers ask your name, and they remember it.
The Sunday welcoming committee’s real work, though, is during the rest of the week.
This group relies on sign-in info from Sunday services that every parishioner fills out (sign-in sheets have a clear checkbox if this is your first event). The committee then follows up with phone calls, cards, or stickers, with warm invitations to return. It’s also a chance to see who’s been missing, and for Welcoming Committee members to check in and offer a hand if they’re going through a rough cycle.
It might seem corny or cheesy or not genuine, but just because caring is structured doesn’t mean it’s not real.
The Welcoming Committee isn’t meant for everyone: it’s meant for people who truly enjoy meeting people and making friends, who enjoy helping people feel at home. This is a gift people can bring to our movements, same as artists bring their gifts to banners, or orators to speeches, or logistics people to rally design.
Beyond this spirit of upfront welcoming, Randall also encourages groups to build welcoming into the structures of how movements greet people over time.
Mega churches (and really, plenty of down-to-earth sized churches) welcome new members into small group ministries. These are groups that meet for anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months or more. This gives new parishioners a chance to learn about the mission and drive of a church, and most importantly, a chance to meet other members. The idea is to multiply the touchstones people have with the organization: to make more friends and meaningful connections.
Randall has a hunch that people who make at least one friend during their first activist event are much more likely to return. My friend Kayla Parker who is a Unitarian Universalist minister told me that when she sees people move from their first Sunday services to small group ministries, she knows they’re far more likely to stay.
Randall also encourages the kind of disagreements and flare-ups welcoming new members from diverse backgrounds is bound to bring. I’ve certainly been in activist meetings where we pounced on people who said something dumb. And by pounce, I don’t necessarily mean point and ridicule—just that people suddenly turned their attention and energy towards trying to point out, even politely, that the person was misinformed. Instead, Randall suggests welcoming these moments and not trying to wipe them out.
Randall invites us to remind ourselves: "Hey, we can involve them in the organizing and their views will change over time."
The point of our meetings aren’t to disprove people of their opinions or to straighten them out. If people stick around long enough, they will figure stuff out on their own. Remember: virtually ¼ of frontline anti-abortion activists started out pro-choice. Imagine all those frustrated anti-abortion folks at meetings when one of the newbies said something like, “But shouldn’t women have the right to make their own healthcare decisions?”
The point is to get through to the other side, and not entrench people so they feel like they have to defend themselves. Thank people for sharing, appreciate people for showing up, and keep the show going.
Welcoming is where it’s at.
When we first got started with SOAR, the small and scrappy community group I work with in WV that focuses on the overdose crisis, we tried a few things to draw on the magic of welcoming:
At every SOAR meeting, we had pizza and soda. We passed a hat around to help cover the costs. One reporter wrote that I told her, “Pizza and ice cream. That’s all it takes...The pizza comes out and everybody wants to hang!” I’m not sure we’ve ever had ice cream, but sure!
Also, at every meeting, we moved into small groups as quickly as possible. We had groups that focused on naloxone, on homeless solidarity, on challenging stigma, etc. In reality, the topics mattered but what really mattered was that people could gather around circular tables and get to know each other.
Everybody got a name-tag. This meant new people didn’t have to feel like they didn’t know anyone’s name. Everybody was now on the same name-knowing playing field.
We tried to finish meetings with a song or a prayer. As we grew, we often ended in a massive circle with holding hands, and we said the Serenity Prayer. The words mattered, but again the holding space with each other mattered more.
We gave out lots of “I Carry Naloxone” stickers and pins. People added these to their cars, water bottles, laptops, etc. These stickers showed that you carried a life-saving antidote, while also signaling that you were part of a meaningful group.
This basically no-budget approach to welcoming allowed SOAR to launch a working group that equipped over 50 local restaurants and businesses with naloxone, sparked an annual Glow Run for Recovery, and planted the seeds for a massive grassroots harm reduction program which recorded 773 lives saved in the first year of COVID-19.
Pizza. Groups. Prayer. Nametags. And stickers.
It’s an elixir that still fuels SOAR to this day.
PS: In a more recent tactic, with a sister group Charleston Can’t Wait, we end each meeting by asking everyone to send personal invitations to 3 friends to the next meeting. This is a right now activity. And to help encourage people to actually do it, the facilitator keeps a real time tally of total invites sent. It takes a few minutes, as people shout their # of invites sent. “2!” “Add 3!” “1 more!” The group sees we’ve invited 20, 30, 40, 50 people. This activity accomplishes two things: it builds the base. And it encourages people, especially newcomers, to write individual notes explaining why the effort matters. This is self-persuasion in action. This is awareness raising, better than any billboard campaign.