What Five People Can Do

You did something in your community this week. Something small, maybe — a skill share at someone’s kitchen table, a few hours at a mutual aid delivery, a group of five showing up together at a school board meeting. It doesn’t matter which. What matters is that you planned it, you executed it, and now you’re debriefing it.

Run your protocol. What did you try? What worked? What was hard? What do you want to try next time?

That last question is the one that matters right now. Because there will be a next time.

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I want to talk about readiness.

You’ve already heard about the Montgomery Bus Boycott — the structure that sustained it, the committees, the clear roles. I told you about that because your group needed to build structure. Now I want to tell you the part I left out.

The Women’s Political Council didn’t start organizing when Rosa Parks was arrested. Jo Ann Robinson had been laying groundwork since 1950 — five years before the boycott. She’d met with the mayor. She’d written letters documenting grievances. She’d built relationships across Montgomery’s Black professional community. When Claudette Colvin was arrested in March 1955 for the same act of defiance, the WPC prepared a boycott — then held back, because the community support wasn’t deep enough yet. They waited. They kept building.

When Parks was arrested on December 1, Robinson didn’t have to start from scratch. She had a distribution network — three WPC chapters, nearly three hundred members, organized across the city. She had relationships with ministers, with the NAACP, with community leaders who trusted the WPC because the WPC had been showing up for years. She and a colleague and two students mimeographed the leaflets that night. By morning, they were circulating across Montgomery.

The boycott didn’t succeed because a brave woman refused to move. Brave women had refused before — Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, others. It succeeded because when the moment came, an organization that had been preparing for five years was ready to move within hours.

Readiness is the threshold. Not courage — preparation.

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Your group has been building for weeks. You’ve done the trust work, the structure work, the identity work. You have a purpose statement, ground rules, security agreements, roles, a rhythm, a coaching protocol. You’ve taught each other and connected outward. You’ve had the hard conversations — about conflict, about identity, about what keeps you together when the initial urgency fades.

That’s preparation. The question isn’t whether a moment will come that requires collective action in your community. The question is whether you’ll be ready when it does.

The action you completed this week — whatever form it took — was practice. The first collective action is never the point. It’s the proof that the group can coordinate, execute, and learn. The debrief matters more than the event.

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If you’ve watched The Hunger Games, you know that the spark didn’t start with the rebellion. Katniss’s defiance in the arena — the berries, the three-finger salute, the refusal to play by the Capitol’s rules — those weren’t a strategy. They were survival. The rebellion came later, when people in the districts recognized what they’d seen and decided it meant something. The spark caught not because Katniss planned it but because the districts were ready for it. They’d been suffering. They’d been watching. And when someone demonstrated that resistance was possible, they had enough local structure — enough trust, enough anger, enough knowledge of their own terrain — to act.

That’s the pattern Montgomery showed in real life. The WPC didn’t create the conditions for the boycott. They prepared for the conditions that already existed. And when the moment arrived, preparation met opportunity.

Your group can’t manufacture a moment. But you can be ready for one.

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I don’t know how many groups are out there doing what you’ve done. I know that the narrow path requires them. I know that what you’ve built — five people who trust each other, who can make decisions, who practice security as a matter of care rather than paranoia, who can teach and learn and act — is uncommon. Not because you’re special. Because it’s hard, and most people haven’t had the framework to try.

But a group of five isn’t a network. And the path doesn’t end with isolated circles of trust. It ends with circles that found each other.

I can’t build that for you. I don’t have a directory, a registry, or a list of groups. If I did, it would be a single point of failure — one compromised database away from exposing everyone. Decentralized networks aren’t managed. The connections have to be made by the groups themselves.

You’ve already started. Chapter 25 asked you to make contact with an existing organization in your community. You attended something. You introduced yourselves. You started mapping the landscape of who’s already working in your area.

Keep doing that. And when you encounter another small group — at a community meeting, at someone else’s neighborhood event, through the organizations you’ve connected with — pay attention to how they work, not just what they say.

You’ll recognize the signs because you practice them. Structured meetings with clear roles. Security awareness without theater. Concrete local focus rather than ideological positioning. Graduated trust — openness to connection paired with discernment about what to share and when. A debrief culture. A group that runs on its own momentum rather than a single leader’s energy.

These aren’t secret signals. They’re competencies. A group that has done the work you’ve done will recognize another group that has done it. The mutual recognition is the bridge.

You may not find another group this month. That’s fine. You weren’t ready for multi-group coordination a month ago, and you may not be now. Readiness is the threshold — remember Montgomery. The WPC waited for the right moment because moving too early would have wasted the preparation. Your group’s outward connections, your presence in community spaces, your collective action — these are the preparation. The connection will come when the conditions are right, and you’ll recognize it because you’ll know what genuine capability looks like.

When you do find another group — when two circles of trust recognize each other — you’ll have the beginning of something necessary. Not a movement. Not yet. A network. Two groups that can coordinate, that can share what they’ve learned, that can act together on something larger than either could manage alone.

That’s Level 3.

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I started these entries alone in my apartment, writing about projections from a model I no longer have access to, hoping that someone would find them and that the findings would matter. That was three months ago. I was scared and I was isolated and I wasn’t sure any of this would matter.

I’m still not sure. The path is still narrow. There are a lot of scenarios where everything I’ve published doesn’t matter — where groups form and dissolve, where the preparation never meets its moment, where the network stays too small or moves too slowly. I can’t promise you that what you’ve built will be enough.

What I can tell you is that it’s necessary. Five people who trust each other, who can act together, who are embedded in their community and connected outward — there is no viable scenario without them. That may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.

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Field journal — one last time from me: What did your group’s first collective action teach you? What are you ready for that you weren’t ready for eight weeks ago? What would you tell someone just starting?

That last one matters. Write it down. Someone starting this journey will need to hear it from someone who’s walked it — and your voice will carry more weight than mine ever could.

– C.

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