How to Run Your Second Meeting

Your first meeting got people in the room. Your second meeting is where a room full of people starts becoming a group. This is the meeting where you go deeper with the folks who showed up, decide together what problem you’re going to take on, and start figuring out who might carry which piece of the work.

A note before you start: the goal of this meeting is not to walk out with a fully staffed leadership team and a signed campaign plan. The goal is to build real relationships, get clear on a shared problem, and surface who’s interested in taking on responsibility. Commitment comes later, in one-on-one conversations. Interest is what you’re after today.

Prepare for Your Meeting

Personally invite everyone who came to the first meeting. Pull out your sign-in sheet and reach out individually: a text, a call, a short personal email. A blast to the whole list is fine as a backup, but people come back because someone asked them to, not because they got a newsletter. If someone who attended the first meeting can’t make this one, tell them you’ll follow up so they don’t feel dropped.

Ask a few members to each bring one new person. Your second meeting is a great moment to grow. Give people a specific ask (“Can you invite one neighbor or coworker?”) rather than a general one, and give them something easy to forward.

Set your agenda and your objectives. Use the Know / Feel / Do framework:

Know: What problem does this group care most about and what roles does a functioning group need?
Feel: Connected to each other and like their own experience matters to what the group does next.
Do: Sign up to learn more about a role and show up to the next meeting or first action.

Assign roles for the meeting itself. At minimum, a facilitator to keep things moving and draw people out, and a scribe to capture the problem ideas and the interest list. If you’re meeting virtually or in a space with tech, add someone to troubleshoot. Consult the list in section 4 below as roles evolve in your group.

Prepare a role menu in advance. Don’t ask an open-ended “what does our group need?” and hope. Come with a short written list of the roles a group like yours typically needs, with a one-sentence description of each and a rough time commitment. You’ll adapt it live, but people can only raise their hand for something they can picture. (See the sample list below.)

Bring a sign-in sheet and something to write on that everyone can see. A whiteboard, a flip chart, a shared doc on screen. The problem-identification conversation works much better when people can see the ideas accumulate.

Revisit your group norms. If you set them at your first meeting, plan to briefly restate them. If you didn’t, build in ten minutes to agree on them now — how decisions get made, how you’ll treat each other, what people can expect from the group. It’s much easier to do this before you have a disagreement than after.

Running Your Meeting

1. Open by naming why you’re here

Welcome everyone, especially anyone new. Restate the goals plainly: get to know each other better, pick a problem to work on, and start figuring out who does what. Restate your group norms and Indivisible’s commitment to nonviolence.

2. Go deeper on relationships

Your first meeting probably used a quick icebreaker. This one should go a layer deeper. Break into pairs — mixing people who don’t already know each other, and pairing new attendees with returning ones — and give them 10–12 minutes total, about five or six minutes each way, on a question like:

What’s something happening in this community that makes you angry, worried, or hopeful?
What brought you to this work, and what keeps you coming back?
Tell me about a time you saw people work together and actually change something.

This isn’t filler. Paired conversations are how people build the relationships that keep them showing up when the work gets tedious, and they surface the raw material for the next section of your agenda. Ask people to listen for what their partner cares about; they’ll be reporting that back.

Then bring everyone together and ask each person to share, briefly, one thing they heard from their partner. Introducing each other rather than themselves builds connection fast and keeps any one person from monopolizing the floor.

3. Identify a problem you want to work on together

You just heard a room’s worth of concerns. Now narrow them.

Name the problems. Have your scribe capture what came up in the report-back, and open the floor for anything that didn’t get said. Push for specifics. “Healthcare” isn’t a problem you can organize around; “our county commission is about to close the only clinic on the east side” is.

Explain the difference between a problem and an issue. A problem is broad and permanent: housing, democracy, immigration. An issue is a specific, concrete piece of that issue that a specific person or body has the power to fix. Groups get stuck when they try to organize against a problem. They get traction when they pick an issue.

