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Summary

Extinction Rebellion Germany’s affinity-group welcome pack — the German-language introduction to XR’s Bezugsgruppe (affinity group) model: roles, group agreement, care coordination, conduct at mass actions.

Body

The XR-DE Bezugsgruppen-Handbuch is the onboarding document for new affinity groups in the German XR chapter — covering how to form a Bezugsgruppe (the XR-DE term for an affinity group), what roles to fill within it, and how to coordinate with other Bezugsgruppen via the spokescouncil at a mass action [source: xr-de-bezugsgruppen-handbuch]. The handbook defines the Bezugsgruppe as the small, self-organising unit of trust — typically 5–15 people who know each other well enough to make collective decisions under stress, the same operational definition as the WRI handbook’s affinity group and Seeds for Change’s small-team convention [source: xr-de-bezugsgruppen-handbuch].

The handbook covers: role definition (Kontaktperson / contact person, Care-Role / wellbeing check-in, action lead, media liaison, jail liaison); group agreement (the binding internal document covering care needs, escalation triggers, what the group will and will not do, and what to do if a participant withdraws consent on the morning of the action); care coordination (who in the group is responsible for the emotional state of the others — not as therapy, but as attentive monitoring); conduct at mass actions (the spokescouncil mechanic, the police-liaison role, the legal-observer role, and how the Bezugsgruppe hands over to legal support if a participant is arrested) [source: xr-de-bezugsgruppen-handbuch].

The document is XR-DE’s local adaptation of XR UK’s affinity-group materials; it adds a German-jurisdiction note on Versammlungsrecht and explicitly addresses the care role, which is more central in the German XR tradition than in the UK one [source: xr-de-bezugsgruppen-handbuch]. License is XR-open-materials (verify) — treat as link-only.

Use it for

Onboarding a new XR-style affinity group in a DE-speaking context; setting up the group-agreement template; integrating the care role into an affinity group.

Related

• affinity-groups
• boycotts-and-strikes
• coalition-building
• constructive-programme
• dilemma-actions
• distributed-organizing
• escalation
• 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

• Confirm current edition; XR-DE’s site is updated after each major action wave.
• Verify the licence — XR-DE publishes most materials as CC-BY-SA but the handbook’s specific licence line needs to be confirmed.