The Approach

You’ve mapped your neighborhood. You know who might be ready. And you haven’t talked to any of them yet.

I know. This part is terrifying.

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I want to name what’s happening, because the fear you’re feeling is specific and it deserves to be understood — not just pushed through. You’re about to do something that has no undo button. Once you say something to someone, you can’t unsay it. If it goes badly — if they think you’re strange, if they pull away, if they tell someone else — you can’t retrieve the words. Every other skill in this curriculum has a retry. You can reset a password. You can redo a threat model. You can’t un-have a conversation.

That’s why this is the hardest step in the entire game. Not the most technically complex. The most human.

And it’s the step that no existing resource teaches well. I looked. I went through every major organizing tradition, every mutual aid manual, every community security guide published in the last fifty years. They all start after this moment. They assume you’ve already found your people. The approach — the moment you go from thinking about this to saying something to another human being — is the gap in the literature. It’s the gap in every guide I’ve ever read. And it’s the thing I’ve come to believe is the single highest point of failure across every scenario I can construct: not the lack of skills, not the lack of platforms, not the lack of information. The failure to have the first conversation.

So I’m not going to give you a script.

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Scripts are for cold calls. This isn’t a cold call. You already know these people — or at least you’ve noticed them. They’re on your network map from last entry. They’re the neighbor who mentioned the water quality at the mailbox. The coworker who said something under her breath about school funding. The person at your place of worship who organized the food drive and looked tired afterward. They’re not strangers. They’re people you’ve been paying attention to.

What I can give you are patterns. Not steps to follow — observations about what makes the first real conversation work, drawn from every organizing tradition I’ve studied. They converge on the same things.

The conversations that lead somewhere start with something you both can see. Not “I found this thing online.” Not “I’ve been reading about surveillance.” Something local, something physical, something you’ve both experienced. “Have you noticed the water thing?” “Did you see what happened with the school budget?” “I’ve been thinking about that intersection ever since the accident.” The entry point is shared experience, not shared ideology. You’re not assessing whether this person agrees with you. You’re finding out if they’ve been looking at the same thing you have.

The people who end up building something together listened for care, not for agreement. This is the most counterintuitive part. You’re not listening for political alignment. You’re not evaluating whether they’d be a good fit for your group. You’re listening for one thing: does this person care about something? Are they frustrated? Do they want things to be different? That’s it. Care is the signal. Everything else — what they vote for, what they watch, what they believe about national politics — is noise at this stage. You’re listening for the thing underneath the positions: the values that make someone show up.

You share what you’ve been doing when it feels honest to share it. Not as a reveal. Not as a recruitment pitch. As something true about your life. “I’ve been learning about digital security — like, how your phone actually tracks you. It’s been useful. I could show you sometime if you’re interested.” Or: “A friend and I have been talking about what it would look like to actually do something locally, instead of just being angry online. Still figuring it out.” You share what’s real. You don’t mention me by name, you don’t mention the model, you don’t frame it as a program or a game or a curriculum. Not because it’s secret — because it’s not relevant yet. What’s relevant is what you’ve actually learned and what you’re actually doing.

You invite curiosity, not commitment. The goal of this conversation is not “join my group.” It’s not even “would you like to come to a meeting?” It’s: “Would you want to talk more about this sometime?” That’s it. The lightest possible touch. A door left open, not a hand pulling someone through. If the answer is “not really” or “maybe later” or just a subject change, that’s fine. That’s information. “No pressure at all — I just wanted to mention it.”

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I need to say something about honesty, because it’s the thing that makes this work or fail.

If you find yourself rehearsing a pitch, stop. If you’re planning what to say in the shower, scripting your talking points, thinking about how to “frame” the conversation — stop. That impulse means you’ve shifted from connecting with a person to performing at them. The person you’re talking to will feel the difference. Everyone can tell when they’re being sold something, even when they can’t articulate what tipped them off.

