It took no time at all, in the final weeks of 2016, for Vermonters with an activism streak to recognize the peril wrought by the recent elections and to start organizing to confront it. Donald Trump would soon become president. He had started his campaign with racist statements about immigrants and had made disparaging remarks about women along the way.
In Calais, Vermont, however, it was another issue — climate change — that provided an organizing opportunity, which evolved into a branch of the nationwide Indivisible movement, one of Trump’s most effective adversaries.
“There was a group of us working in town already,” local resident Ginny Sassaman recalls. “We called ourselves the Calais Climate Action Team. We were setting up park-and-rides and doing whatever environmental projects we could. Trump had called climate change a hoax, whereas we thought action on climate change was urgent.
“I checked in with my friends and we agreed: ‘We need to do something.’ We already had the group and we weren’t new to advocacy.”
Using Front Porch Forum, they announced a meeting at the Maple Corner Community Center. Sassaman recalls watching one person arrive who was obviously despondent. “But he was standing up straight when he walked out, and I thought, ‘We found the secret sauce. We’re going to work together and we’re going to fight back.’”
Still, as the group focused on its new agenda they struggled with the issue of identity. They weren’t just a climate-action group anymore. Who, and what, were they?
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., former congressional staffers Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg were gaining attention for a manual they had compiled for resisting the lawless authoritarianism Trump and his movement aspired to. It emphasized localized, civic action, for they had seen the influence that an insistent constituency can have on elected representatives.
“Together,” they concluded in their guide, “we are indivisible.”
A movement formed around them, and the Calais group identified with its objectives and its structure.
“It’s not top-down,” Sassaman explains. “Local groups decide what issues they want to pursue, what actions to take, all within the context of nonviolence.” Indivisible provides research, guidance, and technical tools. And it’s a force multiplier: inspiration and collaboration among the groups creates regional and national impact.
“So,” Sassaman says, “we decided, ‘Let’s just be Indivisible Calais.’”
Down in the Valley
The Women’s March of Jan. 21, 2017 was not tied to the nascent Indivisible movement but it demonstrated the power of positivity in opposing a dark regime. Fifteen thousand people flooded into Montpelier (there were 500,000 in Washington, D.C., with estimates up to one million there, plus demonstrations all over the nation and the globe).
“Right after the Women’s March,” says Jeb Bouchard, of Moretown, “a Front Porch Forum post went out, and this woman said, ‘Hey! Is anyone else feeling a little freaked out? Do you want to get together and talk about it?’ And of course we did.”
Half a dozen women met at the Red Hen Bakery in Middlesex; some had read the Indivisible guide. Soon Indivisible Mad River Valley formed, with Bouchard and Dana Goss as leaders. They would focus on elections. Goss began working in that realm with other activists in Montpelier, and eventually separated from the Mad River Valley group to form Lean Left Vermont, which has become, in Sassaman’s words, “the brain trust” for identifying desirable candidates in important swing states and helping Indivisibles assist them.
For while Indivisibles have gained recognition for their public displays — honk-and-waves, banner drops over the interstates, candlelight vigils, and their role in major demonstrations — their work behind the scenes is critical.
“We became a postcarding group,” says Bouchard, of Mad River Valley. Lean Left identifies upcoming elections, often in obscure locations — even, sometimes, for seats in another state’s legislature — where a victory could flip a district, advance democracy, or thwart authoritarianism. Lean Left provides names, addresses, and short scripts from groups on the ground in those places, and then Vermont Indivisibles start writing. Research indicates that postcarding campaigns can make a difference in turnout between three and eight percent. Indivisibles here believe their work has contributed to victories in Iowa, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maine, and elsewhere.
“We’ve written thousands and thousands of postcards,” says Sassaman, in Calais. Not all have been for candidates. Some have urged U.S. senators to oppose Trump’s cabinet picks, or to thank senators or representatives for certain votes.
For those contacts, the phone works just as well. Sassaman laughingly recalls receiving a desperate plea from someone in former Sen. Patrick Leahy’s office. “Please stop! We’re glad you’re thankful but this is getting in the way of our doing our jobs.”
