An oft-repeated phrase among socialist spaces is the simple aphorism “Get organized!” It is easy enough to understand the sentiment. It’s a phrase designed to encourage people to not only be idle spectators, but to take action and partake in the work required to build a socialist movement. What’s often not talked about is the difficulty in overcoming the threshold of inertia needed to feel motivated to organize.

It should not be shocking to most people why this is difficult. When people look to socialist movements, especially in the United States, it is work which is often somewhat uninspiring canvassing for the Democratic Party, or an endless series of meetings that don’t seem to be producing much. This experience is no doubt variable, both in time and place. In the context of the Democratic Socialists of America, it can highly depend on the chapter you’re organizing with.

With all that being said, I want to make it clear to every reader that it is more possible to start organizing in meaningful ways than you’d think.

This past May, I finished my graduate degree and returned to the state of New Hampshire. As recently as then, there were not a lot of ways to get involved with socialist groups. The summer when I returned home, I started looking to things in the area I thought I could contribute to. I found NHMARF, a mutual aid group based in Manchester but with other stores along the seacoast. During my later college years, I was still learning to organize. It was hard. I was often busy, and I had a hard time making it to organizing events without reliable transportation. However, I did manage to spend some time with a mutual aid group similar to NHMARF, Food Not Bombs.

There was one frustration I had when helping NHMARF, and it was the fact I had to go all the way to Manchester, New Hampshire to help out with something. Now granted, I live in Nashua, so it isn’t that far, but it felt like my city should be just as capable of mobilizing something like the free store in Manchester. For a while, there was little I could do. I decided I would take a box of bread back down to Nashua and drop it off at some encampments I had spotted in the area. I was incredibly nervous to do so. It may sound odd, but it took a little bit of courage from myself to force myself to talk to these complete strangers out in the woods. Eventually, it became a lot easier. I developed some rapport with the folks staying in the “tent-city” as they had dubbed it, and was able to ask them questions about places in the city that serve food, when they serve food, and if we were to get a free store started in Nashua, where they would want it.

There was not a lot I could do with this information for a while. All I did was try to stay keyed in on the goings-on of the DSA chapter and NHMARF. Eventually, two things happened that made creating a free store in Nashua possible. First, the DSA decided to do a flyering event in Nashua for a Queer Liberation March they were hosting in Manchester. I have to imagine part of their decision to do so was because they knew they could get at least a couple of people in Nashua to actually help, including myself. There I met the first person willing to help me, who I will refer to as R. Not too long after, I attended a tenant right’s meeting hosted by the Socialist Party where I met two other folks that eventually became regular helping hands at the store.

It still took some time for things to get rolling. I had been handing out bread to people every weekend for a few months at this point, so I was used to going out there to people. At first I would have a small rotation of people helping me, and then it became a bit more established week after week. With R, we were able to do good local outreach, and overtime it became a project that, while I may have gotten the ball rolling on, was moving all on its own with our without me. Most weeks we have a dedicated group of people showing up to hand out food and supplies. Everyone is still working in some way to figure out how to improve our capacity and ability to do what we do. Not to mention, now when someone in the Nashua area joined the DSA chapter for one reason or another, there was a way for them to “get organized” with a lot less work than I had to do.

Only four months ago, there was nothing like it in the city. Now, we have a fully fledged mutual aid project.

This story is meant to illustrate a basic lesson: do not be discouraged. If you feel like you are the only socialist around, that’s alright. Start small. Get involved in local groups even if you don’t feel that they’re everything you want them to be. Learn how to organized in the smallest ways you can. The method I’ve offered here is only one of many, there are no doubt many other ways to get organized all from different starting points. Be patient with yourself, and have just a little bit of courage each time you try. In no time at all, you’ll find you’re capable of a lot more than you first thought. You ultimately only learn how to organize by doing it.

Our burgeoning DSA chapter is only getting started. I have been a member of the DSA for some time and many members of this chapter would agree, even at the start of 2024 our chapter was still coalescing, despite on paper having existed for many years prior. There are many more projects being crafted as we speak, projects that extend beyond mutual aid. So, when we say “Get organized,” it means to start building. It’s best if you can plug into somewhere first, but if not, take inspiration from existing projects in mutual aid, labor organizing, tenant unions, and so on. Organizing only seems daunting when you’re starting, but once you’re in it, you realize that the steps you need to take are intuitive ones, and you’ll find yourself more capable than you could’ve imagined