We have compiled an extensive list of resources and actions that CODEPINKers and local organizers have developed throughout years of community building. The best actions are the ones built within our community for the benefit of our community! Please flip through our guides and email us for any additions or suggestions!
Meeting Tips
For the organizer(s): Speak from your heart, be organized with a meeting agenda and materials, and focus on what everyone should get out of the meeting.
Combine your meeting with a potluck meal or a peace vigil, if possible. Hold your meeting at a home, or a public place, such as a coffeehouse or public library meeting room. And bring a sign-up sheet! 
Have the meeting go smoothly by having one person facilitate the discussion, one person keep track of time, and one person take notes or a task list. Note for later: rotate these responsibilities so that your group members use and/or develop their skills.
Add an action to your meeting: for example, have people call new members on their cell phones, write letters to the editor of your local newspaper, make peace signs, or paint a banner. Use this action to promote your meeting. Keep organizing meetings short and to the point. If people are looking tired or distracted, offer a short stretching break or a song. Make sure everyone has something concrete to do at the end of the meeting. Remember, the more ownership participants feel, the more active they'll be.
At the end of every event or large action, have a debriefing to discuss what went well, and what can be done to improve things next time. Congratulate and thank each other for every success, no matter how small.
Meeting guidelines from InterOccupy:
Be Curious and Open to Learning: Listen to and be open to hearing all points of view. Maintain an attitude of exploration and learning.
Balance Advocacy and Inquiry: Seek to learn and understand as much as you might want to persuade. Conversations are as much about listening as it is about talking.
Seek Alignment rather than Agreement: Alignment is shared intention, whereas agreement is having a shared belief or opinion.
Be Purposeful and to the Point: Notice if what you are conveying is or is not "on purpose" to the question at hand. Notice if you are making the same point more than once. Do your best to make your point quickly with honesty and depth.
Be Excellent to Each other: Share what's important to you. Speak authentically; from your personal and heartfelt experience. Be considerate to others who are doing the same.
Direct Action and Theater
By Nancy Kricorian
CODEPINK for Peace is a grassroots peace and social justice movement that was founded in November 2002 as a women's peace vigil outside the White House. The name CODEPINK was chosen as a response to the Department of Homeland Security's color-coded advisory system.
CODEPINK employs a variety of tools and techniques for working towards positive social change, and we are well-known for our use of direct action and street theater.
First to define the terms:
Direct action is a political tactic of confrontation and sometimes-illegal disruption intended to attract and arouse public awareness and action. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 was an example of direct action that was successful in ending seating segregation on public buses.
Street theater, sometimes called Guerilla Theater, involves the acting out of a social issue in a public space—that could be in a park, on the street or in a subway car. It is a form of direct action. There are a number of street theater groups, among them CODEPINK, the Billionaires for Bush, Greene Dragon, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. CODEPINK is in a proud tradition of popular, satirical protest of the powers-that-be.
Civil disobedience, which is another form of direct action, involves the nonviolent act of breaking the law to call attention to a particular law or set of laws that some people think are immoral or questionable. An example of civil disobedience from the Civil Rights Movement was the “sit-in” campaign by African-American students in the south. The students would sit at Whites Only lunch counters, trying to show that it was wrong to have a law enforcing that kind of segregated seating. They would remain in their seats, in effect breaking the law, until the police were called in to drag them out.
Why direct action?
You know the old expression, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease?” Using direct action is a way of being a very squeaky wheel.
Huge media conglomerates control most of the information we see and hear about the world. Corporate-owned television outlets show us for the most part the version of reality that the current government and its corporate cronies want us to see.
Direct action and street theater are ways to try to break through this control. A couple of dozen women dressed in pink, holding dolls wrapped in red-stained blankets and carrying a coffin show up in front of Donald Rumsfeld's house in Washington, D.C. and it might show up on the evening news. Medea Benjamin, dressed all in pink, stands up on her seat at the Republican National Convention during President Bush's acceptance speech. She is holding a banner and shouting END THE OCCUPATION NOW. The police come, pull her from her chair, and hustle her out of the auditorium. You might see only a flash of this on CNN, but a Pakistani taxi driver told me he had seen the whole “fight”, as he called it, on the nightly Pakistani cable news. When I told him that Medea Benjamin was in the back seat of his taxi he turned around to her and said, “You are a great lady.”
We believe that direct action works. A study on environmental activism by sociologist Jon Agnone showed that chaining yourself to a bulldozer and throwing paint over company executives is more likely to influence environmental policy than lobbying on Capitol Hill. And beyond having a direct influence on legislation, we believe that our street actions have an impact on our communities. It's about educating people. It's about making an alternative version of reality visible on the streets and on the news. We're angry about what's going on; we're standing up for our beliefs and principles, and we're strengthening our movement and ourselves by working together. And often we're also having a great time.
Outreach Ideas
By making an outreach plan for events and actions, your group will get the attention and participation you need to make your actions effective. Some pointers:
Recruitment: The best way to recruit and motivate people is face-to -ace. Tabling at events, talking to friends and neighbors, discussing at meetings are all good ways to get people involved. Bake sales or garage sales to raise money for your local group also pull in new people to be active. You may be able to get photocopies donated by local printing companies. Include www.codepink.org at the bottom of your flyer.
Encourage Participation: Once you have someone's name, email and phone number, let her know she is wanted and welcome. Put her on an email list and a phone list. Ask her to be in charge of something or host a meeting or make something for an event—there's nothing like direct involvement to encourage participation.
HAVE FUN! One of CODEPINK's greatest strengths is that people perceive us as having fun in our work—and we are!
The Law of Halves: Recruiting expectations should be realistic. If you contact 200 people, you will probably make contact with 100 people. Of those 100, 50 people will agree to come to a meeting or event. Involve others in continuing to make contacts.
Online Promotion: Use the website and social media: Post your event on local calendar websites. Use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media websites to reach out to people online.
In-Person Promotion: At any event you attend, publicize your event, and/or circulate petitions and have signup sheets available.
Highlight Local Connections: Make your issues meaningful to your local community; emphasize the local cost of wars and militarism: Check out www.nationalpriorities.org - it's a deep resource with many links and tools.
Work Collaboratively: Don't burn yourself out -- including more people in planning and actions will not only lighten your workload, but will also build capacity in other CODEPINK activists.
Follow up! Always make sure to re-connect and thanks that came to your event and enage them in the next action, event or resource!
Banner Making
Here is a simple guide to making a banner that you can use to freeway banner, do a banner drop, or carry to a rally!
Materials:
- canvas: 3 x 12 feet
- bleach (optional)
- rit dye, magenta (one pkg)
- masking or scotch tape
- exacto knife
- 1-1/2 rolls removable clear shelf liner paper
- Ruffle (optional)
- grommet kit* (optional)
- 14” cable ties (need two for each grommet)
- Small pair of scissors for removing ties (small scissors are less threatening to the police.
- Cut the canvas (or other fabric) to 3 x 12 feet (4 yards of 6 ft fabric makes two banners). Tearing works better than cutting.
- Bleach, wash and then dye the canvas. Don't leave the fabric in the bath for too long. Dark pink is harder to read.
- Paint the sign, using stencils if desired.
- Once dry, remove the stencil and apply ruffle (optional).
- Attach the grommets (optional).
- As soon as you arrive at your banner-hanging location, take photos for posting on the CODEPINK national website, your Facebook wall, twitter and elsewhere!
Depending upon the location you choose, you may not need the grommets. When the police come by, they will most likely instruct you on the law (no attaching banners). Explain that you just wanted to make sure the banner didn't fall onto the freeway.