I've been doing community organizing in some capacity for the better part of fifteen years. Whether organizing kink events or activist movements, these are the lessons I keep close to heart and bring up again and again in any organizing efforts. Most of them are about avoiding burnout, so your community that you're organizing can keep existing.

Nobody Does Anything Alone, Ever

Even the most amazing perfect person in the world can be hit by a car. You need more than one person to know how to do everything so someone else can do it if that happens. Also, you are not the most amazing perfect person in the world. Everyone makes mistakes, drops the ball, forgets something, gets busy, burns out, or needs a balancing second opinion.

Ideally, you should have at least two people working as a pair on any given topic. When I organized an all-trans weekly shabbat dinner, we had two people focused on the logistics of who is hosting this week and what the space will be need, two people focused on hospitality and accessibility needs, and two people focused on organizational things like running meetings and managing the facebook group. Even for something as simple as a weekly potluck, it took six people to run it sustainably.

When you start, you will have fewer people, and one of your top priorities should be growing your organizing team so at least every part of organizing has at least two people on it.

Taking It Seriously Means Taking Your Time

If you run a monthly kink event, then you will receive reports of consent violations eventually, whether at your event or between people who met at your event. If your event happens once per month, then even for the most horrifying consent report you've ever received, you have at minimum one month to handle it. And, if you're not done by the end of the month, you can ask people to temporarily abstain from attending while you continue your process.

Rushing leads to burning out, making mistakes, impulsive decisions, and hasty (biased) judgements. Things are not always as they seem on the surface. Someone previously banned from one event for abuse might report the survivor as their abuser to isolate the survivor and prevent them from speaking to organizers about their abuse.

You can't 'Believe Survivors' before you've decided who the Survivor is, therefore, you must investigate all reports you intend to act upon, in order to determine who you believe is the survivor and who is the perpetrator. Otherwise, responding to consent complaints becomes nothing but a game of who can catch the ears or organizers quicker. Given the long history in this country of racially biased and transphobia-biased false reports of rape used to target marginalized people, you must not be quick to judge. You must take the report seriously, as something with serious consequences for both parties, and therefore you must take your time to due your due diligence and do it right.

Rushed processes are more stressful and make people feel like they need to speak as quickly as possible, with an intensity matched to a time-sensitive emergency. If your process happens in terms of minutes or hours instead of days and weeks, people will panic and have a much worse experience of reporting their consent being violated than if you make sure everyone knows that they have plenty of time to breathe, take care of themselves, and focus on other things. We don't need to make a traumatic experience even more traumatic. In most cases, the incident has concluded and the two parties do not have to see each other if they simply avoid attending the same events for a bit, so there is no imminent danger that must be halted. You can take your time.

There is such a thing as taking things too slowly such that you make things more emotionally taxing for all involved, but that amount of time is much longer than you initially think. You can easily take two months, even if you shouldn't take six months. Ask yourself what is actually "moving" while you're not acting. What is rolling downhill? Sometimes, someone who potentially is going to keep causing havoc in the community is continuing to mill about causing more pain and drama, and that means you need to act quicker. Sometimes, nothing is "moving" until you act, and you can treat the situation as a flat field, and not a hill. You can take steps when you are ready.

Outside of consent incidents, rushing your work is still a ticket to burnout city. Taking the time to do something right instead of quickly will help you sustain your organizing for longer and help you enjoy your own community events. This isn't your job, and you don't have a boss breathing down your neck.

Do Less and Focus on Sustainability

When you first start a new community organizing project, think about how much you have the capacity to take on in your life, and then do less than that. You can expand later, after sustainably getting into the rhythm of organizing the smaller project you started with.

Infinite Growth is a cancer killing the world. Your community event is not a corporation. The number does not need to go up forever. This is not your job. This is your hobby. It should be fun and fulfilling. Focus on doing the amount you can sustainably keep doing without burning out, and then focus on making it even more sustainable and low effort to achieve. A bigger team, or templates for promoting events. These should be more important for any volunteering work than growing for the sake of growth.

It's better to have a really tight-knit dense community of 35 people than a really huge event where 200 people attend and don't really know each other that well. Bigger is not better. Americans have been raised in a culture obsessed with growth. We must resist that instinct as volunteer community organizers.

