An affinity group is usually a small group of activists (usually from 3-20) who work together on direct action.
Affinity groups are organized in a non-hierarchical manner, usually using consensus decision making, and are often made up of trusted friends. They provide a method of organization that is flexible and decentralized.
Affinity groups can be based on a common ideology (e.g., anarchism, pacifism), a shared concern for a given issue (e.g., anti-nuclear, anti-war) or a common activity, role or skill (e.g., legal support, medical aid, black blocs). Affinity groups may have either open or closed membership, although the latter is far more common.
Read more about Affinity Group: History, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words affinity and/or group:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)