Two Circles

You found another group.

Maybe it happened at a community meeting — you noticed someone facilitating with a structure you recognized. Maybe at a mutual aid delivery where the other volunteers clearly had roles, a rhythm, a way of checking in that wasn’t improvised. Maybe through one of the organizations you connected with during your outward work — a neighbor mentioned a group that’s been doing food security coordination in the next zip code over, and something about the description sounded familiar.

However it happened, you noticed competencies. Not a phrase someone dropped or a symbol on someone’s bag. Competencies. A group that runs structured meetings. That rotates facilitation. That debriefs after actions rather than just celebrating or complaining. That treats security as a quiet practice rather than a performance. You recognized these things because you do them yourself. And that recognition — behavioral, not symbolic — is the only foundation worth building on.

I want to sit with why that distinction matters, because the temptation to look for surface signals is strong. It would be easier if there were a handshake, a code word, a shared reference that marked someone as trustworthy. But anything symbolic can be performed. Anyone can learn the right vocabulary. The FBI informant in Denver — rose to a leadership position in a movement because he could say the right things convincingly enough. What he couldn’t fake, over time, was the operational discipline of a group that had built its practices from the ground up. He could mimic enthusiasm. He couldn’t mimic a group’s accumulated competence.

The Fremen understood this. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stilgar doesn’t welcome Paul and Jessica because they declare themselves allies of the Fremen cause. He watches. He tests. He assesses their capabilities — their ability to walk the desert, to conserve water, to contribute to the sietch’s survival. The evaluation is behavioral, extended over time, and grounded in demonstrated competence rather than declared loyalty. Herbert was writing science fiction, but the principle is organizational research: inter-group trust is built through observed capability, not through stated intentions.

And the research is specific about this. Zaheer, McEvily, and Perrone published a study in 1998 in Organization Science that identified something most people sense intuitively but rarely articulate: the trust you have in a person from another group is different from the trust you have in the group itself. Interpersonal and inter-organizational trust are distinct. You might like the person you met at that community meeting — find them sharp, committed, easy to talk to — without knowing anything about whether their group runs well, practices security, or makes decisions in ways that would hold up under pressure. Both kinds of trust matter. But organizational trust — trust in the other group’s practices, reliability, and culture — is the foundation. The interpersonal relationship is the bridge you build on that foundation. If you get the order wrong, you end up with a friendship that can’t bear the weight of coordination.

This is where the Movement for Black Lives got it right, and where Standing Rock — for all its moral power — got it dangerously wrong.

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M4BL didn’t begin with a summit. It didn’t start with a platform or a manifesto. It started with organizations that were already doing the work — Black Lives Matter Network, Black Youth Project 100, Dream Defenders, the Ella Baker Center — encountering each other in the same spaces, seeing each other’s demonstrated commitment, and recognizing organizational competence across group boundaries.

The relationships predated the formal coalition. When over fifteen hundred activists gathered at Cleveland State University in July 2015 for what became the Movement for Black Lives convening, they weren’t strangers building trust from zero. They were organizations that had been watching each other work for months or years — in Ferguson, in local campaigns, in the overlapping spaces where racial justice groups operate. The coalition that eventually encompassed over a hundred and fifty organizations grew from mutual recognition. Not central recruitment. Not a charismatic convener who brought everyone to the table. Groups found each other because they’d been showing up, doing similar work, with visible competencies that couldn’t be faked.

The recognition was behavioral. The foundation was organizational trust, built before anyone tried to coordinate.

Now contrast that with Standing Rock.

The movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 was one of the most morally galvanizing civic actions in recent American history. Thousands of people traveled to the camps in North Dakota to stand with the Standing Rock Sioux. The camps were welcoming, open, designed to grow fast. And they did.

They also became trivially easy to infiltrate. Energy Transfer Partners hired TigerSwan, a private military firm founded by a retired Delta Force commander, to suppress the movement. TigerSwan treated the water protectors as an insurgency. Operative Joel McCollough was dispatched with a PowerPoint presentation — documented in tens of thousands of pages of internal records later released by court order — laying out a plan to infiltrate the Standing Rock camps. The firm ran social media monitoring, built dossiers on persons of interest, intercepted radio communications, conducted aerial drone surveillance, and executed information operations designed to exploit tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants.

The open, unvetted connection that let the camps grow so quickly was the same structural feature that made infiltration trivial. TigerSwan didn’t need sophisticated tactics. They needed someone who could show up and be welcomed. The camps’ character — their generosity, their openness — was also their vulnerability.

Over four hundred people were arrested. The Water Protector Legal Collective documented more than eight hundred state criminal cases brought by North Dakota prosecutors. The pipeline was built. Activists reported lasting trauma and a persistent climate of distrust.

