Mutual Aid

Emancipatory Mutual Aid: From Education To Liberation

May 23, 2020 By PReP / Neighborhoods, ROAR. Create! Collective Liberation, COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Solidarity

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained and even overwhelmed the public health, medical care and disaster response systems where governments and state agencies were ill-prepared to contain and suppress infectious outbreaks. In countries where emergency lockdown measures have been adopted without accompanying policies to guarantee income security and housing tenure, there is the additional problem of economic hardship. Already existing and newly formed non-governmental organizations and associations have mobilized to fill the gap. These formal and informal groups assist people forced into the margins by government neglect with free meals, grocery and medicine deliveries, safe housing and even cash.

Mutual Aid In Public Housing Continues After Housing Authority Pushback

May 23, 2020 By Sarafina Harper, The Real News. Create! COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Mutual Aid, Poverty, Recession

In early April, Baltimore City’s Housing Authority threatened Reverend Annie Chambers with arrest and eviction for distributing food to her neighbors at Douglass Homes, citing a policy barring non-government organizations from giving food donations to public housing residents. Rather than stopping Chambers’ mutual aid initiative, the incident led to widespread support for her work. Chambers says that the Housing Authority has not interfered with a giveaway since and that the public attention has resulted in an increase in donations. ”We have not had any trouble from them since. People called The Housing Authority from Washington, New York, Philadelphia and Virginia,” Chambers told The Real News Network. “Senator [Mary] Washington and the Teachers Union called the Housing Authority. Many single individuals have called the mayor and The Housing Authority on our behalf.”

Mutual Aid: Building Networks Of Solidarity Not Charity

May 11, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Recession, Solidarity

In the face of the twin crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic collapse, people are organizing mutual aid networks to provide food, medicines and other basics to those in need. This is done in the spirit of solidarity, not charity, a non-hierarchical empowering approach versus a hierarchical exploitative approach. We speak with Eleanor Goldfield, an activist in Washington, DC who is active in her local mutual aid network and has written about it, about how they are organizing, the response from the community and government and how this fits into the bigger picture of resistance and building alternative systems to meet human needs. Some resources that Eleanor suggests are MutualAidDisasterRelief.org, ItsGoingDown.org and her website, ArtKillingApathy.com.

Organizing For Survival In New York City

April 29, 2020 Woodbine, Commune Mag. Create! Autonomy, COVID-19, Mutual Aid, New York City (NYC)

We are in month two of the coronavirus crisis in New York City, and must reassess how we are organizing ourselves. More than ten thousand have died, and we have seen mass burials in a public park, without names or ceremonies. The medical emergency quickly morphed into a crisis of social reproduction, with vast numbers of New Yorkers out of work, without income, and experiencing heightened food insecurity. At the same time, a newly designated class of “essential” workers struggles to maintain grocery stores, delivery services, and transportation. For most of these workers, social distancing conflicts with survival to such an extent that they risk illness to stock food, deliver packages, work cash registers, and drive rideshares.

In Absence Of State Action, Organizers Help Homeless People During Pandemic

April 27, 2020 Ella Fassler, Truthout. Create! COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Homeless, Mutual Aid, Social safety net

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, collectives sharing free food with the hungry were facing a sharp uptick in state repression. In Arizona, Tucson Police Park Safety warned the public that sharing food in public parks is illegal in a statement posted to Twitter on February 7. In response, the People’s Defense Initiative in Tucson started a petition and organized a rally at the City Hall on February 19 to “remind Tucson leadership that feeding the hungry is never a crime!” Free Hot Soup, a group that serves food to over a hundred people in a Portland, Oregon, park five nights a week, sued the city in November 2019 after it introduced a new “social service” law. The law creates new bureaucratic hurdles for solidarity services including food handling permits, insurance coverage, dumpsters, security, and restricts the services to once per week per park.

Mutual Aid: ‘When The System Fails, The People Show Up’

April 23, 2020 Eleanor Goldfield, ROAR Magazine. Organize! Community, COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Pandemic

The badges are both for security and for building relationships. We want our community corner stores to know us as those who are looking out for the people. And we want the people to know who we are in case they need help or can lend a hand. We want cops and other government entities to acknowledge and respect that we are essential workers getting supplies and services to our community. It is not a fail-safe, but for scrappy DIY mutual aid teams, nothing ever is. We roll with what comes as best we can. We are unpaid and many folks are brand new to this work. And yet, we still manage to do a better job than the almighty politicians and their corporate overlords. For instance, here in DC, several offices under the purview of Mayor Bowser, along with city-partnered nonprofit organizations, have routed calls for help to mutual aid networks around the city.

Open-Source Medical Supplies Battle COVID-19

April 22, 2020 Anders Lisdorf, Shareablenet. Create! COVID-19, Medical equipment, Mutual Aid, Pandemic

While health authorities focus on top-down measures to get COVID-19 supplies to hospitals in need, home-grown initiatives are enlisting regular people to create open-source equipment. Rather than wait for the impact of government efforts to persuade manufacturers to move into emergency production of ventilators and protective equipment, the sharing economy is already saving lives with home-made masks and 3D-printed ventilators. A dearth of adequate medical supplies was implicated in an increase in coronavirus mortality in Italy, compared with Germany and South Korea, where supply was adequate. Meeting a desperate need for ventilators through open-sourcing Health authorities say the immediate short-term need is to get more ventilators, which compress and decompress air for patients who are too weak to breathe on their own.

