lang: en
Summary
A small (5–15), trusted group that organises and acts together — the basic unit of anarchist and movement-organising practice, especially for direct action.
Body
An affinity group is a small (5–15), trusted group that organises and acts together — the basic unit of anarchist and movement-organising practice, especially for direct action.
An affinity group is a small, self-organising cluster of people who know each other well enough to make fast collective decisions in a high-pressure action. WRI’s Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns treats affinity groups as the basic building block of action safety and decision-making, with the same structure used whether the action is a sit-in, a banner-drop, or a coordinated block of rapid-response phone calls. Seeds for Change publishes facilitation guides for affinity-group meetings and consensus, plus the discipline of the spokes-council — when multiple affinity groups need to coordinate, each sends a single mandated spokesperson who can speak for and report back to the group [source: seeds-for-change]. The same pattern (small trusted teams + spokes-council coordination) underpins the distributed-organising models that MobLab and the Commons Library describe for large digital campaigns [source: commons-library].
Use it for
Organising a direct action safely; structuring the participation of newcomers; building the basic unit of a grassroots network.
Worked examples
- case-studies/barbie-liberation
- case-studies/gezi-park
- case-studies/idle-no-more
- case-studies/otpor-milosevic
- sindicato-inquilinas
- case-studies/sunrise-green-new-deal
- case-studies/umbrella-movement
Examples
- African Americans boycott buses for integration in Montgomery, Alabama, US, — On January 30, 1956, opponents of the Montgomery bus boycott bombed the house · north-america
Related
Open Questions
None yet.
Sources & verification
- wri-handbook — grounding: secondary — unfetchable
- seeds-for-change — grounding: secondary — RAW (452 chars)
- commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)
Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.