Hi. I’m Evo Terra, one of the organizers of #RhRR, or the Rush-hour Resistance Rally. Or rallies, rather, as we currently have five each week! Perhaps you’ve seen us during your morning commute?

I’ve been organizing (loosely, you’ll learn) hyperlocal events since the early 00s, primarily for fun but sometimes with a purpose. At the end of this article, you’ll be able to read more about my antics and the work I’ve done. But let’s get to the meat, shall we?

The following 11 tips are designed to help you take direct action by starting a hyperlocal event:

1. Just start. You don’t need to wait for “critical mass.” You start with yourself. Ask a few friends to join you if that helps. A whopping three people attended our first #RhRR event, and now we have dozens showing up each week—in multiple locations!
2. Make it convenient for you. I can, and often do, walk or bike to the RhRR on the Melrose Curve, because I live in the neighborhood. If it’s inconvenient for you, it’s easy to find excuses not to attend. AND YOU NEED TO ATTEND!
3. Be consistent. Pick a recurring day, time, location, and duration. And make sure you or one of our co-organizers is always there at that time for that duration. That’s respectful of the people who also want to attend the event. And it also starts to build recognition with regular passersby.
4. Get help from your attendees. While organizing events in my style is quite simple, you will need support to attend and welcome folks when you can’t be there. We have a small Signal group chat where a small number of us collaborate.
5. Lean on larger groups. RhRR received outreach help early on from some local Indivisible and 50501 chapters. Because our goals are aligned, they included our events in their newsletters and let us talk about them in their own group chats. And we’re able to post our events to their Mobilize.us page!
6. Have a website. Yes, a website. Websites are dead-simple to make these days and are super cheap to host. No, you can’t rely on corporate-owned social media as your website. Your event needs its own site, even if that site just gives info about the event and an email address. I used Canva to make the first website for RhRR in about an hour.
7. Don’t use your personal email address. I’m not worried about my privacy, as I live a loud online life. But I am worried about email overload, and having a separate email for all the projects I’m involved with helps with that. Each of them forwards to my main inbox, but with labels and other organizing opportunities I can apply to keep my sanity. YMMV.
8. Connect with every attendee. I try to introduce myself to every new person I see at the event and, if they’re amicable, I get a good email address from them. This allows me to send the occasional email to all attendees, keeping RhRR fresh in their minds. DO NOT SPAM! And don’t sell or distribute the email address to anyone else.
9. Have a message and a mission. Many of your attendees won’t know where to start, so help them understand what you hope to achieve by making a simple write-up for your website. See the first few sections of RhRR’s FAQ page to see what we did: https://rhrr.us/#faqs
10. Respect and embrace individual efforts. Everyone has different motivations, so I don’t dictate what signs or messages attendees should bring. And no, I’m not too worried about attracting “the wrong crowd,” whatever that means. That’s the beauty of staying local: it’s less attractive to the more opportunistic groups who prefer to glom onto larger events.
11. Good trouble only. Yes, you want to get the attention of those who pass by your event. But you can do that without doing more aggressive and disruptive things, like blocking traffic or yelling “Nazi scum!” at every Cybertruck that passes by. (Though, if the jackboot fits…) Follow the law, stay on the sidewalk, don’t antagonize people as they get off the bus, etc. Wheaton’s Law applies in all things.

As promised, I end with my own history with starting hyperlocal events:

• I organized my first resistance movement when I was in grade school. No kidding. It was an effort to get us better school lunches. It didn’t work, but it did get my best friend/co-conspirator and me an audience with the principal and superintendent. Not for swats that time!
• In 2005, I helped organize PodCamp AZ, which started local and small but grew much bigger in subsequent years, attracting people from out of state—and some from out of the country!
• A couple of years later, my wife and a friend of ours started #evfn, or East Valley Friday Nights. This “Tweetup” was purely a social event held every Friday from 6–8 p.m. at a venue with good craft beer selections. It was just the three of us for several weeks. But over a few years, that grew to nearly 100 attendees.
• When I lived in Bangkok in 2017, I started a local social meetup for expat podcasters in the city. But thanks to a grandchild, we had to move back to Phoenix not long after that, so it stayed small. I hope it’s still going!
• In 2018, I started the PHX Podcast Club, which closely resembled the one in Bangkok. It’s still going and attracts podcasters from or visiting the greater Phoenix area. We meet every third Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.
• And on 9 Apr 2025, I started the Rush-hour Resistance Rally. Three of us the first week, five the next… and now we get dozens. And we’ve spun off a few more chapters just in the last couple of weeks!

So there you have it, I hope this short list of tips and my history inspires you to start a hyperlocal event near you. It’s incredibly rewarding, I assure you.

Cheers!

E.

Evo Terra