It’s one of the central tenets of Indivisible’s playbook: Thank politicians when they do the right thing; also let them know when they don’t. They’ll know they’re being watched.
State and Main
Postcarding led to the creation of a sorely missing Indivisible group in Montpelier, the state’s political epicenter. It was 2019, three years after the Calais and Mad River Valley organizations had started. Miriam Hansen, who lives in East Montpelier, had been writing postcards with Indivisible Calais.
“I’m a Jew from Montreal,” she says. “I grew up, like a lot of Jews of my generation, steeped in the Holocaust. So when Trump got elected I knew I had to do something.”
She began enlisting people from her Bone Builders workshop at the Montpelier Senior Activity Center. “After a while,” she says, “I had 26 people writing postcards, through me, for Indivisible Calais. And I thought, why isn’t there a group in Montpelier? So I asked Lise (Markus, a reliable and supportive presence for Hansen’s undertakings) to go for coffee and I said, ‘I’m going to start an activist group.’ That was our beginning.”
It wasn’t an Indivisible — that took a few years. But Hansen and Markus attracted a network, Markus largely providing the communications that kept people involved, Hansen brainstorming new ideas.
“I started doing a Giving Circle,” Hansen says. “I write two or three emails a month and exhort people to donate, mostly for down-ballot elections in swing states. I’m laser-focused on it, because I’m interested in winning! Every time we win, it has a ripple effect; it gives courage, and hope, and people will flock to do stuff. It’s when people get depressed and feel sidelined … That’s the danger zone.”
Calais and other Indivisibles have joined up.
Hansen has also tapped into her Quebecois roots and worked to heal the wounds caused by Trump’s offensive remarks about annexing Canada. Last August she recruited Indivisible members to participate in a multi-state “Friends Across the Border” event. They would gather in a field in Berkshire, the Canadians and Americans separated by a ribbon denoting the border. Hansen was disappointed in the turnout (26 people from our side), but moved by the results.
“We weren’t supposed to touch each other across the border,” she says, “but by the end people were hugging and crying. It was very emotional,”
Montpelier Indivisible has, in fact, been visible, holding exuberant honk-and-waves at the corner of State and Main streets; along with Indivisible Calais they held candlelight vigils on the Statehouse lawn for Minnesota ICE victims Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
But they’re also in transition. Hansen has stepped back from leadership after a whirlwind six years, and the trio of Lise Markus, Polly Nichol, and Donna Goodrich has taken the reins. The start of the new year seemed like a good time to check out their members’ interest and commitment, so they called a public meeting for Jan. 17. More than 50 people showed up and made decisions about their priorities for 2026; they added or reinforced teams to lead on practical issues such as fundraising and coordinating with ACLU and VPIRG (which are engaged in legal and political resistance to Washington’s power grabs). They decided to hold monthly meetings.
And, notably, they created a team to develop a Rapid Response network should ICE become more active in Vermont. With the mayhem in Minneapolis in the background and the midterm elections looming ahead, the Montpelier meeting seems to have responded to what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the fierce urgency of now.”
Secret Sauce
The “secret sauce” Ginny Sassaman identified at Calais’s exploratory meeting in 2016 meant incorporating joy into a struggle against oppression. When Trump kicked off his presidency with his infamous Muslim ban in 2017, Indivisible Calais responded with a fundraiser — a Beatles singalong at the now-closed Bagito’s in Montpelier, led by her husband Bob Sassaman’s group, The Laddies. Profits went to the ACLU, which was fighting to overturn the ban.
Calais has kept at it, raising money through music for the Sierra Club, the People’s Health and Wellness Clinic, the Montpelier Food Pantry, and other nonprofits. (There’s a video from 2017 of Montpelier’s Patti Casey, accompanied by Susannah Blachly, at an Indivisible Calais benefit, singing her song “We Are Stronger Than That,” which has become something of an anthem for the resistance movement.)
This illustrates an important aspect of the Indivisible movement: its commitment to community.
