0.1 Knowing Your Community

Organizing your community: who is here and what are they doing?

The first step of organizing your community is thinking about who is in in it, and the place where you live. You can do this activity alone, but best to do it with a few other people—friends, colleagues, neighbors.

Mapping your community

Who is in your community/place?

*Find your legislators at legislature.vermont.gov/people/

What other dynamics are present in your place?

Stuff and systems in your community

Knowing your ecosystem

Check out the ANR atlas: https://anrmaps.vermont.gov/websites/anra5/ for information on the hydrogeology, flood risk, and more in your Vermont community. Click on ’Layers’ on the bottom left of the window, and turn on these layers by checking the boxes next to them:

• FEMA flood layers show where the edges of floods have gone
• Soil hydrologic groups show soil types, and help you imagine which locations will remain wet after flooding, because different types of soil drain more quickly than others.
• Wetland delineations show where the land is always also water

Bringing people together

You can spend any amount of time organizing your community and building resilience. It will probably take 5-10 hours of conversations to get a group of about 10 people ready to organize with you. Meeting once a week can help build momentum, but you can also meet every other week or once a month.

Here are some things to consider when starting to organize your community:

• What work is already happening to build resilience?
• Of the people you mapped, how many do you know? Where can you go to know them better or introduce yourself? Who is missing?
• Why are you excited about building resilience? Can you get comfortable talking about why you care about this to people you don’t know well (yet)?
• What problems are most discussed, or most important, to people in the place where you live? How can building resilience help address some of these problems?
• Where can you start talking about building community resilience, and meet people who are interested in working on this with you?

Once you have a few people - it can just be four or ten people! - you can meet. You’ll need:

Facilitation guides

Get to know the toolkit: interactive activity

45 minutes to 1 hour

This activity will help orient you to some of the sections of the toolkit, and practice using it to solve problems about resilience.

1. Print out the interactive toolkit activity page of prompts , or edit the prompts to best fit the non-flooding disaster you want people to think about. Cut the prompts up along the dotted line.
2. Set the scene: talk about a scenario, either a real one that has happened in your community or an imagined one, that would benefit from increased community resilience. Warn people that it might be a bit stressful to think about these situations, but that planning and working together make them less scary when they’re happening. Some ideas:
   1. Heavy rains drench your town, and the river rises more than it has in the past. Homes along the river are damaged, and many are flooded. Town water is compromised.
   2. An ice storm comes through and takes out power, cell service, internet.
   3. Imagine something else realistic!
3. Split your group into smaller groups of 2-5 people each, and give each group a prompt. As you’ll see, some questions are about before the disaster; others are about the disaster itself; and the rest are about aftermath. You can also read all the prompts aloud, and if people want to reorganize themselves to work with prompts that interest them more, they can do so.
4. Instruct groups to spend about 20 minutes discussing the prompt and using the toolkit to respond to it.
5. Reconvene as a group and hear from people about what they learned, what questions this activity brought up, and what they found useful in the toolkit.

Conduct a Community Needs Assessment

Every community is different! Use this activity to help identify some of your community’s strengths and priorities for further resilience work. It can be helpful to do this activity after going through the Mapping Your Community exercises that begins on page 9.

You can do this activity in a meeting of people interested in building community resilience, or drop off copies of the assessment at local schools, the town office, and the library—or in another setting!

1. Print out copies of the Community Needs Assessment for everyone in your group.
2. Give people 15-20 minutes to complete the assessment.
3. Break into small groups or pairs to discuss the results once people are finished, then share as a whole group.
4. Make some notes about which questions, issues, and opportunities came up over and over again.
   1. Was there consensus on a priority issue, or areas in which more information is needed?
   2. Is there someone who holds relevant information who wasn’t in the room?
5. Make a plan to connect with people who can help with the ’three big things’ or ’three easy things’ you identified in the assessment.
6. Make a plan to share results of the assessment with people who were not present. Consider posting on local social media, putting up flyers at schools, grocery stores, clinics, town offices. The more people you engage in this process, the better your work will reflect the diverse needs and skills of your community.

We started organizing. How do we know it’s working, and when to ask for more help?

It can be hard to tell if you’re making progress. Here are some signs your work is effective:

• More than four people attended your first meeting
• Someone you haven’t explicitly invited to participate heard about your work, and is excited to participate in the future
• You received an email or a call from a town official asking what you’re working on
• You and one, two, or more people are energized and excited to keep working with this toolkit and talking to people in your community about it.

Here are some signs you might be ready to ask for more help and move ahead with plans to launch a resilience hub.