Essential Work

April 17, 2020 Stephanie Luce, Organizing Upgrade. Create! COVID-19, Essential worker, Mutual Aid, Public Good

In the midst of the COVID-19 quarantine, Anna* wrote to a neighborhood facebook page, asking for help. Within hours, dozens of people had responded offering to buy groceries, donate cash to pay for a birthday dinner, bake a cake, host an online birthday party, take a socially-distant walk in the park, or just to talk. This wasn’t unusual. During this pandemic lots of people need help and have turned to neighbors (usually strangers). Even more people have stepped up to offer assistance. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Many writers have told stories of how people step in quickly to assist in times of disaster. Rebecca Solnit observed this in the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco and in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005; she learned of similar responses in earlier disasters like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

How Disabled Activists Are Fighting Isolation, Collectively

April 15, 2020 Brooke Anderson, In These Times. Create! COVID-19, Mutual Aid, People with Disabilities

Oakland, CA - “I already disinfected the door handle, so come on in!” Yomi Wrong says. A rambunctious puppy eagerly eyes us through the gate. “Shiloh can’t wait to see you.” As a healthcare compliance manager, Wrong is used to being out in the world—from going into her office to taking the dog for long strolls around Lake Chabot. All that changed when she began sheltering in place to lower her chances of contracting COVID-19. “I’ve lost so much human connection,’’ Wrong says. “My sister lives in Alameda, but I haven’t seen her in over a month because she is immunocompromised. The two of you are the people I most consistently see.” My friend Katie Loncke and I have been stopping by Wrong’s home every other day for the past three weeks as volunteers for a mutual aid project launched by the Disability Justice Culture Club (DJCC), a collective of five disabled and neurodivergent queer people of color in Oakland.

Disunited States: Government Failure To Address Coronavirus Is Sparking A Mutual Aid Revolution

April 14, 2020 Eleanor Goldfield, Mintpress News. Create! Capitalism, COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Recession

I‘m not from DC, but I live here. I’m now a part of this living, breathing being that is a city. This city. It helps me to think of cities that way, even ones that I don’t fully feel at home in – like a body. And I’m like a blood transfusion. I know this isn’t my city, my body, but it’s where my life flows now, and so I best flow with it. This body holds me – it is my literal and figurative structure. I am one of the millions of cells rushing through the veins of this place, and although I’m a relative newcomer, I can feel that this body is not well. I can feel that familiar illness – it’s the same as any city I’ve ever lived in.. Every body is weakened and bowed under the weight of capitalism. Yet, there is a new illness – one that found a foothold in our immunocompromised bones and at the same time exposes the severity of that underlying sickness so old it’s etched in our souls.

Fascists Are Using COVID-19 To Advance Their Agenda

April 13, 2020 Ejeris Dixon, Truthout. Strategize! Fascism, Mutual Aid, Pandemic, Police State

The COVID-19 crisis is a story of a predictable pandemic. It is a result of the willful ignorance of the impact of the climate crisis and unsustainable expansion, a failure of multiple governments and the intentional under-resourcing of public health and medical systems. It results from our societies’ ignoring of the conditions for poor people, the unhoused, disabled and chronically ill people, sex workers, migrants, communities of color and street-based communities, and the exploitation of this crisis by a rich, privileged and powerful fascist minority. Our government had the information, the resources, and the ability to prepare for this pandemic, including supporting those most at risk. We could have had the tests, the masks, the ventilators, the resources and emergency plans.

Navajo And Hopi Families Relief Fund Builds Movement In Response To Covid-19 Pandemic

April 8, 2020 NavajoHopiSolidarity.org. Create! COVID-19, Hopi, Mutual Aid, Navajo

Tsiizizii, Dinétah (Leupp, Navajo Nation/Arizona) - In response to the escalating health crisis facing Diné (Navajo) and Hopi communities in Northern Arizona, Southern Utah, and New Mexico, the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund has mobilized volunteer emergency food and water distribution throughout the region. “It is so amazing to see our communities come together and respond proactively to the threat of coronavirus and COVID-19 on the Navajo and Hopi reservations.” said Ethel Branch, former Navajo Nation Attorney General and founder of the Relief Fund. “I thought this would make just a small impact, but the great love and care that the public has for our communities, and their sense of justice to correct the inequities that exist in Indigenous communities has morphed this effort into a movement.”

The Horror Films Got It Wrong; COVID-19 Turned Us Into Caring Neighbors

April 7, 2020 George Monbiot, The Guardian Blog. Create! Collective Liberation, Commons, COVID-19, Mutual Aid

You can watch neoliberalism collapsing in real-time. Governments whose mission was to shrink the state, to cut taxes and borrowing and dismantle public services, are discovering that the market forces they fetishised cannot defend us from this crisis. The theory has been tested, and almost everywhere abandoned. It may not be true that there were no atheists in the trenches, but there are no neoliberals in a pandemic. The shift is even more interesting than it first appears. Power has migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilised where governments have failed. In India, young people have self-organised on a massive scale to provide aid packages for “daily wagers”: people without savings or stores, who rely entirely on cash flow that has now been cut off.

Mutual Aid: Inspiration & Support for Disaster Preparation

July 21, 2019 Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Create! Disaster Preparadeness, Hurricanes, Mutual Aid

As we enter hurricane season in the Atlantic and fire season in the West, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is compiling tips for preparing communities to take care of each other in the spirit of mutual aid when disaster strikes. Below is a list we’ve started and are continuing to add to as y’all submit new ideas for ways to prepare for disaster. Oftentimes, in disasters, whether personal or collective, we find a power within us that can’t be measured or defined. There is an alternative to the hoarding, violent zombie-prepper trope. This alternative is an instinctual social responsibility that most individuals and groups will default to when a crisis strikes.

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