Becoming a High Agency Person

A means of community worldbuilding

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One time I made a mixtape for a crush and put “Get On Your Feet” by Gloria Estefan on it, half as a decoy because what romantic mixtape would have this song on it, and half in earnest as a hype anthem.

I remember trying to see if I could believe that last part – did it hit? – and listened to it over and over again. In the end I had to accept that the song was unfortunately just corny to me. It winks at the hard times – I think it's true that we've all been through / Some nasty weather – but as its core directive, it only offers this: Get on your feet. Get up and make it happen.

These days it feels like multiple corners of my world only have this same premise to offer all of us. Get on your feet! Stand up and take some action. In the face of so much powerlessness, disconnection, and hopelessness, the moxie to do so feels in short supply.

I’ve written before about how flat, urgent messages to find your people and build community and movements and interdependent networks starting yesterday cause some of us to fumble and freak out with their urgency. We risk moving too quickly and with too much panic in our bloodstream, making us more likely to fail and bail when instead we need to keep showing up.

But I know I sometimes feel the blockage even earlier; the risk isn’t moving too quickly. The risk is whether or not I begin at all.

Whether we’re trying to create a giving circle or build relationships with our neighbors or organize an action or just gather some friends together for soup, we are all flush with how-tos and lists of actions and toolkits. None of these alone will flip the switch in us required to act.

That requires something else from each of us. I believe it is something deeply personal, distinctive as DNA, and subconscious to the point of being mysterious.

It is what bridges the gap between understanding the importance of something —> and doing it.

It might be something like agency, though there are many other things in this gap like privilege and access, and though this word might not be perfect.¹

What follows is an exploration of agency as a means of community worldbuilding: what it feels like when we experience it, how it shows up in community spaces and individual DIY practice, and where we might go to tap into this sensation more.

If we use agency as a prism to assess our daily activities, we might discover that it is not just about having enough information, trying enough toolkits, browsing or scrolling about it; it is about cultivating our own capacity to act.

It is about rushing towards the sources that stoke a sense of agency in us, so that we may tap into our own power and build things with other people as much as we dream about it.

Shrinking the gap between the idea and the realization of the idea

Agency is about our capacity to act, to desire something and move towards it, to experience our own power having tangible effect in the world. It is kind of just Free Will?

It feels like:
A very deep breath and the aliveness you feel after
Breakthrough
A warmth like pride in the chest
Magic (in that you do something you just imagined in your head)

Agency can be deadened or weakened and taken away by conditions set by people and systems and tech bent on sapping our power.

For the purpose of this piece, I’m thinking about agency on the (seemingly) smallest scale. I experience agency when I sew a button back onto my sweater that has been dangling for months. When I tidy up my clothes chair that I have been meaning to tidy for months. When I mail a friend a letter…that I have been meaning to mail for months. (There is a theme and the theme is “for months”.)

It is desiring something and acting on that desire so that it leaves your consciousness and now exists alongside you in the real world.

Agency occurs when: the gap between the idea and the realization of the idea is as small as possible.

What Agency Looks Like: Community Centers & Individual Practice

Let’s scale it up a bit and look at what agency looks like in the contexts of community centers and individual practice that touches other people.

High Agency Social Spaces

Discourse about civic life often centers on the benefits of social infrastructure (leagues/clubs/third spaces etc) creating opportunities to connect with other people, develop trust, and generate a sense of belonging.

There’s also the spiritual byproducts of these spaces:

• Leadership opportunities – from being a welcomer at the door to someone asked to host the next event

• Recruiting others – calling up three friends to join the next meeting, starting a phone tree, bringing a buddy along with you

• Effect on physical space or ephemera – Making signage, refreshing the bulletin board, creating an ugly flyer with your ok graphic design skills, arranging chairs

If you’ve ever belonged to a space that empowered this in you, you know how awesome it feels.

Strong community spaces create a chance for everybody to participate beyond simply showing up. They are high agency spaces.

A volunteer finds their onboarding confusing and makes a handbook so others can more easily navigate their own journeys.

An attendee sees a bottleneck happening at the event’s doors and jumps in to help folks navigate.

An artist wants to collaborate with others who share their identity or lived experience and curates a showcase of bands or visual artists like them.