M4BL’s slower path — recognition through demonstrated competence, trust built before coordination — proved more durable precisely because the foundation was organizational, not just interpersonal. You couldn’t show up at a BYP100 meeting with good intentions and immediately access the coalition’s internal workings. You had to demonstrate capability over time. That slowness was the security.

The lesson isn’t that Standing Rock was wrong to be welcoming. It’s that openness without structure is the combination that every documented case identifies as most vulnerable. The approach here is different: structured openness. Connection through demonstrated competence. Trust that’s earned, not assumed.

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So your group has noticed another group. The recognition has happened — behavioral, accumulated over time, grounded in competencies you share. What now?

Not a summit. Not a joint meeting where both groups sit around a table and decide to be allies. That comes later, if it comes at all. The first step is smaller and more careful than that.

You send boundary-spanners.

A boundary-spanner is someone from your group who’s comfortable in unfamiliar social settings and can represent your group’s character without overcommitting on its behalf. They’re not your leader — you don’t have a single leader, and if you do, revisit your Level 2 work on rotating roles. They’re not your most passionate member, who might promise more than the group has agreed to. They’re someone with good judgment, solid listening skills, and the ability to come back to your group with a clear, honest report of what they learned.

Each group sends one or two people. They meet somewhere neutral — a coffee shop, a park, someone’s porch. Not at either group’s regular meeting space. Not yet.

First-Contact Protocol

Before the meeting, your group decides together:

• Who are your boundary-spanners for this contact? (Ideally two, so they can compare observations afterward.)
• What can your spanners share about your group? (Your general focus, how you formed, what you’ve been working on. Not your membership list, your internal disagreements, or your security details.)
• What do you want to learn about the other group? (How they formed, what they’re working on, how they make decisions, what their community needs.)
• What are your spanners not authorized to commit to? (Everything. The first meeting commits to nothing except the possibility of a second meeting.)

During the meeting, the conversation follows a simple framework:

How did your group come together? — Listen for organic formation versus top-down recruitment. Groups that formed through shared concern and built their own practices tend to be more resilient than groups organized around a single personality.

What are you working on in your community? — Listen for specificity. A group with concrete local projects — food security coordination, school board monitoring, neighborhood emergency preparedness — is different from a group with abstract goals and no current action.

What’s been your experience — what’s worked, what’s been hard? — This question reveals more than anything else. A group that can name its failures honestly has a debrief culture. A group that only talks about wins may not.

What does your community need that your group alone can’t address? — This is the question that opens the door. If both groups identify a gap that neither can fill alone but might address together, that’s alignment worth exploring.

Listen also for misalignment. Different security practices, different risk tolerances, different decision-making styles. These aren’t disqualifiers — they’re useful information. Two groups don’t need to be identical to coordinate effectively. They need to be compatible, and compatibility requires understanding the differences clearly.

After the meeting, don’t commit to anything beyond a second meeting. Return to your group and report honestly. What did you learn about how they operate? What felt aligned? What felt different? Would you trust their organizational practices — not just the individuals you met, but the group behind them?

Conduct at least two boundary-spanner meetings with the other group, with different members from each group attending when possible. The goal is organizational assessment, not personal chemistry. You’re building a picture of the group, not just the person.

Write what you learn in your field journal. About them. About what your groups might share. And about what feels different — because the differences matter as much as the similarities, and naming them honestly now prevents friction later.

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Some of you will read this and recognize a group immediately — someone you’ve already been watching, already been curious about. The boundary-spanner meetings might happen this week.

Some of you won’t find another group for months. You’re in a rural area, or a small town, or a place where civic infrastructure is thin. The community spaces where recognition happens are fewer, further apart, harder to access.

That’s fine. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lesson from Chapter 17 still holds: readiness is the threshold, not speed. The Women’s Political Council waited years between their initial preparation and the moment when conditions were right. Your group’s continued presence in community spaces — your mutual aid work, your organizational connections, your collective actions — is the preparation. The connection comes when the terrain allows it.

Don’t rush this. And don’t manufacture it. A group that isn’t ready for multi-group coordination won’t be helped by forcing the timeline. A connection with a group that hasn’t built its own internal foundation won’t produce coordination — it’ll produce dependency or collapse. The documented record is clear on this: the networks that survived were built slowly. The ones that grew fastest broke first.

You’ve waited before. You can wait again. The preparation is never wasted.

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When your boundary-spanners come back from that second meeting with something specific — a shared local concern, a complementary capability, a connection to the same community institution from different angles — you’ll have the foundation for the next conversation. That conversation is about what happens when two groups that trust each other’s competence need to communicate securely across the boundary between them. It’s a security question, but it’s not the security you practiced alone. It’s security as architecture — designed for the space between groups, where the most sensitive information lives.

Your boundary-spanners will know what that conversation needs to cover, because they’ll have seen where the two groups overlap and where they diverge. That’s the input. What to do with it comes next.

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