What You'd Tell Someone Starting

The shared principles conversation surfaced something these pages can’t give you. When you sat together and wrote down what holds the network together — the commitments, the refusals, the history of how you found each other — you weren’t referencing a curriculum. You were articulating experience. The Freeman discussion revealed where invisible hierarchy was operating and what to do about it. The four questions forced the network to decide what it actually stands for, in concrete terms, on the record. The principles document that emerged didn’t come from a researcher who’s never coordinated anything at this scale. It came from your network’s practice.

That distinction matters for what this chapter asks you to do. Because the most important thing the network will produce isn’t a joint action, a civic monitoring report, or a shared principles document. It’s the thing you make for the people who come after you.

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Alcoholics Anonymous has a design insight embedded in its program that closes the loop. The twelfth step — the final step in the program — requires that you help another person begin. Not as charity. Not as outreach. As completion. You haven’t finished the work until you’ve helped someone else start it.

The insight isn’t altruistic. It’s structural. Teaching what you’ve learned forces you to understand it differently. The person explaining the first step to a newcomer discovers gaps in their own understanding that the step itself didn’t reveal. The sponsor articulating why the third step matters has to decide, for themselves, why it matters — a decision that happens in the teaching, not in the initial learning. AA’s reproduction mechanism doesn’t just spread the program. It deepens it for the person doing the spreading.

The Highlander Center’s popular education tradition arrives at the same place from different premises. Myles Horton’s conviction — the answers to a community’s problems already exist within the community — isn’t a motivational statement. It’s a claim about where knowledge lives. Highlander didn’t bring expertise to communities. It created conditions for communities to surface their own. The Citizenship Schools that Septima Clark developed and carried across the South — about a thousand of them by the time she retired in 1970 — trained local people to teach literacy and voter registration in their own communities. Clark had been fired from her teaching position in Charleston for refusing to deny her NAACP membership. She turned that loss into a program that trained an estimated ten thousand grassroots leaders. The organizers who trained at Highlander and went on to help build SNCC, to plan the Freedom Rides, to staff the Mississippi Freedom Schools — they taught what they’d just learned, in communities they belonged to, to people who trusted them because they’d done the same work.

The research confirms what both traditions discovered through practice. Near-peer teaching — where the teacher is only slightly more experienced than the learner — consistently outperforms expert instruction across domains. Peer tutoring meta-analyses show a “teacher-slightly-ahead” model producing better outcomes for both teacher and learner than either same-level collaboration or traditional expert-to-novice instruction. The mechanism is proximity: someone who struggled with the material last month remembers where the confusion lives. An expert who mastered it years ago has forgotten. And the act of teaching produces what researchers call the “protégé effect” — the teacher’s own understanding deepens through the work of making it transferable. You don’t fully know what you know until you try to give it away.

Your network is in the near-peer position right now. You learned these skills recently enough that the difficulty is still visible. You built these practices in a specific place, with specific people, facing specific challenges. That specificity is an advantage no general curriculum can match. A starter kit written by people who learned threat modeling six months ago and taught it to their neighbors is more useful to someone starting today than one written by a security researcher who’s been doing this for twenty years.

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In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City. Within days, an informal network of Occupy Wall Street veterans mobilized under the name Occupy Sandy. They weren’t disaster professionals. They were organizers who had practiced coordination, supply chains, and rapid decision-making during the Zuccotti Park encampment. The operation that emerged — roughly sixty thousand volunteers, over a million dollars in donations and supplies, direct relief in neighborhoods that FEMA and the Red Cross took weeks to reach — was widely reported as the organizational surprise of the disaster. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security later commissioned a study on Occupy Sandy’s effectiveness, calling it one of the leading humanitarian groups in the response.

What was less reported was what happened after.

The veterans of Occupy Sandy didn’t disband when the immediate crisis passed. They documented what they’d built. They wrote operational guides — not theoretical frameworks, but step-by-step accounts of how a distribution hub works, how to triage incoming donations, how to coordinate volunteer shifts when volunteers outnumber your ability to organize them. They trained other communities using those guides. Sandy Nurse, an OWS veteran who had worked with Occupy Sandy relief efforts in Midland Beach, went on to win a seat on the New York City Council. Devin Balkind, who had run tech and communication channels for both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy, launched Mutual Aid NYC during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, building a digital infrastructure for neighborhood-level relief across the city. And the broader network of people who had practiced disaster mutual aid during Sandy became the seed for Mutual Aid Disaster Relief — a national network whose steering committee includes veterans of both Occupy Sandy and the earlier Common Ground relief effort after Hurricane Katrina, explicitly designed around the principle that communities train their own disaster response capacity rather than waiting for institutional rescue.