Maybe these people were predisposed to leadership. But maybe the space itself got them so used to jumping in, lowered the bureaucratic barriers so much, baked it into the collective expectation so deeply, that it just became a learned sense of agency.

I think often now of Tara Raghuveer speaking about her experience organizing the KC Tenants Union:

“It feels so electric to be in a tenant meeting where people feel powerful for the first time ever. I think about so many instances of tenants saying to me: ‘I have never felt power in my body before this moment, before taking this collective action with my neighbors.’ And I’m hooked on that. There’s no better feeling in the world than getting to invite people into that.”

This doorway to power, open to hundreds of us to move through at the same time, is one reason of the many as to why we should join up with community spaces, collectives, unions, and organizing groups if we can find them. But what if we’re short on spaces like these?

Michael Pederson

Molding the world with your own hands

Some of the most inspiring examples of agency I can think of just spring from a single person or small group of people doing their own thing:

• Thinking up a special enough theme for a gathering (i.e. stay up all night, queer film club, baked potato party) that they invite others to join them

• Making a flyer about something they care about and stapling it everywhere – what about this requiem for a cut down tree? Or that time Kathleen Hanna printed out flyers about sexual harassment and handing them out in her old high school parking lot? Or fake flyers for (almost) no reason? Or DIY classifieds looking for: a band if you’re a drummer, other sci fi freaks like you, new friends to watch birds with?

• Offering love or support to your friends and actually meaning it – being there to text, meet up, have a phone call or video chat with.

• Interventions in everyday life, in general – I am a big old sucker for street art, for flyers to print out and put near your local Teslas and/or Tesla dealership, for bus stop benches installed by people when the city should have put them there, for DIY monuments to people killed by traffic violence when the city should have put them there.

• Organizing the power of others through giving circles, letter writing, meal trains!

• Offering up services and skills – like this person who tailors people’s clothes from a pushcart, or my dear friend Joel who repairs bikes on the corner each weekend, or people who just sit and offer to listen

• Creating zines, printed newsletters, classifieds – a house in a neighborhood near me distributes a printed “gazette” every month on a bookshelf and posts the articles online! You can collect resources, legal advice, event happenings, your favorite local spots to meditate – whatever you want!

• Gathering information and putting it somewhere – whether it is building a shareable calendar of film screenings or a spreadsheet of actions resisting fascism or putting together a classifieds listing for people who lost everything in the fires – collection, archival, and distribution is a beautiful thing.

Maybe these don’t always connect to a grander outcome that looks like collective liberation or solving loneliness on its face. But it’s about something deeper: having the idea, acting on it, seeing it live in the real world.

Do this enough times, and it’s impossible not to thrum with your own sense of power.

It’s impossible not to get hooked on the loop of actualizing something with other people, leading to more and more collective practice of agency.

And not to keep kicking this horse of an idea, but I believe there is something quite literally magical in realizing something you only once thought about. I am reminded of the scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once where Alpha Waymond suggests one absurd act after another to himself and Evelyn (intentional paper cuts, telling their attacker that she loves her). Each is a “statistically improbable action”, but that is what makes them so powerful as to jump to other universes. What is your statistically improbable action?

from the Everything Everywhere All At Once script

Who reminds you of your own power?

One hundred years ago at the start of this essay, I mentioned the idea that we should rush towards sources that remind us of our own agency, rather than sticking in an infinite consumptive loop.

These sources are what prime us to act on the wild ideas, tiny interventions, or compassionate offers that all link together to shape active, fascinating, participatory communities – and I am truly talking from the scale of a phone call to someone you love all the way to building a robust food redistribution network. It is all under the same tent because it all requires the same readiness from us, that capacity to have an idea —> act on the idea.

When I say sources I mean: media, stories, friends, art, physical space, your own personal practices. A friend who always has a weird gathering idea they want you to add to. An interview that connects you with a new hero who maybe led something 50 years ago that you want to update for our times. Sometimes I’m surprised at how much I get that “woah I’m a person with free will” feeling even when I cook and diverge from a recipe, when I stretch at night based on what it feels like my body needs, when I try improv quilting and have to trust my gut.

It’s the same reason I look to the artists in my life for motivation; they are worldbuilding and exercising their agency every single day in their creative practice.

