Dance First, March Later
How Joyful Communities Sustain Advocacy
Learning from the Dance Floor
If you find yourself in Seattle on a Friday evening with nothing to do, I recommend stopping by the Emerald City Contra Dance. Contra is a folk dance, easy to learn with simple patterns of moves called out by an announcer. But what really sets the Friday night dance apart is the energy. The music is live and lively, with a different band every week playing fiddles, flutes, and more. The room is packed, dancers forming three long lines from one end of the room to the other. Everyone is happy to be there, decked out in colorful clothes and dresses that flair out when they twirl. It’s an electric experience.
To me, the Contra dance community represents the epitome of a successful community. They’ve been around for decades, putting together weekly dances, finding musicians, and collecting money to pay for the room, all without a single employee. They are thriving in every way that the animal advocacy community is not: they’re large, enthusiastic, and self-sustaining. Where we struggle to scrape together a dozen activists, they have a multi-generational community spilling out of their rented room.
The obvious difference is that Contra is a fun, social activity. It’s easy to get people to go dancing with friends on a Friday night; it’s hard to get people to stand on a busy street chanting protest slogans on a Sunday afternoon. One way around this limitation is to hitch the events together: If we build a community that throws dances on Friday, people will connect and get invested. When a respected member of the community says they’re going to a protest on Sunday, people will be motivated to give back to the community and go with their friends.
It’s not a fool-proof connection. Some people will never graduate from the Friday dances to the Sunday protests. The key factor is what proportion of people make the leap and how big the community gets. As long as we have a big enough community or high turnout ratio, it doesn’t matter that everyone isn’t coming.1 Our direct actions will grow. It’s counterintuitive, but if we spend less time on direct actions and more time on fun activities, we may wind up with a larger, more energized base of activists.
This is not just speculation - there’s historical data to back up the idea that advocacy groups drive more turnout when they also focus on the social lives of their members. Take unions. Many of them hosted dances and picnics, as well as providing their members with essential services like childcare and healthcare. They knew it was big to ask their members to risk their jobs and safety in the fight for better working conditions. In order to make that ask, those members would have to feel supported and cared for. It worked. Unions were a powerful force for change from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, until big businesses and the government conspired to crush them. We could build that kind of power, too.
Planting the Flag
We are a far cry from having the infrastructure needed to do something like providing our activists with insurance,2 but we can start today by growing vibrant communities around specific activities: dancing, sports, movies, writing, and so on. The activity doesn’t matter as much as the fact that people enjoy it. Nor is there special training needed for starting a community. Some hosting skills help, certainly, but those are also developed over time. What matters most is planting a flag and inviting people in. That’s not much to go off, so I have a few nuggets to share from my time as an organizer.
First, pick an activity. Personal hobbies are a great place to begin if they can be done in a group. It can also be beneficial to visit groups around your city and see which have traction. Seattle, for instance, tends to have a lot of writing and reading groups, perhaps because of our long, dark winters. Physical activities like sports or dancing are perennial favorites, no matter where you are. Being distinctive can help, although it’s not strictly necessary - crocheting is a much more specific vibe than a general art night. There’s a balance between broad appeal and being specific enough to not be lost in the noise.
Consistency is key. Having a group that meets at least once a month, and preferably closer to once a week, is a major element of building a community. The knowledge that people can come back and get to know others is a draw. With that in mind, it’s important to pick something that you as an organizer genuinely enjoy. Us animal advocacy folks can be a self-sacrificing bunch and we might feel an obligation to host the kinds of events we think will be most popular. That’s a sure path to burnout. Find something that you really want to do that also intersects with other people’s interests.
Once you have an event, you have to do it well enough that people want to stay and come back. Here are a few of my favorite ways of making people feel welcome:
Bring food. It doesn’t have to be a full meal; snacks can go a long way. Nothing brings people together like food.
Pay special attention to new people. They’re taking a risk by coming to a new event. Going out of your way to make them feel welcome is a great way of getting them to come back. Contra, for example, gives new people a free coupon for their next dance.
Practice learning people’s names. It’s an easy way to show you care about who comes and that they’re not just faces in a crowd.
Have a post-event hangout. Make sure there’s a good place for everyone to hang out after the main structured event. Structure is great for giving people a low pressure way of connecting, but the real magic happens at the after party. Go get drinks, go to someone’s house, give people space to eat and mingle.
Hosting can be overwhelming but even a few small, thoughtful details go a long way.