The reproduction happened because the knowledge was documented and taught by people who’d done it. Not studied it. Done it. The credibility of the teaching came from visible struggle — Occupy Sandy’s organizers could say “here’s where our supply chain broke down on day three” alongside “here’s how we fixed it by day five” because both were true and recent. The documentation wasn’t polished. It didn’t need to be. It needed to be honest about what worked, what failed, and what they’d do differently — the same three things your network knows from experience.

March for Our Lives, by contrast, survived by formalizing. After the Parkland shooting in February 2018, student organizers built three formal entities — a movement organization, an action fund, and a foundation. The structure enabled persistence. March for Our Lives still operates. But the formalization required institutional overhead — legal counsel, board governance, fundraising infrastructure, nonprofit compliance — that most informal networks don’t have access to and don’t need.

The lesson isn’t that formalization is wrong. It’s that reproduction doesn’t require it. What reproduction requires is documentation and teaching. Occupy Sandy’s model spread because people wrote down what they learned and showed others how to do it. The starter kit your network produces in this chapter is the same act — the minimum viable mechanism for transmitting what you’ve built to someone who needs it.

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In The Matrix, Neo’s final act isn’t a battle. It’s a message. “I’m going to show these people a world you don’t want them to see.” The promise isn’t victory. It’s visibility — the act of revealing what’s possible to people who didn’t know it existed.

The network’s starter kit operates on the same principle. You’re not building a franchise or a manual for replication. You’re documenting what you’ve seen become possible — that ordinary people in a specific place can build the skills, the trust, the coordination, and the civic infrastructure that the narrow path requires. The documentation is the message. The experience behind it is the proof.

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This is where these pages can be transparent about something they’ve mostly left implicit.

The Narrow Path is a curriculum. It was designed to produce what your network has built — individual security practices, trusted relationships, a functioning group, inter-group coordination, civic infrastructure, shared principles. It used a fictional frame to make the learning engaging and the skills sticky. A researcher who encountered something at work that crystallized what she’d been feeling — and then did what researchers do. She went and found out how. She wrote it down, chapter by chapter, under a name that isn’t hers, on a laptop she bought with cash.

The fiction served a purpose. It created urgency without manufacturing crisis. It provided a narrative arc that made thirty-six chapters of skill-building feel like a journey rather than a syllabus. It gave the curriculum a voice — mine — that could be personal without being prescriptive. And it kept the epistemological commitment intact: everything I cited is verifiable. The surveillance infrastructure is documented. The legal frameworks are published law. The case studies are drawn from court records, journalism, organizational histories, and published research. The fiction was the frame. The content was always fact.

But your network’s starter kit doesn’t need the frame. Your authority doesn’t come from a researcher’s interpretation of documented patterns. It comes from practice. You’ve done the work in a real place, with real people, navigating real friction. When you write about what worked and what didn’t, you’re not translating someone else’s findings. You’re documenting your own.

That’s why the network’s version will be more honest than the curriculum that produced it. Not because the curriculum was dishonest — every claim in these chapters traces to documented reality, and that commitment doesn’t change. But because the curriculum was designed for everyone, and the starter kit is designed for someone. Your community. Your terrain. Your specific challenges. The ground under your version is more solid because it’s ground you’ve actually walked.

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The starter kit is organized around four questions. These aren’t prescriptive — adapt the structure to what your network needs. But they’ve worked in other contexts, and they cover the essential territory.

What are the essential skills?

Not everything from the full curriculum — the 80/20. If someone had one week to prepare, what would you prioritize? Your network has been through three levels of skill-building. You know, from experience, which skills changed how you operate daily and which were good to know but not essential in the first month. The threat model? Probably essential. The specific details of data broker opt-outs? Important, but can wait. Signal setup? Day one. The full history of COINTELPRO? Valuable context, but not the first week’s priority.