This is not to say you should not be welcoming to new people, but you must balance that with avoiding burnout and not letting this eat your life to the point that you aren't enjoying or participating in the events you're organizing.

Organizing Should Feel Good

This is not your job, it's your hobby. It should be fun, pleasurable, and rewarding. You count as a person and community member too. Your comfort and enjoyment matter too. Your volunteers and organizing team deserve appreciation and fun. Host private volunteer-only parties to just have fun and enjoy each other's presences without having to run the show. Treat everyone to dinner with revenue from the event. Thank each other, frequently and generously. Let people take breaks. Treat this as something we do out of love, not obligation.

In adrienne maree brown's book "Pleasure Activism" she writes about the importance of organizing work and activism being something that feels good to do. Treating this like your job, being mean to each other, and subsuming your emotions for The Cause, is a ticket to burnout city and that's how communities and movements die. It's the same whether your organizing communities to change the world, or just making a monthly munch happen.

Support and care for one another. Bring snacks to team meetings. Making organizing something you look forward to by making it rewarding. Organizing teams should have copious in-jokes. They should have fun. Check on your team members who seem burnt out or distressed. Distribute the work evenly. Rotate leadership when possible.

Recently, a member of my organizing team brought me a cupcake. I mean literally that alone recharged me for organizing another three Trancesylvanias. Recently, while organizing a team effort, I decided I would give every who helped a compliment for every thirty minutes we spent on the project, and treated them all to bagels. This is how you stay motivated when it's not your job you have no choice but to do to survive under capitalism. You make each other feel cared for.

Sometimes, community members will expect organizers to talk to them in customer service voice. The event has a small ticket cost, so therefore they're a customer, even though you're not a paid laborer. If a regular attendee regularly makes you feel miserable and prevents you from enjoying the event you organize, if they act entitled to your time and mistreat you, just ban them. I mean, sure, start by self-advocating for your boundaries and asking them to change, I think everyone deserves that chance, but if they're making this not fun anymore, then suffering in silence jeopardizes the continued existence of the community, because you're going to burn out from tolerating some asshole who talks to you like you're their personal servant.

Model Calm

When someone else is panicking, don't match their energy. Try to demonstrate being calm. Others will attune to your calm, and everything will feel better. If your organizing team is also following this mantra, then when you start to panic, you'll have someone else to attune to and ground yourself. This is not your job, it's your hobby, it shouldn't be causing you to panic. If the community event has a few small things go wrong, it's truly not the end of the world. What are the actual consequences of dropping the ball? We have to go get more folding chairs mid-class? The microphone is wonky and the presenter has to shout really loudly?

When you're receiving a report from a panicked community member, that acute distress is the worst part of what they're going through and how it is handled will be a major determining factor in if this crystallizes into PTSD. Don't match their energy. Don't interrogate them and act like the situation is as imminently urgent as they feel it is—even if it actually is quite urgent. Stay calm, help them attune to what calm feels like, slow down, be a gentle listening ear, and be grounding.

Even in an emergency, such as needing to evacuate a building, it will go better if you can model being a calm grounding figure for people to follow, calmly, out of the building in an orderly fashion. Panic is not productive.

Maintain Firm Boundaries

As a community organizer, you probably will set some rules, such as "the doors close at 7:00 p.m." or "throw out your trash." A lot of these rules exist because the continued existence of the community needs them to exist, or else you will lose your venue, or get in legal trouble. Some exist so that the community is safe for everyone.

Some rules exist because they make your life easier as an organizer and keep you from burning out. These rules may be some of the most important ones to enforce, for these are your personal boundaries as an organizer. Don't let people push and cross your boundaries. If you burn out as an organizer, the community stops existing. Your personal boundaries are just as important as the rules set by your venue. Sure, if you burn out, maybe you'll get someone else to take over what you've been doing, and in fact if you're doing things right that shouldn't be hard to do, because you're not doing it all alone, but if you're burning out, then the other community organizers will too, and so will your replacement.

Being "flexible" with too many rules too often, or making a habit of not actually enforcing rules and boundaries, will make it a lot harder to organize. You will spend more time responding to more rule violations or requests for "flexibility" about the things that you can't be flexible on, leading to more tiring conversations and less having fun. When people expect "exceptions" every time they break a rule, they'll never bother trying to follow the rule in the first place and won't accept it when you actually try to enforce it.

