We're early. How to organize without hardening into an institution, and how to grow from connection.
Every large movement began as a small gathering. Every institution that now commands resources and attention started with people who shared a belief and decided to meet about it. We are in that early season now the season of finding each other, of tending the first flames, of building without yet knowing the shape of what we are building.
Marshall Ganz, the veteran organizer of the United Farm Workers and the author of modern movement-building theory, distinguishes sharply between mobilization and organization. Mobilization is what happens when people show up for a march powerful, necessary, but temporary. Organization is what happens when those same people develop the relationships, the leadership, the decision-making structures, and the shared story that sustains action over years and decades. The fire that burned brightest in the civil rights movement was not any single protest. It was the infrastructure of churches, training programs, and local leaders that made those protests possible.
The research confirms this. Hahrie Han's 2014 book How Organizations Develop Activists used field experiments to demonstrate that the strongest predictor of sustained participation is not ideology, passion, or even issue importance. It is whether people are embedded in a relational context a community of people who know each other, call each other, and hold each other accountable. Creating that context is the work of organizers, not just activists.
McAdam's classic 1982 study of the civil rights movement, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, showed that the movement succeeded where it did because it built on pre-existing organizational networks black churches, colleges, NAACP chapters. These were the indigenous resources the structures that already existed within the community, activated for a new purpose. The movement did not invent them. It found them, connected them, and amplified them.
Pearlman's 2021 study of the Syrian uprising pushes the question further: what happens when no pre-existing organization exists? She found that mobilization can still emerge, but it requires extraordinary creativity, risk, and the gradual construction of organizational sophistication through trial and error. Movements can be built from scratch but the difficulty reminds us why existing relational networks are so valuable.
The lesson: we are not starting from scratch, because the relationships we form now are the infrastructure of whatever we will build. Every conversation, every shared commitment, every person who finds their way to this hearth these are not preliminary to the work. They are the work, in its earliest and most formative season.
Key Research:
Han, H. (2014). How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century. Oxford University Press. Field experiments showing that creating relational organizational contexts makes people more likely to participate, recruit others, and sustain engagement.
Ganz, M. (2010). Leading Change: Leadership, Organization, and Social Movements. In N. Nohria & R. Khurana (Eds.), Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice. Distinguishes mobilization (temporary) from organizing (sustained), emphasizing narrative, strategy, and local leadership development.
McAdam, D. (1982). Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. University of Chicago Press. Classic study showing how movements build from pre-existing organizational networks and indigenous resources.
National Research Council (2014). Lessons from Social Movements. How movements build capacity through local and intermediate-level leadership; the Grange and NRA as examples of 77,000+ volunteer-led local chapters.
Pearlman, W. (2021). Mobilizing From Scratch: Large-Scale Collective Action Without Preexisting Organization in the Syrian Uprising. Comparative Political Studies. Shows how protest can emerge and build organizational sophistication even without pre-existing civil society infrastructure.
You do not need to know where this is going. The people who built the movements that changed history did not know either. They knew that the work was worth doing, that the people beside them were worth trusting, and that if they kept showing up, something would emerge that none of them could have designed alone. That is the seedling season. You are in it right now.
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