By Jess Primavera, Special to the Blog
Something happened in North Seattle on March 28th that felt different from anything we’ve done before. And I’ve been trying to find the right words for it ever since.
On a bright Saturday morning, neighbors from Greenwood, Phinney Ridge, Green Lake, Lake City, Fremont, Ballard, Licton Springs, and honestly, too many neighborhoods to count, made their way to Maple Leaf Reservoir Park. They brought kids in wagons and elders in lawn chairs. They brought tamales and baked goods and hand-painted signs. They brought a giant monarch butterfly they’d been building in someone’s garage for weeks. They raised over $2200 for families in need. And they showed up, not because they were told to, not because an organization sent them a push notification, but because the people next to them asked them to come.
That’s what I want to talk about. Not just the day itself, but what it represents.
I’ve been thinking about a term I want to put out into the world: syndicated grassroots organizing.
A syndicated grassroots organization is community-led, volunteer-driven, and hyper-local at its core, but it belongs to something bigger. It’s part of a network of similar groups, sharing strategies, resources, and ultimately, national-scale impact. The power doesn’t flow down from a national office or a major donor. It flows up, from neighbors trusting neighbors, from people who know each other’s streets and kids and coffee orders deciding to act together.
What Phinneywood Neighbors Protecting Neighbors* has built is exactly this. We are not a chapter of anything. We are not waiting for instructions. We are a neighborhood organization that learned how to plug into a larger movement, and on March 28th, that looked like 25+ volunteers running a full-scale community gathering while 8 million people did something similar across every congressional district in the country.
That number is worth sitting with. Rebecca Solnit, writing about this year’s No Kings in [www.meditationsinanemergency.com/eight-million-protestors-and-no-kings-the-case-for-showing-up-2/]Eight Million Protestors and No Kings: The Case for Showing Up, points out that this wasn’t just the biggest No Kings yet. It was structurally different. More distributed. Deeper into non-urban areas. Driven not just by outrage but by infrastructure. Researchers surveying marchers found that far more participants heard about the event through an organization than in previous years. People aren’t just showing up anymore. They’re being mobilized by the groups they’ve joined, the networks they’ve built, the neighbors who texted them the week before.
That’s us. That’s what we’ve been building.
The Pre-Rally was designed around a simple idea: belonging-forward, not rage-forward.
We didn’t open the day with a speaker listing everything that’s broken. We opened it with a poem, written and read by a local artist. With a song about belonging. With craft tables where kids could make flower crowns and protest signs. With tamales from Aurora Avenue vendors and a bake sale where you paid what you could. At the center of it all stood a monarch butterfly installation, collaborative, still in progress, with people adding their own paper butterflies throughout the morning. That image felt like the right one for this moment. Something fragile and migratory and communal, built by many hands, impossible to finish alone.
We also built something into the day that I’m really proud of: a two-track model. At 11:30 AM, some folks headed downtown to Cal Anderson to join the citywide march. Others stayed, for extended craft time, a community sharing circle, quieter music, more conversation. Both tracks were named and honored equally from the stage. Because not everyone can march. Not everyone should have to. And the work of building community doesn’t stop when the crowd heads to the light rail.
The people who stayed were not the leftovers. They were the point.
Tim Hjersted, writing in response to critics who dismiss large protests as feel-good theater, put it plainly: where the cynic sees a spectacle, the organizer sees thousands of people ready to get involved. A chance to connect them with local groups. A chance to deepen engagement and build the relationships that every form of deeper resistance depends on.
That’s exactly what Saturday was. We had a Get Involved table. We had QR codes for mutual aid networks, housing support, and yes, our summer plans. We had neighbors from Fremont signing up other neighbors from Fremont. We had people who had never considered themselves organizers walk up, ask what we needed, and say I can help.
That is what syndicated grassroots looks like in real life. Small in scale, enormous in its potential to connect.
Phinneywood Neighbors Protecting Neighbors exists because people in Greenwood and Phinney Ridge looked at what was happening to their neighbors and refused to feel helpless. We organized into zones. We built Signal channels. We trained in de-escalation. We stood up a mutual aid network, and then we made a block party out of it.
The No Kings Pre-Rally was not our endpoint. It was a reflection of something that’s been quietly taking root on our streets for months, neighbors choosing each other, over and over again, in every small way that adds up.
If you want to be part of what comes next, we’d love to have you. Whether you have time, skills, a truck, a garage, a knack for logistics, or simply a willingness to show up, there is a place for you here.
This is what community looks like.
join.phinneywoodprotect.org (will redirect your to our Signal channel intake)
*Greenwood Neighbors Protecting Neighbors merged with Phinney Ridge Rapid Response and is now Phinneywood Neighbors Protecting Neighbors.