The Panthers did free before school breakfast and after school babysitting and all sorts of actual community building like that. The PSL does protests and craft events and that’s it. I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult than organizing marches but it just doesn’t seem like the marches are getting us anywhere.
I am part of a (not-well-funded) Trotskyist group and the stated reasoning for charging for papers and buttons and stuff is that people are more likely to read a paper or put a button somewhere important if they paid for it. I have a drawer at home full of free stickers. We have leaflets that are free though.
But you should look on social media and ask around. I know about a bunch of orgs in my area that I’ve never crossed paths with organically.
I get that, and it makes sense for fundraising, those things aren’t free. This group has high quality large posters in full color all over, nice banners, but yeah they didn’t even have a free leaflet or business card, seemed like a basic thing for any org in my experience. True about social media, I am sorta new to the area so I haven’t delved into that, there are some other groups I’ve seen posters for. Long ago I would use twitter to get info from orgs, I have avoided that for a while, what do people even use these days?
Oddly enough I’ve seen a lot of announcements on Instagram. “Upcoming events” posted by a leftist bookstore or church nearby may also be helpful - yesterday I found out this way that apparently there is a Chicago chapter of Extinction Rebellion. But word of mouth is the best way, a lot of orgs just don’t have good social media or get squashed by the algorithm.