WHAT IS THIS ACTIVITY?
This month’s Kitchen Table Activity is to make a plan with your group for how you are taking time to care for one another and for leaders and organizers in your community who need some extra love and support. To keep our movement strong and healthy for the long haul, we must take the time to love on one another and rejuvenate wherever possible. Things can easily go sideways if we don’t take the time to reflect, check on each other, and repair where necessary.
WHY THIS ACTIVITY?
While it is undeniable that our resistance is growing, things can feel really dark right now, and it’s not just because days are getting shorter and colder. In a time like this, when we’re all feeling urgency to defend our communities from attacks on basic human rights, it can be easy to move at an unsustainable pace. And so often, when we are stretched thin, things can break down our ability to work with one another. There’s a lot of talk right now about how it’s going to take all of us to turn the tide of authoritarianism, and that’s true. How can we rest before we burn out? How can we address internal conflict before it becomes its own crisis?
HOW TO COMPLETE THE ACTIVITY
- Get together with your group and spend time checking in with one another. Try starting by all taking a deep breath together. Then get the conversation going with some of open-ended questions:
- How are you really doing? What do you need right now?
- What do you need to keep showing up to do this work for the months and years ahead?
- What do we need from each other to strengthen our team and our trust in each other?
- Make a plan for sharing in something joyful together! Here are some ideas:
- Make a yummy meal together at someone’s home.
- Fill a car with your teammates and drive around town, sipping hot cider and checking out decorations and lights.
- Collaborate on a playlist of resistance songs to go into 2026 with happy ears.
- Lift someone up who’s holding others. Are there leaders in your community who are spending a lot of time and energy on supporting others? Are they getting what they need back?
- Brainstorm who might need some extra support and what your group might be able to offer.
- Write a few letters to each other or to folks outside your group that you have appreciated partnering with in the past year, thanking them for the work they are doing.
- Consider publicly celebrating someone with a Certificate of Appreciation for their work to defend human rights. In past years, we’ve written a whole KTA about this, you can read the full text here. The short version: This month marks the 77th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is a great chance to celebrate a leader who is committed to these values. Some suggestions include immigrant justice leaders, people who went the extra mile to eliminate barriers to accessing housing or food resources, school teachers or coaches, union leaders, or student leaders.
Kitchen Table Activism (KTA) is a monthly activity by the Rural Organizing Project. The idea is that small actions can lead to powerful collective results when groups of people gather to complete the same action across the state of Oregon. ROP works to keep each KTA easily achievable so that groups with other projects or groups with limited immediate energy can still complete the KTA each month.