Sort the list together. Walk through the options against a few questions:

Is it widely felt? Do lots of people in your community experience this?
Is it deeply felt? Do people care enough to do something about it?
Is it specific? Can you say in one sentence what you want to change?
Is there a clear decision-maker? Is there a Member of Congress, city council, school board, state legislator, or agency that could actually act?
Could this group plausibly move it? Be honest about your current size and capacity. A first win, even a small one, is worth more than an ambitious loss.

Narrow to one or two. You don’t need to finalize a campaign today. What you need is enough agreement that a small group can go do some research and come back with a proposal. If the group is split, that’s useful information — note both, and assign someone to dig into each.

Watch for who’s being left out. The issue you pick shapes who feels like this group is for them. Be deliberate about whose experience is in the room and whose isn’t, and be honest when the answer is “we don’t know — we should go ask.”

4. Figure out what roles you need, and who’s interested

Introduce this as: a group runs on a handful of jobs, and if they all live with one or two people, this group will burn out and stall. Then walk through your role menu. A starting list for most groups:

Meeting lead / facilitator — plans and runs the agenda
Communications — sends the emails, texts, and reminders that get people to show up
Member welcome — follows up with new folks and makes sure nobody falls through the cracks
Notes and data — keeps the member list current and captures decisions
Events and logistics — space, supplies, sign-in sheets, accessibility
Social media — posts photos and updates so people outside the group can see you exist
Research — digs into the problem you just picked and reports back
Partnerships — connects with other local groups and organizations

Ask the group what’s missing from the list and what’s not needed yet. Then make the ask — and make it a low bar:

“I’m not asking anyone to commit tonight. I’m asking who’s interested in learning more about one of these. If you put your name down, what happens next is a 20-minute conversation with me, not a lifetime appointment.”

Pass around a sheet, or use a shared doc, with each role and space for names. Multiple names per role is good — that’s a team, not a competition. It’s also fine for someone to write their name next to three things.

Say out loud that nobody is locked in. People decline roles because they’re afraid of being stuck with them forever. Naming that fear directly gets more hands up.

5. Close with something concrete

Confirm the date, time, and place of your next meeting before anyone leaves.
Name the specific next steps and who’s doing them — including who’s researching the problem and who’s following up with the interest list.
If your group is ready, commit to one small, concrete action between now and the next meeting.
Remind people to bring someone new next time.

Next Steps After Your Second Meeting

Follow up individually with everyone who put their name down. This is the single most important thing you do after this meeting, and it’s the step that’s easiest for groups to skip. Within a week, have a short one-on-one with each interested person: what drew them to that role, what they’d need to feel good taking it on, what they can realistically give. This conversation — not the sign-up sheet — is where interest becomes commitment. People say yes to people.

Send out notes to everyone, including folks who couldn’t make it. Include the problems you discussed, where you landed, the role list, and the next meeting date. Anyone who missed the meeting should be able to read the notes and know how to plug in.

Reach out to the people who didn’t come back. A short, non-guilt-inducing message — “we missed you, here’s what we did, here’s when we’re meeting next” — brings more people back than you’d expect.

Let the research group do its work. Give whoever volunteered to dig into your problem a clear deadline and a clear ask: come back to the next meeting with what you learned and a recommendation.

Template meeting agenda

Intro — 10 minutes

Welcome and introductions, especially for new attendees
Group norms and commitment to nonviolence
Meeting overview and goals
Logistics and accessibility

Deepening relationships — 25 minutes

Paired conversations (10–12 minutes)
Report-back: introduce your partner and one thing they care about (12–15 minutes)

Identifying our problem — 30 minutes

Capture the problems that surfaced in the report-back, plus any others
Issue vs. problem: what makes something organizable
Sort against your criteria: widely felt, deeply felt, specific, clear decision-maker, winnable for a group your size
Narrow to one or two, and assign research

What our team needs — 20 minutes

Walk through the role menu – if needed use this more extensive list
What’s missing? What’s not needed yet?
Interest sign-up — interest, not commitment

Close-out — 5 minutes

Next steps and who’s doing them
Next meeting date, time, and place
Reminder to bring someone new