Who We Are (And How We Work)

Something I keep coming back to. The groups that lasted — the ones that were still functioning a year later, two years later, five — weren’t the most skilled. They weren’t the best organized. They were the ones that knew who they were. They had an identity that went deeper than the problem that brought them together.

This chapter is about building that identity. And about the infrastructure that sustains it — because identity and structure aren’t separate things. A group that knows its story can maintain its structure through the hard stretches. A group with good structure creates the stability where identity forms.

Your next meeting has two parts. Set aside ninety minutes.

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The first part is your story.

Marshall Ganz, who organized with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers before spending decades teaching public narrative at Harvard, developed a framework for how groups build shared identity. He called it Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now. The structure is simple. The experience of doing it is not.

Story of Self first. Two minutes each, no cross-talk. Each person tells a short story about themselves — not a biography, a moment. Ganz’s structure: a challenge you faced, a choice you made, and an outcome that shaped who you are. The story doesn’t have to be dramatic. It has to be true. It has to answer the question: why do you care enough to be sitting in this room?

Go around. One person at a time. Everyone else listens — no responses, no relating, no “that happened to me too.” The listening is the practice. You did this in your first one-to-one back at the beginning. The skill transfers. The difference is that now five people are hearing each other.

Then Story of Us. Fifteen minutes, open conversation. After everyone has told their story, build a shared narrative together. Three questions: What brought us together? What do we share? What are we building?

The answer isn’t a mission statement. It’s a story. Something any one of you could tell a stranger in sixty seconds: who you are, how you found each other, what you’re doing. Write it down. It doesn’t need to be polished. It needs to be yours.

Bed-Stuy Strong started in Brooklyn during COVID-19 as a crisis response — food delivery for neighbors who couldn’t leave their apartments. The group survived long after the crisis because its identity evolved. It became about political education, community events, seasonal markets. The identity held because it was rooted in place — the neighborhood — and in relationship — the people knew each other. When the original urgency faded, those roots kept it alive.

Your group’s identity doesn’t need to be permanent. It needs to be specific enough that when someone asks what you’re about, you have an answer that comes from all five of you, not from a chapter I wrote.

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The second part is how you work.

You’ve been meeting. You have roles, ground rules, agreements. What you’re doing now is formalizing the infrastructure — not because it’s broken, but because what works for three doesn’t automatically work for five. Five people is the point where informality starts generating the problems Ella Baker and Jo Freeman both warned about: unspoken hierarchies, uneven labor, people drifting because no one noticed they were quiet.

Five things to discuss and write down.

Roles rotate every meeting. Facilitator, note-taker, process-checker. You’ve been doing this since your first meeting. Now make it explicit: a rotation schedule, written down, no exceptions. When everyone has facilitated, everyone understands what facilitation costs. When everyone has taken notes, no one assumes it’s someone else’s job. Baker spent her career arguing that leadership should be distributed, not concentrated. Freeman showed what happens when it isn’t. Ganz built rotation into every organizing structure he designed. They all converged on the same principle for the same reason: the role teaches the skill, and the rotation prevents the hierarchy.

Same day, same time. Every week or every two weeks — whatever the group commits to. The sociologist Randall Collins documented what he called interaction ritual chains: the finding that regular, predictable gatherings generate a kind of emotional energy that sustains participation. The energy doesn’t come from the content of the meeting. It comes from the rhythm. The regularity. The fact that Tuesday evening means something now that it didn’t mean two months ago. Pick a time and protect it. Canceling is expensive — not because of what you miss, but because of what it signals about priority.

If you’ve watched Squid Game, you know what this looks like under extreme conditions. The players who survive longest aren’t the strongest or the most strategic — they’re the ones who form sleeping groups. They build structure instinctively: who sleeps where, who keeps watch, who they eat with. The alliances aren’t formal. They’re rhythmic. Same people, same place, same time. That regularity becomes the container for trust, and the trust becomes the mechanism for survival. Your stakes are different from a life-or-death competition, but the principle is the same — regular gathering generates its own sustaining energy. The rhythm is the infrastructure.

Add something social. A shared meal before the meeting. A check-in round where people talk about their lives, not just the work. An inside joke. A tradition that belongs to you. This isn’t a distraction from the group’s purpose. Collins’ research is clear: the social element is the mechanism through which commitment persists. The Flint sit-down strikers of 1936–37 occupied the Fisher Body Plant for forty-four days. They survived because they organized internally — elected committees, scheduled activities, held classes, managed sanitation. The structure turned a protest into a livable community. Your meetings don’t need a newspaper. They need a moment that makes the group feel like more than an agenda.

Accountability without authority. End every meeting with one question: who is doing what by when? Start the next meeting with another: how did it go? That’s it. No penalties. No tracking systems. Transparency and gentle follow-up. If someone didn’t do what they said they’d do, the question is “what happened?” not “why didn’t you?” The same curiosity-before-accusation principle from your group agreements applies here.

And then the debrief. This is the last thing I want to give you, and it might be the most important.

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After each meeting, take ten minutes. The process-checker leads. Four questions:

What did we try?

What worked?

What was hard?

What do we want to try next time?

That’s the whole protocol. Write the answers on a card — an index card, a sticky note, whatever you have. Keep the cards. At the start of the next meeting, the process-checker reads the last card’s “try next time” answer aloud. That’s how the meeting starts: with what you committed to practicing.

This is a simplified version of what Hahrie Han’s research on organizing describes as reflective practice — the process of learning not just from doing, but from structured reflection on doing. Most groups skip this. They finish the meeting, say goodbye, and come back next time without examining what happened. The groups that reflect improve. The groups that don’t repeat.

The protocol works because it’s short enough to actually do when everyone is tired and ready to leave. Ten minutes. Four questions. A card. If it takes longer than that, you’re overcomplicating it. The constraint is the design.

Rotate who leads the debrief — the process-checker for that meeting runs it. This means everyone practices both the reflection and the facilitation of reflection. Over time, the habit becomes automatic. You finish a meeting and someone says “cards?” and you spend ten minutes getting better at the thing you’re building together.

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Write all five elements into your group’s operating document. You now have: a purpose statement, ground rules, security agreements, group agreements, a Story of Us, a role rotation, a meeting rhythm, a social element, an accountability practice, and a debrief protocol.

That’s a substantial document for five people who didn’t know each other two months ago. It’s also a living document — the same one it’s been since you started writing it. Revisit it when something doesn’t fit. The document serves the group, not the other way around.

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Field journal: What was it like to hear five stories instead of three? What did the Story of Us sound like? Did the group resist any of the structural elements? Which ones? Why?

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