Once things get large enough, charge for the event. It helps cover basic costs and with a little luck can help pay the hosts. Real communities pay for leaders - just look at unions and religious organizations. There’s also the unfortunate reality that many public spaces charge for reserving rooms. Organizers paying out of pocket to cover those costs is not sustainable long term. Charging for events is one step towards building durable institutions. We are going to need money to provide community members with services and support that improve their lives.
Expect to iterate. Hosting is a skill, and like any other skill, takes some time to learn. Not to mention the fact that finding an activity that appropriately suits you and your city will take some trial and error. As you’re iterating, be mindful of doing it in a sustainable way: the biggest thing I wish I’d focused on earlier was enjoying and pacing myself. Building a community should fill the leaders’ cups as much as it’s filling the community members’. When we have events that bring all of us joy and connection is when we’ll have a community that everyone works to keep alive.
Keeping Our Activist Edge
Once we’re throwing our fun events and bringing in new people, how do we make sure they actually convert into activists? We don’t want to put in all this work building up communities and then have no one show up for our direct actions. It’s a little hard to evaluate given that we don’t have that many vibrant communities to begin with, but there are some cues we can take from social psychology and established groups.
The easiest way to make sure our groups keep a hand in activism is to make small activist activities part of the events. Get people to write a postcard or send an email when they come in the door. Give them some way of engaging that takes a few minutes and stays within the event. Encourage them to participate, but don’t force them. If your fun event gets 20 or 50 people, that’s 20 or 50 more postcards than you’d have otherwise and that’s a major improvement. Then there’s the fact that when people start doing an action, their beliefs about themselves will start to follow along. If they do a few small actions at fun events, people may start thinking of themselves as activists, especially if we encourage them.
We can also talk about activism. In the spirit of the land acknowledgement, we can give brief reminders of the state of the world and potential actions at the beginning or end of our events. Acknowledgments keep these issues at the top of everyone’s mind and make sure that new community members know about the related activism. We can also shape our acknowledgments so that they directly tie the community’s values to advocacy and emphasize the importance of taking action together.
When we charge for events, we can put a portion of that money towards activist causes. There are some events where paying is expected - like dances or trivia nights. Sliding scales and recommended donations can help keep events accessible, if need be. Or if you’re not comfortable with charging, you can always recommend organizations for participants to donate to. Donations can even be a draw for some people - one of the most successful events I’ve seen in Seattle was a happy hour where a portion of the proceeds went to a different charity every month.
We may also benefit from putting the good we do up front.3 We can market ourselves as a community for people who love and care about animals, have fun, and take steps to make animal and human lives better. This can set us apart. People are hungry to make the world a better place and if we can offer that hand in hand with the opportunity to connect and enjoy themselves, we’ll have more of the energy we seek.
Filling Our Cups
Taking a step back from direct action to plan dances and book clubs is not where I thought I’d find myself. Four years ago, riding a wave of energy coming out of the pandemic, I was so sure the Seattle THL community was on its way to big things. But after watching the community go bust after half a decade of effort, I ran out of steam. I know I’m not the only one who’s flared out in that time - I’ve watched other local organizers come and go and their communities wax and wane with them.
Building vibrant communities is not just about attracting new activists, although that is certainly a major concern. It’s also about sustaining the organizers and activists who have been here all along, the people who have already given so much to help the animals. In a world that takes and takes from us, finding a way to give to each other is itself a radical act. Joy is not a luxury but a necessity. It is the foundation we will build our revolution on.
Three Things to Try
Bring food to your next event. Test one hosting principle at the smallest scale: snacks at a meeting, cookies at a tabling shift. See if it makes a difference
Reflect on the best community you’ve been part of. What made it good? What would it take to recreate those conditions?
Attend a local non-activist event you’d enjoy: How many people do they have? How does the energy of the community feel? What are they doing (or not doing) to make people feel welcome?
Informed By
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
Mutual Aid by Dean Spade
Politics Is for Power by Eitan Hersh
Header image: Flurry Festival 2019 contra dance, CC BY-SA 4.0
A 50 person community with a 20% activism participation rate and a 200 person community with a 5% activism participation rate both yield 10 new activists. There’s a lot of room for us to investigate what boosts community size and activism participation rate.
But how cool would that be? I bet we’d get a lot of interest real quick, at least in the US.
It won’t do us any favors if we don’t tell people that activism is a big part of the community and then it feels like we’re trying to sucker them into volunteering.