Above photo: A beet canning demonstration and social at South Camano Grange.
Emily “Kimmy” Kim and Mary Ellen Wood have a shared vision to bring grassroots community networks to the Stanwood-Camano area.
In March of this year, the Mutual Aid Assembly of Stanwood-Camano was born to bring that vision to life.
Kim said the group has hosted about 10 meetings and several events with a focus on working together to solve problems and learn from each other.
“We’ve kind of determined that our broad vision is to build grassroots networks of community care through group problem-solving, decision-making and action,” she said. “We’re trying to do this through two main ideas, which is mutual aid and assembly.”
Kim described mutual aid as a goal that’s been around as long as humankind: helping your neighbor.
“It’s building caring relationships and cooperation to meet each other’s needs and desires,” Kim said. “This means we’re actively working together as fellow, equal humans from the bottom up, rather than passively depending on top-down help from institutions like governments or charities.”
Assemblies refer to the spaces where people discuss and solve those issues.
Kim said they are spaces of direct democracy and political empowerment, with emphasis on group participation.
“Direct democracy is a grassroots alternative to representative democracy, which is when you vote people into positions of power to make decisions for you,” she said. “The mutual aid is a space that empowers people to come together to cooperatively solve issues that affect them. It’s basically a group experiment, and trying to meet others’ needs.”
Over the course of 10 meetings, the group has developed goals such as skill sharing, film screenings, group discussions, shared meals and produce, and other miscellaneous projects.
Kim started the group by posting physical fliers and posting to Facebook groups, which resulted in about 15 participants at the first meeting.
Since then, the group has had a core of about nine consistent members.
“I personally am passionate about social movement organizing,” Kim said.
“I’ve been living here since 2020, and since I’ve settled in and gotten to know the area, I wanted to start something locally, because I feel like the strongest social-movement organizing comes from places where people are living everyday, daily lives.”
Wood has a small farm, and said she’s been most involved in the food processing and preservation skill shares.
“That’s just something that I know how to do, and I’m happy to share with people, and it also falls along in that category of feeding people,” she said.
Wood said she and her fellow farm-owning members teach others about gleaning food, preserving it to reduce food waste and providing that food to people.
“Earlier, we did a (canning) event where Kimmy’s farm had a lot of extra strawberries that they weren’t able to harvest,” Wood said. “We all came out and picked them, and I taught everyone how to make and can jam.”
On Saturday, Nov. 1, the group ran another canning event, gleaning beets from a different member’s farm and learning how to pressure can them.
Wood’s mother-in-law also taught participants how to pickle the beets.
The pair said they hope that as time goes on, more people will attend their meetings and events.
“I hope to get more people involved and more aware of these kind of alternative political empowerment and social relation building practices,” Kim said. “I would love to have some actual town assembly happen, but that’s very long-term.”
She added she wants to see people get to know and help each other past the common guise of Democrats versus Republicans — something she knows can be a tricky subject.
“It’s balancing the idea of wanting to feel safe but also build community relations, I think every individual has different risk tolerance to that,” she said.
“But in terms of the bigger picture, I personally feel like it can be a little bit of a trap to just fall into these identity politics of ‘You’re this, I’m this, and therefore we’re fated to be against each other.’”
Kim and Wood acknowledged the impact federal-level decisions have on small communities, but said they hope to “zoom in” and fill gaps on a local level.
The Mutual Aid Assembly posts about upcoming events and meetings at mutualaidassembly.wordpress.com and on Facebook.
