Your 2025 Activism Guide is Here!
Download Below and Share Widely!
In 2018, Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said the best way to win was to "flood the zone." So far Trump 2.0 has adopted that strategy with an influx of harmful executive orders. Our goal is to counter the flood-the-zone strategy by keeping us as focused as a laser beam on what we can control. Our institutions that act as checks on Trump’s power (the judiciary, Congress, states, and advocacy organizations) are working like machines to counter Trump 2.0 and succeeding in many cases. As ordinary citizens, we must strengthen those checks by empowering them and reminding them they answer to us.
To help us all stay focused and take action, we created a guide that is designed to ask you questions that will help you create an action plan for 2025. The first version of this guide (V 1.0) will not discuss two very important issues (the 2026 election and messaging) but will instead focus on immediate needs and the basics of activism: harnessing our leverage as citizens to influence our MOCs (members of Congress), state officials, and other institutions. Later versions of the guide will provide additional sections to expand your activism.
FIND THE GUIDE HERE (note: download it, don’t fill it out on your web browser!):
How to Use The Guide:
We are making this guide a fillable PDF that you can continuously update. You should first fill out the PDF once through (est. time 3 hrs). The guide will take you through:
Research questions you need to ask and answer before creating your plan, broken down by checks on executive power (Congress, state governments, the judiciary, etc.)
Creating goals, tasks and deadlines
Creating a calendar
Each week we’ll write a post on Substack (subscribe) on call content for the following week. You’ll then go into your guide and type the issues into your call scripts and pull up the 5calls.org scripts on that topic. If there isn’t a 5calls.org script on an important issue, we’ll send a sample out in the blast. You can then save your guide for that week with a distinct name (e.g., “Guide V1.0_3_ 6_2025”). The guide also has a section at the end for you to take your own notes. The guide is intended to serve as your activism hub. (est. time each week to update: 10 minutes).
What’s the Time Commitment?
Filling out the guide hopefully not more than 2-3 hours of work. We understand if that sounds like a lot, but once you’ve answered these questions you’ve done the CORE work you need to do. Additionally, the most important thing at the moment is to fill out your plan for the first three checks (Senator 1, Senator 2, House Rep), so if you want to start there you can, but filling out the whole guide should be your aim in this month. Our hope is that once you fill this guide out, you’ll only have to spend about 10 minutes/day on activism work (unless you choose to do more!).
Lastly, remember to harness your networks. You can fill this out with friends and family and share on social media!
XO,
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