I'm not saying you can never be flexible on rules, but you should be very sparing with it and save your exceptions for extraordinary circumstances.

Because, the truth is: If it doesn't really matter if someone follows the rule, then it shouldn't be a rule in the first place. Your list of rules should not be a list of desirable behaviors or etiquette. If you're okay with people doing it, then don't make it against the rules!

Instead, you should have fewer rules that community members know are actually important and that will have actual consequences if these rules are not followed. Because the only rules that should be rules are the rules that, when broken, have consequences of some kind, not because you enforced the rule, but because breaking the rule actually causes something bad to happen. Bigotry is against the rules because it has the actual consequence of making minority groups feel unsafe in your community. If your event doesn't allow nudity due to the rules of your venue, then it's against the rules because nudity could cause you to lose your venue and therefore radically change or kill your community event. Consent violations are against the rules because they make your community unsafe and leave an emotional consequence on the one whose consent was violated.

One rule we recently set with Trancesylvania was "do not directly message individual moderators about moderator business, use the ticket button on the discord server or message the organizational fetlife account instead." This rule is not set just because we love bureaucracy and hate talking to people, but because when it's violated it has the actual consequence of not allowing us to take breaks from being mods, routinely making us disappointed that someone didn't want to DM to be friends but for mod reasons—which feels dehumanizing in a not-hot way—and it makes it a lot harder for us to handle the report as a team in a timely fashion. If a ticket is opened, then whoever is available first can handle it, but if it's in a DM, only one person can respond and they might be busy, or have a life, or maybe it got lost in "message requests."

It's a rule because breaking it actually has consequences. It's a personal boundary we're setting as organizers. Enforcing our personal boundaries is important for not burning out. Being "flexible" teaches people that the rule doesn't matter and has no consequences, and so they won't bother following the rule, which is to say, they won't respect your personal boundaries, and you will burn out, which will kill the community.

At the very least, you must enforce the rule by warning them that they're crossing your boundaries and direct them to the desire alternative behavior.

On the flip-side...

Look at Systems More than Individuals

The more people, the more chaos, the less you can expect every individual to "just make the right choices." If you don't want people doing something, instead of having to enforce it all the time, an even better option is making it impossible.

For instance, we used to have an open channel on the Trancesylvania discord server for people to advertise local events. We wanted it to be a public message board that people seeking age verification could look at to find events they can get verified at in-person, since that is how most people prefer to verify. However, people kept discussing events in the advertising channel, or replying to posts, in a channel that wasn't locked behind age verification, and which made it harder to find out about local events since they got lost in discussion.

I kept wasting energy enforcing this rule, until I remembered this mantra, and a team member had the smart idea to just turn off the ability for people to post in the channel without permission. Now, if you're someone who has events to advertise, we flip the switch that lets you post there, and for everyone else, it's a read-only channel.

How about in-person? Well, if the rule is "don't arrive after 7:00 p.m. because I want to stop running check-in and attend my own event" then rather than expecting people to show up on time and warning everyone who doesn't, simply lock the doors so they can't enter.

We used to have trouble with people leaving on time so we can clean up and go home. Then we started playing somewhat loud music at the end of the event. The munch is now forced to end, because you couldn't continue to have a conversation, and people went outside to continue talking. This allows us to quickly clean up and go get some sleep.

The only rules you should have are rules with consequences, and having to enforce rules is exhausting and you can't depend on everyone following them. Even better than enforcing rules, is making breaking the rules impossible.

We also encourage people to follow the rules by reading them at the beginning of every event in a way that's entertaining. The beginning-of-event rule reading is a whole stand-up comedy routine that engages the audience, makes people laugh, and hopefully helps them remember the rules.

Outside of rule enforcement, systems make everything easier.

Instead of depending on individuals remembering the steps to organizing an event, make a check-list. Instead of depending on remembering to promote the event, set reminders on your phone. Instead of doing things haphazardly, seek rhythm and repetition.

OK my brain is starting to hurt so this is the end of my organizing advice clump. I hope you find these mantras helpful and will enjoy reciting the headings of this essay as mantras during your three hour edging session tonight.