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Summary

Greenpeace USA’s standard role-and-logistics grid for boat actions, climbs, and banner drops — a single-page sign-up sheet that doubles as a run-of-show for a small-team direct action.

Body

Greenpeace USA’s NVDA roles-and-logistics grid is the operational single-pager used across their US actions — boat blockades, banner hangs, building climbs, office occupations [source: gp-usa-roles-logistics]. The grid pre-defines the roles that have to be filled for any small-team action: action lead (overall command, accountable for the decision to proceed), deputy lead (assumes command if the lead is arrested or injured), police liaison (the only person who talks to police during the action — sole channel of communication), media liaison (sole spokesperson on the public-mic channel), legal liaison (coordinates with the on-call lawyer, knows the legal observer’s location), medic (trained first-aider, not a doctor), safety officer (watches for physical hazards: traffic, weather, structural), and arrestees support (the role that handles the immediate post-arrest phone tree) [source: gp-usa-roles-logistics].

The grid is paired with a logistics sheet that pre-prints: legal observer’s phone, bail fund’s phone, family emergency contact list, and a “do not say to police without lawyer present” reminder. The single-pager is filled in by name at the staging area before the action — every participant knows their own role and one or two backup roles, and the sheet is photographed and distributed to the legal observer, the bail fund, and the lawyer on call [source: gp-usa-roles-logistics].

The grid is a Reference-tier practitioner artifact — useful for any small-team action but not a substitute for the longer action-planning process (use BFGA or ANV-COPA fiches for that). Treat as link-only; the document is internal to Greenpeace USA and the licence is not stated. Reproduce by paraphrase when designing your own grid.

Use it for

Designing a single-page role sheet for a 5–15-person direct action; training new action participants on what each role actually does; coordinating pre-action with lawyers and bail funds.

Related

• affinity-groups
• boycotts-and-strikes
• dilemma-actions
• escalation
• framing-and-narrative
• leadership-development
• methods-of-nonviolent-action
• noncooperation
• nonviolent-direct-action
• one-to-ones
• pillars-of-support
• public-narrative
• structure-tests
• the-tactic-star

Open Questions

• Document is internal to Greenpeace USA — confirm whether a public-facing version exists.
• The grid was designed for “small-team dramatic action” (boat, climb); less useful for mass-mobilisation or sit-blockades (see XR arrestee pack for those).