The exercise of choosing forces a conversation about what matters most. That conversation is itself part of the learning.

What are the protocols that worked?

Your first-meeting script. Your security floor. Your decision-making process. Your facilitator rotation. Your debrief format. Your first joint action template. Some of these came from these pages. Some you invented. Some you adapted so significantly from the original that they’re functionally yours. Write down the versions you actually use, not the versions the book provided. Include the modifications and why you made them — the adaptations are the most valuable part.

What did you learn the hard way?

This is the honest section, and it’s the most important one. What almost broke the group? What surprised you? What does no curriculum prepare you for? The groan zone when consensus stalled and someone almost walked. The security incident that wasn’t an attack but felt like one. The joint action where coordination broke down and the debrief was harder than the failure. The institutional meeting that went differently than expected.

Write this section in specific terms, not abstractions. “Building trust takes longer than you expect” is true but useless. “We met every week for two months before anyone shared something personal, and the breakthrough happened over a mutual aid delivery, not a structured exercise” is something a new group can actually learn from.

What would you tell someone just starting?

In your own voice.

This is the section that no curriculum, no book, no researcher can produce. It’s the part that comes from sitting in a room with people you’ve learned to trust, having done something together that none of you could have done alone, knowing that the capability you’ve built is real because you’ve tested it.

Write what you wish someone had told you. Write what you’re glad no one told you because discovering it was the lesson. Write what you know now that you didn’t know when you first checked your location history alone in your apartment, seeing for the first time how visible you were.

This question will produce the most disagreement and the best writing. Let it. The person who wants to say “it’s worth it” and the person who wants to say “it’s harder than anyone admits” are both telling the truth. Include both. A starter kit that only contains encouragement is useless. A starter kit that only contains warnings is discouraging. The honest version includes the weight and the reason for carrying it.

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The starter kit is a real document. This isn’t a reflection exercise.

When it’s complete, share it through the liaison channel with every group in the network. Discuss it at a joint meeting. Revise it based on input from groups whose experience was different from yours. The revision process matters — it surfaces the assumptions each group made about what’s essential, and the disagreements produce a better document than any single perspective could.

If your network has identified groups or individuals who might be starting their own journey — people you’ve noticed at community meetings, neighbors who’ve asked questions, connections from institutional relationships — the starter kit is something you can share with them. Not as recruitment. As an offer. The same way this book was offered to you: here’s what we learned, here’s what we built, here’s where we got it wrong. Take what’s useful. Adapt it. Make it yours.

The act of producing the starter kit is itself the learning. It forces the network to synthesize months of experience into a coherent account of what mattered. It surfaces disagreements about priorities — disagreements that clarify the network’s values as much as the shared principles document did. And it creates something that exists outside the book, outside the curriculum, outside the fictional frame. Something that belongs entirely to the people who built it.

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Challenge

Produce the network’s starter kit. This is a multi-meeting project — don’t rush it.

Meeting 1: Draft. At a joint meeting, work through the four questions above. Assign each question to a small drafting team of two or three people drawn from different groups in the network. Each team produces a rough draft of their section before the next meeting.

Meeting 2: Assemble and revise. Bring the four sections together. Read them aloud. Discuss what’s missing, what’s redundant, what needs more specificity. The read-aloud is important — writing that sounds right on paper and writing that sounds right spoken to a real person are different, and the starter kit should sound like people talking, not like a document.

Meeting 3: Finalize and share. Incorporate revisions. Produce a version the network agrees represents its experience honestly. Share it through the liaison channel. Discuss: who should receive this beyond the network?

The starter kit should be short. One document. If it’s longer than what someone would read in a single sitting, it’s too long. The constraint is a feature — it forces the network to decide what actually matters versus what’s nice to include.

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Field Journal

Document the starter kit production process, not just the product. Which questions generated the most discussion? Where did groups disagree about what’s essential? What did the revision process surface about the network’s different experiences?

And note what it felt like to write the “what would you tell someone just starting” section. The distance between where you are now and where you started is the argument for everything the network has built. If the distance feels real when you write it down, the starter kit is working.

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The curriculum was designed to produce you. You were designed to outgrow it.

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