“We’re always making decisions around Vermont groups that could use support,” says Judi Daly, of Indivisible Mad River Valley. “We wanted to respond to the immigration crackdown, so we said, ‘Let’s raise money for the Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund.’ We’ve also done it for Hannah’s House (a nonprofit promoting mental health for children and families), we’ve raised blankets for the Good Samaritan Shelter, and more.”
“This relates to staying positive,” adds Bouchard. “People love their community; they want to feel they’re not alone.”
“You need to continue to touch joy in some way,” says Montpelier’s Lise Markus. “Because it’s going to be a long road. And some people say it’s going to get worse.”
Him Again
Trump’s chaotic first term was a period of skill-building for the Indivisible network. They held workshops to learn skills more technical than postcarding: phone banking and text banking to work more effectively with campaigns recommended by Lean Left, adapting to technologies advanced by the national Indivisible hub.
As the 2020 elections neared, Mad River Valley held a Resistance Café every Thursday on Zoom. “I like to say that Vermont text bankers did about 1.5 million texts in about three months,” says Bouchard. “It was exhausting. Then, after the election — and this was my heartbreak — a lot of people said, ‘We won! We don’t have to do this again ever!’ And they went away.”
“Not all of us!” says Daly.
The Biden years failed to quiet MAGA rumblings, and Trump, of course, never let up. Texting, postcarding, parading with witty banners, Indivisible devotees kept the engine running. They even hit the road. During midterm elections, and as the 2024 presidential election neared, Vermonters knocked on doors in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Ginny Sassaman and Tisa Rennau (from Indivisible Mad River Valley) were among them
But on Nov. 6, 2024, Americans woke to the news that Trump would be returning to the White House.
“We had to grieve,” recalls Ginny Sassaman. “And rage. And somehow find our footing.” Again, her group turned to music. “Because music heals. Fascist regimes — one of the things they’ve always done is try to make people feel alone and isolated. We can’t have that! Look around! See these other people! You’re not alone! You’re not alone!”
Then, shortly before March 1, 2025, Rennau was tipped off by a journalist that Vice President J.D. Vance was bringing his family to ski at Sugarbush. She and her group revved up quickly, placing an ad in Waitsfield’s Valley Reporter and a notice on Front Porch Forum.
“This was just after Vance and Trump beleaguered Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office,” Rennau says, “and people were desperate for an opportunity to speak out against this regime.”
More than 1,000 protesters flocked into the Valley, lining the streets and carrying signs, their outrage fueled by exuberance at this golden opportunity to express it together. National and international press showed up, and Rennau and the other leaders were interviewed by BBC and Canadian broadcasters. And, for Ukrainian TV.
Indivisible had never vanished; the Calais, Montpelier, and Mad River Valley branches remained diligent, but others had dropped off. According to one source, Vermont was down to five Invisibles by the end of Biden’s era. But Trump’s reelection, and Vance’s vehement rejection in the Mad River Valley relit the fuse. There are now 36 Indivisible groups in Vermont, and more than 2,000 nationally.
They are not a movement unto themselves. In Vermont. Lean Left is doing similar work, as is 50501 (50 states, 50 protests, one movement), Third Act, and other groups. Indivisible Mad River Valley, Bouchard asserts, is zeroed in on this year’s crucial midterm elections. Memberships have increased, their websites are informative, and all three groups send weekly emails to hundreds of recipients listing one opportunity after another for people to get involved.
And now comes No Kings 3.0, scheduled for March 28. No Kings 2.0, last October, drew seven million participants. The goal this time is to smash that record. Calais, Mad River, and Montpelier Indivisibles will provide information as the day nears. Organizers hope to make it a nonviolent but irrefutable statement that this country will not accept American fascism.
And then, Tisa Rennau envisions, there may be room for another quest.
“How do we find common ground?” she wonders. “How do we learn to respect someone’s opinion without vilifying them? It’s getting harder and harder. But if we just put out negativity we’re going to foster more negativity. We have to find compassion. We have to put out good.”