• Have you met two or more times?
• Do you have a group of 2-5 people excited about launching a resilience hub?
• Have you talked to 10+ neighbors to see if they think this is a good idea?
• Have you used the community needs assessment (above) and begun to identify what your priorities are as a community?
• Can you identify three sections of the toolkit where you would like support?

Here are some different kinds of assistance to seek out:

• Fiscal sponsorship: access to nonprofit status so you can raise funds and pay stipends without creating a new organization
• Fundraising to support your work
• Technical assistance using the toolkit
  • Help facilitating group meetings
  • Visioning for how to best use the toolkit in your community
  • Subject matter expertise on sections you want to work on
• Relationships with existing institutions like libraries and schools, places of worship, food pantries, community spaces to see if they are interested in participating in your work to launch a resilience hub.
• Connection with elected officials or local committees to advocate for and share about your work

Think about if you can get this kind of help in your community, from people you already know. If not, reach out to Community Resilience Organizations (CROs) — resiliencetoolkit@gocros.org — and we’ll do our best to connect you with people and organizations who can assist.

Going deeper: finding the community work you want to do

There are so many ways to support community resilience, and each person has a unique set of skills and interests to contribute. It can feel and be isolating to find yourself in a moment of disaster, not knowing who to turn to or how to help. The activities below can guide some of your personal preparedness for difficult times. Respond to the reflection questions below to spur your thinking. Check out this zine for more ideas .

Look at this (incomplete!) list of roles to play in a community, and check out the corresponding toolkit sections to see if any of this work appeals to you. Check out this list for more ideas.

Pod mapping

This activity, developed by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Center , can help identify your “pod” - who you can count on for support and connection in the everyday and during disaster. Interpersonal relationships help us move through stress or adrenaline; loved ones help us make sure we are taking care of ourselves, even while showing up to help others.

Use the diagram on the next page to do this activity. To start, write your name in the middle grey circle. The surrounding bold-outlined circles are your pod. Write the names of the people who are in your pod. We encourage people to write the names of actual individuals, instead of things such as “my church group” or “my neighbors.”

The dotted lines surrounding your pod are people who are “movable.” They are people that could be moved into your pod, but need a little more work. For example, you might need to build stronger relationships or trust with them.

The largest circles are community resources. For example: a local food shelf or sexual violence prevention org or a park with your favorite tree that you like to go sit with to take some deep breaths. Or really anyone or anything else you think of as a resource.

Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet

Written by Mia Mingus for the BATJC, June 2016

During the spring of 2014 the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) began using the term “pod” to refer to a specific type of relationship within transformative justice (TJ) work. We needed a term to describe the kind of relationship between people who would turn to each other for support around violent, harmful and abusive experiences, whether as survivors, bystanders or people who have harmed. These would be the people in our lives that we would call on to support us with things such as our immediate and on-going safety, accountability and transformation of behaviors, or individual and collective healing and resiliency.

Prior to this, we had been using the term “community” when we talked about transformative justice, but we found that, not surprisingly, many people do not feel connected to a “community” and, even more so, most people did not know what “community” meant or had wildly different definitions and understandings of “community.” For some, “community” was an overarching term that encompassed huge numbers of people based on identity (e.g. “the feminist community”); while for others “community,” referred to a specific set of arbitrary values, practices and/or relationships (e.g. “I don’t know them well, but we’re in community with each other”); or some defined “community” simply by geographic location, regardless of relationship or identity (e.g. “the Bay Area community”). We found that people romanticized community; or though they felt connected to a community at large, they only had significant and trustworthy relationships with very few actual people who may or may not be part of that community. For example, someone might feel connected to “the queer community,” but when asked who from that “queer community” they felt they could trust to show up for them in times of crisis, vulnerability or violence, they could only name 2 or 3 people.

Although “community” is a word that we use all the time, many people don’t know what it is or feel they have never experienced it. This became increasingly confusing as we used terms such as “community accountability” or “community responses to violence” and encouraged people to “turn to their communities;” and this became even more complicated in dealing with intimate and sexual violence because the violence, harm and abuse was often coming from their “community” because so many people are abused by someone they know.

We needed a different term to describe what we meant, and so, “pods” was suggested and it stuck. This is not to say that we don’t use the term “community” still—we do; but we needed to create new language for our work.

We knew that across the board, people who experience violence, harm and abuse turn to their intimate networks before they turn to external state or social services. Most people don’t call the police or seek counseling or even call anonymous hotlines. If they tell anyone at all, they turn to a trusted friend, family member, neighbor or coworker. We wanted a way to name those currently in your life that you would rely on (or are relying on) to respond to violence, harm and abuse.

POD

Your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you; or the people that you would call on if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm or abuse that you’ve done; or if you witnessed violence or if someone you care about was being violent or being abused.