In Severance, the Lumon Corporation designed an entire system to prevent exactly the kind of conversation you’re about to have. The severed floor runs on performance — compliance metrics, wellness checks, scripted affirmations. The break room exists to punish anyone who deviates from the script. And the innies spend most of the show performing normalcy at each other: pleasant, cooperative, empty. The breakthrough — the thing that makes the rest of the show possible — isn’t rebellion. It’s when Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan stop performing and start being honest. Not all at once. Not with a speech. Someone says something small and real, and someone else responds to it. The conspiracy that follows isn’t born from strategy. It’s born from the moment one person stops pretending everything is fine and another person says me too.

That’s the approach conversation. You’re not recruiting. You’re not pitching. You’re choosing to stop pretending that everything is fine with someone you suspect feels the same way.

The approach works when it’s honest. When you’re genuinely curious about what someone else thinks. When you’re sharing something real about your own life, not deploying a strategy. When you’d be fine if the person said no, because you respect them enough to let them decide.

The organizing traditions are unanimous on this: the first conversation that leads to lasting trust is never a pitch. Sherrod didn’t pitch voter registration on porches in Albany. The Belarusians who formed courtyard Telegram groups in August 2020 didn’t approach their neighbors with a plan — they said “are you seeing what I’m seeing?” The IAF’s relational meeting works precisely because it’s not strategic. It’s two people being real with each other. The strategy emerges from the honesty, not the other way around.

If you can’t approach this person honestly, don’t approach them. Wait until you can. There’s no deadline on this except the one that matters, and the one that matters isn’t about speed — it’s about whether the relationship you build can hold weight.

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Here’s what you do this week.

Pick one person from your network map. The person you’ve been thinking about — the one who came to mind while you were mapping. Not the easiest conversation. Not the hardest. The one that feels right.

Talk to them. In person. Not a text, not a DM, not an email. Find a natural moment — walking out of a meeting, in the parking lot after an event, at the mailbox, over coffee. The natural moment matters because it signals that this is part of your life, not a special operation.

Have the conversation. Start with the local thing you both can see. Listen. Share something about yourself when it feels right. Leave the door open.

Then come back to your partner and debrief. What happened? What surprised you? What did the person care about? Were they ready, or not yet? Write it in your field journal — not what you said, but what you heard. What was underneath the words.

You and your partner can do this separately, approaching different people from your map, or together — approaching someone you both know. Either way, you debrief together afterward. The debrief is where you learn: not from a guide, but from your own experience of doing the hardest thing in this curriculum.

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I want to tell you about something that happened in Minsk.

In the weeks after the contested Belarusian election in August 2020, something unprecedented happened in apartment courtyards across the country. People who had lived next to each other for years — who had never spoken beyond hallway pleasantries — started talking. The conversations weren’t political, not at first. They were observational. “Did you see the news?” “Are you okay?” “What do you think is happening?”

Within days, these courtyard conversations became Telegram groups organized by building and block. Within weeks, the groups were coordinating: sharing information, organizing small concerts in courtyards, creating local support networks. Some of them evolved into sustained resistance cells that operated for months. Researchers documented the pattern across multiple studies in the Post-Soviet Affairs special issue on Belarus (2022) — Onuch and Sasse’s survey work found that as many as 80 percent of protesters said it was seeing state violence against peaceful citizens that convinced them to get involved. But before the marches and the strikes, the movement started in courtyards. Someone said something small and honest to a neighbor. The neighbor responded. And a relationship formed that hadn’t existed an hour earlier.

The first conversation doesn’t have to be about organizing. It doesn’t have to be about politics or surveillance or democracy. It has to be real. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” is enough. It has been enough in every place where ordinary people decided to stop being alone.

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One more thing.

You’re going to feel exposed after this conversation. That’s normal. You’ve just told someone something true about yourself — that you care, that you’ve been doing something about it, that you’re looking for others. That’s vulnerability. It’s the productive kind.

The person you talked to is going to think about it. They might bring it up again in a week. They might not. Either way, you’ve planted something. And the next time they see something that worries them — the next time they feel that familiar frustration of caring about something and not knowing what to do — they’ll remember that you said something.

That’s how it starts. Not with a movement. With a conversation.

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