The tiny group of anti-MAGA activists knew they were on to something big in February 2025 when its quickly planned “Emergency Town Hall” was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show.
Donald Trump had just been inaugurated for the second time. Scared and confused, steering members of the nascent Indivisible Santa Barbara invited elected officials to share what they knew about events rapidly unfolding in Washington, D.C.
They reserved the sanctuary of the Unitarian Church because they figured the space could comfortably hold the 450 or so they were expecting.
Instead, some 1,500 people showed up. They filled the sanctuary and courtyard, then spilled out to the patio and grounds and onto the street.
Myra Paige, one of Indivisible SB’s five steering committee members, said they were shocked at the crowd size and pent-up demand for more information..
“We thought, we are—this is—bigger than we thought, that we are catching lightning in a bottle,” she said.
Paige was likewise surprised the next week to see their event featured on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. “It was just because we ran out of room,” she said, with a laugh. “If we had reserved a bigger space, we would never have made it on her show.”
Since then, Indivisible SB has organized protests large, small—and enormous. Successfully enlisting numerous non-profit groups last year, the group drew crowds in the hundreds for its weekly protests and in the thousands for their three large-scale rallies.
Now Indivisible SB is planning the March 28 “No Kings 3” rally, set for 11 a.m. at Alameda Park. While the theme was being finalized two weeks before the event, the group was workshopping, “No War, No ICE, No Kings.”
Christina Pizarro is president of the Santa Barbara Women’s Political Committee. She was one of hundreds at the corner of State Street and Hitchcock Way on March 7 at a weekly protest coordinated by Indivisible SB.
She also is part of a “second tier” of Indivisible SB members. These are leaders of affiliated groups coordinating with steering members to elevate their causes and populate their demonstrations.
“It is a critical time right now, and we all have to come together,” Pizarro said. “And it’s under the umbrella of Indivisible SB, who’s been doing the work on the ground, who’s been communicating with the community for these peaceful protests, and is very effective.”
According to its website, the national Indivisible is a “movement of millions of people working to stop the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and to demand a real democracy. We believe that politics is too important to leave up to the politicians–it requires all of us to get on the field.”
The umbrella group was founded by former Congressional staffer Ezra Levin and his partner, writer Leah Greenberg. Their website states that Indivisible has some 2,500 chapters in 99 percent of the U.S. Congressional districts and was responsible for more than a million public actions in 2025.
Larry Behrendt, another Indivisible SB steering member, said that national sets dates for the major rallies and provides myriad resources, including training, technical tools and fund-raising support. The local steering members meet online with national leaders once weekly.
“They set the big themes but give us a great deal of independence,” he said. “They provide us with research and direction…but they leave our groups pretty much alone to figure it out.”
Behrendt is joined on the steering committee by four others: retired university professor Marilynn Brewer, Myra and Ian Paige, and a fifth member who asked not to be identified because she works for the government.
The second tier of leadership comprises volunteers organized into teams that coordinate everything from weekly protests on two freeway overpasses to the group’s newsletter, email list and social media.
Representatives from a dozen community organizations also join in around the main rallies. Democratic Women of Santa Barbara County, 805 Immigrant, the Immigrant Legal Defense Center, The Fund for Santa Barbara and the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) are among those groups.
Another 5,000 names are on the email list. In fact, for a certain demographic in Santa Barbara County, an email from Indivisible SB is a weekly event, and even more often before major rallies.
Calli Fonua, 21, is one of the newest members. A communication major at Santa Barbara City College, she said she is trying to start an Indivisible SBCC club.
“I live in Oxnard, and I watched the (immigration) raids in the fields around my house,” she said. A journalism major, she also reads the news faithfully, “And I felt that I really needed to do something.”
Protecting immigrants is a major focus for Indivisible SB members. In fact, Trump’s treatment of immigrant families spurred two of its steering members, Behrendt and Ian Paige, to more active roles in the group, which started during Trump’s first Administration.
Ian and Myra Paige retired to Santa Barbara from Northridge in 2016. But toward the end of 2018, Ian says he was sitting and watching the news when everything changed for him.
“They were doing a story about family separation at the border, and I was moved to tears,” he said. “And I remember Myra said, ‘So do something about it.’”
A retired attorney, he began studying immigration law and volunteering with the Immigration Legal Defense Center. His work took him to the federal court in Los Angeles, where he provided pro bono defense for immigrants, a minority of whom actually secured legal representation.
He cut back on his work during the Biden administration but helped his wife revive Indivisible SB after that fateful emergency town hall.