People can have multiple pods. The people you call to support you when you are being harmed may not be the same people you call on to support you when you have done harm, and vice versa. In general, pod people are often those you have relationship and trust with, though everyone has different criteria for their pods.

Once we started using the term “pods,” we realized a bunch of things:

• Most people have few solid, dependable relationships in their lives. Much of this is from the breaking of relationships, isolation, fear and criminalization that capitalism requires. We found that for many people, mapping their pod was a sobering process, as many thought their pod would be larger than it actually was. It is not uncommon for most people to have 1 or 2 people in their pod. We reassure people this is not a popularity contest, but rather a chance to reflect on why we have so few relationships with the kind of deep trust, reliability and groundedness we need to be able to respond well to violence.
• Many people have less people they could call on to take accountability for harm they’ve done than harm that happened to them. Though competent support for surviving violence is few and far between, we have found that accountable support for someone taking accountability for harm they have done is even harder to find. More often than not, people end up colluding with abusers or reinforcing the shaming and blaming of survivors in their attempt to support someone in taking accountability for harm, if they stay in relationship with people who have harmed or been violent at all.
• Asking people to organize their pod was much more concrete than asking people to organize their “community.” Once we had the shared language and concept of “pod,” it allowed transformative justice to be more accessible. Gone were the fantasies of a giant, magical “community response,” filled with people we only had surface relationships with; and instead we challenged ourselves and others to build solid pods of people through relationship and trust. In doing so, we are pushed to get specific about what those relationships look like and how they are built. It places relationship-building at the very center of transformative justice and community accountability work.
• “Pod people” don’t fall neatly along traditional lines, especially in situations of intimate and sexual violence. People don’t necessarily turn to their closest relationships (e.g. partner, family, best friends), especially because this is often where the violence is coming from, but also because the criteria we would use for our pod people is not necessarily the same as what we use (or get taught to use) for our general intimate relationships. We have different and specific kinds of relationships with our pod people, often in addition to relationship and trust, they involve a combination of characteristics such as, but not limited to: a track record of generative conflict; boundaries; being able to give and receive feedback; reliability. These are characteristics and skills that we are not readily taught to value in U.S. society and don’t usually have the skillset to support in even our closest relationships.
• Building analysis was much easier than building the relationship and trust required for one’s pod. Once people started to identify their pod, it became clear that most of the people they would call on were not necessarily political organizers or activists and usually didn’t have political analysis. This was true, even for political organizers and activists who were mapping their pods. Using the language of “pods” was a way to meet people where they were and reveal what was already working in their intimate networks. People already had individuals in their lives they would turn to when violence happened (even if it was just one person). So this is where we needed to focus our work, instead of trying to build new relationships with strangers who might share a political analysis, but had no relationship to each other, let alone trust. We set out to build through our relationships and trust. We then worked to support our folks in cultivating a shared analysis and framework for understanding intimate and sexual violence through many things, most notably our transformative justice studies.
• The BATJC focuses on transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse. Growing and deepening our pods helps us build where children already are. Utilizing the concept of pods is a way to reach children where they are because a 5 year old is not going to reach out to us for support, nor should they be expected to spearhead a community accountability process. The more we can grow our own pods and have conversations about protecting and supporting the children and youth in our lives, the better prepared we will be to respond to child sexual abuse in our intimate networks.
• Relationship and trust, not always political analysis, continue to be two of the most important factors in successful TJ interventions, whether in supporting survivor self determination and healing, or in accountability processes. Though shared language, values, and political understandings can be very useful in responding to violence, we find that these are easier to build where relationship and trust already exist. By building where there is already authentic relationships and trust, rather than trying to piece together shallow versions, we help to set the conditions for, not only, successful TJ responses, but the likelihood that people will respond to violence at all.
• There are many people who do not have any pod people. This a very real reality for many oppressed and isolated communities/individuals because of how capitalism, oppression and violence shape our lives. For example, many disabled people are extremely isolated because of lack of access and resources; many immigrant women of color are isolated because of language or documentation; adults, youth and children who are surviving current abuse such as domestic violence may be isolated by their abusers. We hope that by beginning to build and grow pods where they already exist (or could exist), we can help build the conditions to be able to support people who do not have pods. By growing the number of people in the Bay Area who can recognize, talk about, prevent and respond to violence, we hope to make it that much more likely that people in need of support will find it in their daily lives. We also believe that orienting from a place of growing pods can help us gradually move away from the structures that keep people isolated. In this way, building our pods is not only useful for ourselves and the people in our immediate circles, but has the potential to help build a network of pods that could support anyone experiencing violence.