All to say there is no one Guaranteed Resource to Make You Feel Your Own Agency. It is truly unique for all of us; maybe the news really does spark a sense of power in you, or having 40 tabs open to different community-building resources is the perfect fodder for your next thing.

Or maybe reading these sentences made you cringe because you just feel it in your body how these actually feel so heavy, and static, and demotivating. I am in this particular camp these days.

So rather than point to any one resource for stoking agency, it might look like a series of reflections on your own interior experience:

• Does this kind of thrill me?

• Does this give me a “it really can be that easy” type of feeling?

• Do I want to reach out to the person who wrote this/made this/led this and meet them/learn more from them?

• Does this immediately spark connections to other people, spaces, resources that I could wrangle to do something similar?

• Do I want to share this with others so they can feel the same spark?

• Did I do something like this once, maybe when I was younger, and it feels good to be reminded that it is still possible?

• Does this make me feel like the person I want to be?

• Do I get a little jealous because someone already did something I have been meaning to do?

• Will it take me away from social media, my phone, maybe the internet entirely?

• Does it require use of mediums or materials that I don’t work with as often? (i.e. a printed flyer, a phone call)

• Does it make me feel like another world is possible?

Maybe this list is 100% kooky and none of this essay makes sense, but when I think about the stories, people, art, and resources that genuinely inspire agency in me, these are some of the sensations I feel. I felt it even when writing the lists about community space and individual practice above; it is thrilling to think of what we are all capable of.

The sensations these resources spark are not: deadened, hopeless, preached to, not enoughness, needing to pay to access something I don’t already have.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting we ditch the news or rush through new projects without learning or treat anything as disposable while we flip over every rock for our sense of agency – this is just meant to be another frame through which we approach our inertia, bias against action, and intake. Maybe agency is not the issue for you and you actually need to slow down and learn more, or collaborate, or archive and storytell about some of the cool work you’re doing.

But if you’ve been feeling the powerlessness, the slogging through mud-ness, the itch to just do something but struggling to start, try this on for size with me.

We all deserve to tap into our own capacity to act. We all deserve that feeling of seeing something come to be that we once just imagined. We all deserve to hear the calls to action, even if they’re as corny as Get on your feet, even if our response isn’t the grandest one of all, even if it just touches one other person or moves an entire community of people, and feel ourselves already moving to act as we think: I could do this.

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RECENT SOURCES OF AGENCY FOR ME

• Risa Puno’s projects that combine games, physical builds, and experience design like this infinite monkey bar or tabletop game designed to process unresolved Asian femme rage or a wooden maze that requires collaboration to solve

• Bartertown, a game that imagines a world without money

• The Ministry of Love, a working group in the Lower East Side Collective in the 1990s whose sole purpose was to spread love. “They were to plan the parties. They were to meet people who came to our meetings. They were to call them later, check in with them. They were to make sure that our meetings didn’t go on too long. They were to make sure that we basically had fun.”

• New Communities, the Black farming cooperative established in the sixties. Really loved the interview diving deeper into the article which got at the different understandings of community land trusts between generations and niches (i.e. those who see CLTs as just being about housing.)

• Cutting my own hair

• Suay, a textile reuse center in Los Angeles that just floors me with the scale of their operations. So inspired by their events and just sent in something to be dyed in their Community Dye Bath just to see what it’s like!

• Garett’s list of 30 “lonely but beautiful actions” and the response it got that shows how hungry we are for this

• The Buffy prom my friend Dev organizes and this short and sweet interview of how it came to be + raise funds for the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Indiana

• “I was walking through my life and feeling sick that’s when / I started plotting out a course to getting free again” punk saves my life on a daily basis

Send me all your agency stoking resources plz

p.s. I had the honor of being interviewed by my friend Sam Pressler in the wonderful newsletter

Connective Tissue

where I also talk about agency! This interview was a positive challenge for me as I don't believe in "experts" in the realm of community building – either all of us or none of us are experts, we all have so much intuitive wisdom to bring to the table, etc etc – and I didn't want to position myself that way. But I'm proud of where we landed: with an exploratory, sometimes squishy, heart-forward look at what it takes to build things with other people.

The mysterious, magical, unpredictable human funk of being in community

💜

1. And maybe there are better words than agency. While writing this I also wondered about: power, confidence, bravery, rebellion, DIY spirit, that certain magical something. Swap it out for your own good word!