One event he likes to talk about is the June 2025 “No Kings 1″ rally along Cabrillo Boulevard. As would become typical, thousands more than expected lined the beachfront from Los Baños pool to the Chromatic Gate across from East Beach.
“The police later told us that CHP officers complained that the traffic was backing up at the freeway off-ramps,” he said. They were expecting a few thousand; the local press reported a crowd of 12,000.
Myra Paige splits her time between Indivisible SB and the Bay Area-based Commit to Democracy, which she co-chairs with Joan Bowman.
For the second group, she coordinates phone banks and postcard mailings for a variety of elections. The group’s efforts contributed to Democrats flipping the Santa Clarita-based 27th Congressional District in 2024, when George Whitesides defeated thrice-elected Republican incumbent Mike Garcia.
After the election, Whitesides told the Paiges this story:
“He would be invited into people’s homes to talk to them about issues, and he said that when he was inside, he saw some of the postcards, maybe the ones that you wrote, on the refrigerator,” Ian said.
“Postcards are a little more personal,” Myra added.
Myra said that they worked for a while with Indivisible Carpinteria after Trump’s second election on “Tesla Takedowns” every Saturday. Hundreds of people would gather in front of the Tesla dealership on Hitchcock Way to protest Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling of huge portions of the federal government.
Lasting from February through Fall 2025, those protests have moved to State and Hitchcock on Saturday mornings, spreading to both sides of State down to Hope Avenue. On Saturday, March 7, Trump’s invasion of Iran a week earlier dominated the conversation, chants and posters.
“We are dealing with such a traumatic time in our lives,” Myra said. “Every day there’s a new horror.”
Later, at an interview in her home, she added:
“It’s absolutely imperative that people understand Indivisible works really hard to try and save American democracy, to make sure people understand what we are fighting to protect, to defend…
“People need to get involved and understand that we need millions of people out on the street. And to make sure our politicians know it’s going to be the people who fix this. Because they clearly are not.”
The idea that a united community response is a powerful way to fight the slide into autocracy is also what drives Behrendt.
A retired software engineer and activist for immigrant rights, Behrendt moved to Santa Barbara from Washington State in 2023 and joined Indivisible SB immediately after Trump’s election. Unlike the Paiges, he was new to Santa Barbara and knew no one.
“But immediately after working with this group, I knew this was where I wanted to be,” he said. “That is the silver lining to a very dark cloud—that I really look at them as my second family now.”
He got to work right away, reaching out to the non-profit organizations in Santa Barbara that eventually became Indivisible SB’s partners. The Paiges say that Behrendt is the group’s primary ambassador to the larger community.
“He really took our outreach to a new level,” Myra said.
Indivisible SB is a 501(c)4 non-profit corporation, and Behrendt is also treasurer. He explained that while national Indivisible routes local donations back to the group, it relies on it very little for expenses. The Fund for Santa Barbara awarded the group $10,000 in 2025 to offset the cost of the major rallies.
Other than that information, Behrendt declines to discuss the group’s finances, except to add that members don’t hold back if they need to use their own dollars to pay necessary expenses.
An example is the stack of flyers for the upcoming rally sitting on the dining room table in the Paiges’ Bel Air Knolls home, which has become their de facto war room. Behendt printed them that morning on his home printer.
“We really do this on the cheap,” he added.
On the peanut and coffee cup-strewn table are laptops, scattered papers and multi-page “to do” spreadsheets for the upcoming rally.
On those spreadsheets are myriad tasks required to hold a permitted, multi-site protest that—based on experience—will bring thousands to the streets and parks of Santa Barbara:
• Contact city Police and Park and Recreation departments for permits—check.
• Reach out to elected officials to coordinate schedules and confirm their appearances—check.
• Check in with teams to secure the stage, a sound system, 300 chairs, portable toilets, and orange delineators to block off traffic. Refresh publicity, email alerts and social media updates. Contact team leaders to update security and safety training for monitors and to distribute flyers to people living near Alameda Park, warning of the disruption—check, check, check.
Is this the secret sauce to Indivisible SB’s success? Reams of paperwork, forms, contact lists and phone calls—and an organizational competence that grows with each new threat to democracy?
“There is no secret sauce,” Behrendt countered. “But it is a sacred community.
“We don’t do this alone. We can’t do anything of any significance without community partners. And the people who step forward, who join us and stand shoulder to shoulder with us. We make something that none of us are capable of doing on our own.”
