Hey there, it’s great that you want to do more!
First off: don’t try to help 24 hours a day. Save time for yourself and what keeps your life on track, save time for the people you love. A lot of activisits care passionately about what they do and make the mistake of bburning themselves our trying to do everything. Try to avoid that. You are of much more use to your community when you are doing activism AND have a happy, fun life full of carefree moments. That way you can actually sustain what you’re doing for decades instead of a few months.
Now, about doing stuff. Let’s start with the protest, since that’s where you already have some experience. You can probably expand your role there. Protests are a lot of work. People need to do the paper work, design and distribute the promotion materials, coordinate the first aid crew, check the area for dangerous points on the protest route, answer questions on the facebook page, provide sleeping places for organizers who can not travel home after the protest and or course someone needs to prepare a meal for all those activists so they can carry on their work into the night. (Good food keeps spirits up in bad times so I always say: if you can cook, you can be a fantastic activist.
You’re willing to get up early to do the groceries for an event that starts at 9 am? You are invaluable). Contact the people who are organizing protests and ask if you can help them.
If they do not want your help or you do not want to work with them, you can also support a protest by bringing lots of extra signs for people who did not bring their own sign (I often make a cut out of a slogan that I know will be popular and then spray-paint that on 50 large pieces of thick paper or old cardboard, quickly creating 50 basic signs), bringing food and drinks to give away, etc. Look around at your next protest and think of how you can make people feel happy, safe and motivated. That may be as easy as bringing lots of bottled water on a hot day and handing them out.
Now, if you wanna do activism outside a protest, there are many different ways and they depend on what you like, what you’re good at, what your boundaries are, etc. I’m gonna quote madgastronomer
A few things activists do:
Legal action (lawsuits)
Political lobbying (getting laws made or changed)
Service (directly aiding the oppressed)
Fundraising
Education within the movement
Workshopping (gathering with other activists to discuss solutions)
Creating and running events (conferences, meetings)
Creating safe space
Consciousness raising (internal to the movement)
Awareness raising (external to the movement)
Organizing (getting oppressed people together to speak together, to amplify the message)
Solidarity work (getting people from different oppressed groups together to support one another)
External education (the kind people on Tumblr keep demanding everyone do)
Testifying (telling one’s own story, to those both inside and outside the movement)
Writing
Public speaking
Academic research
Resource compilation
Building and participating in support organizations
Phone banking
Just talking to friends
A great many things that are specific to individual movements, whether animal rescue, making AIDS quilt panels, writing harassment policies, being a clinic escort, and far more
Think about what you can do and look for people who are already doing it and may need help, or friends willing to do things with you.
Do you have no skill at activism but you throw great parties? Then fund raising could be your thing. Do you like physically doing stuff without too much intellectual theory? Directly aiding the oppressed in things like food drives and clothing collections could be your thing. Got mad research skills? Then debunking the bullshit in media and police statements could be your thing. Etc. Got language skills? many organizations need translators and you can often do this work at home (great if you live in the middle of nowhere).
There is a lot to do and often the first step is finding people who are already doing it. Simply speaking to protest organizers or activist groups present at protests and asking what else their group is doing and how you can help might be a place to start. Looking around you, seeing a problem and organizing with your friends to solve it might be another.
QueerAnarchism 