Mutual Aid

Underground Networks Spring Up to Help Migrant Kids in US

July 20, 2014 Laura Sánchez, www.eluniversal.com Organize! Immigration, Mutual Aid, Racism

Priests, shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, activists and even artists are among those who make up a network that is starting to spring up in the United States to help migrant kids – but they must keep the network underground to avoid attacks by anti-immigrant groups. A pro-immigrant underground network has emerged, operating in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and Ventura counties, where 47 percent of the population is Hispanic. The system of humanitarian aid has started to extend across the country, and the children and their families have received transportation, plane tickets, medical care, legal representation, places to stay, and even free haircuts. Luz Maria Gallegos, a short, dark-skinned woman, is starting to lose her voice and her arm is cramping up. For the last two hours, she has been holding up a sign and yelling, “Against racism, igualdad para todos [equality for everyone].” She drove from San Bernardino to Murrieta, Calif., to support the protest in favor of releasing the migrant kids.

Village Where People Come Before Profit

July 17, 2014 Jen Wilton, www.roarmag.org Educate! Cooperatives, Direct Action, Mutual Aid, Spain

In the south of Spain, the street is the collective living room. Vibrant sidewalk cafes are interspersed between configurations of two to five lawn chairs where neighbors come together to chat over the day’s events late into the night. In mid-June the weather peaks well over 40 degrees Celsius and the smells of fresh seafood waft from kitchens and restaurants as the seasonably-late dining hour begins to approach. The scene is archetypally Spanish, particularly for the Andalusian region to the country’s south, where life is lived more in public than in private, when given half a chance. Specifically, this imagery above describes Marinaleda. Initially indistinguishable from several of its local counterparts in the Sierra Sur southern mountain range, were it not for a few tell-tale signs. Maybe it’s the street names (Ernesto Che Guevara, Solidarity and Salvador Allende Plaza, to name a few); maybe it’s the graffiti (hand drawn hammers-and-sickles sit happily alongside encircled A’s, oblivious to the differences the two ideologies have shared, even in the country’s recent past); maybe it’s the two-story Che head which emblazons the outer wall of the local sports stadium. Marinaleda has been called Spain’s ‘communist utopia,’ though the local variation bears little resemblance to the Soviet model most associate with the phrase. Classifications aside, this is a town whose social fabric has been woven from very different economic threads to the rest of the country since the fall of the Franco dictatorship in the mid 1970s.

Occupy Founders Launch The After Party in Detroit

May 1, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Acronym TV, After party launch, AfterPartyUSA, ATV 003, Carl Gibson, Dennis Trainor Jr, Detroit, Do the Right Thing, Justin Wedes, Micah White, Mutual Aid, Occupy, Occupy Solidarity Network, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, populist party, Priscilla Grim, Radio Rahim, Spike Lee, The After Party

Some of the founding members of the occupy movement are launching a new political party – THE AFTER Party. Carl Gibson is among them. He says, “What sets The After Party apart is that 365 days out of the year it is a humanitarian organization. The way we organize politically, what sets us apart is that we are finding needs within the community, and then working to meet them using the community's assets.” And, so is Radio Rahim, another After Party founding member and, yes the real life persona behind the character in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing says the following:

The Occupy Sandy Network: Still Working Tirelessly For A Just Recovery

April 30, 2014 Staff, www.OCCUPYSANDY.NET Create! Mutual Aid, Occupy

In the eighteen months since Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast and forced the entire region to rethink our way of life, people on the front lines of the recovery effort have been working tireless to rebuild and restore hope to the community. Eighteen months later, The Occupy Sandy network is still working tirelessly for a just recovery and a more resilient future Whether it be developing youth programming, worker cooperatives, and political education and organizing for responsible development in the Rockaways; coordinating rebuilding crews and sharing stories in New Jersey; or building coordination systems for community-led relief, recovery and resilience efforts - our community coalitions are growing strong and there is still so much work to be done. Yesterday, a dedicated group will come together for a press conference in Staten Island to mark the 18-month anniversary, and to discuss progress and future plans. The group will gather at 706 Quincy Avenue at 2pm – an Ocean Breeze street virtually destroyed by the storm – in front of the home which was rebuilt by members of the Long Term Recovery Group’s rebuild committee.

Grassroots Organizing Rescued West Virginia’s Water Crisis

March 4, 2014 Dana Kuhnline, www.wagingnonviolence.org Organize! Food and Agriculture, Mutual Aid

Only a few hours after news of the spill began trickling out, a grassroots group called WV Clean Water Hub had already begun organizing water deliveries through its Facebook page. That quickly turned into a massive community-organized effort supported by new volunteers, as well as long-established grassroots groups in West Virginia — including Aurora Lights, Coal River Mountain Watch, Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and RAMPS. By working to identify communities in need of clean water and supplies, as well as connecting affected communities with volunteers and donors, this wiki-style relief effort has filled the gap left by larger relief organizations. “There is so much bureaucracy [at the larger relief organizations] that communities fall through the cracks,” said Nate May, a volunteer organizer with WV Clean Water Hub. “We’re hearing directly from the people who need the water. Someone will post on the Facebook page that they need water and we’ll make a meme out of it. Then someone else will post when they can deliver some.”

Merry Crisis And A Happy New Fear

December 26, 2013 Jerome Roos, www.roarmag.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, Human Rights, Mutual Aid, Video

When Charles Dickens waxed poetic about death, greed and misery in his classic Christmas Carol, he very much had in mind the societal dislocation wrought by early industrial capitalism. Of course the Dickensian critique of capitalism lacked a thorough political economic analysis and ultimately failed to move beyond moral outrage at poverty and the decline of human virtue. But, that said, even Karl Marx opined that Dickens in his lifetime “issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.” A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, just five years before The Communist Manifesto and the revolutionary wave of 1848. If we were to write A Christmas Carol for our time, would the story really look so different? The character of Scrooge still seems omnipresent — from wealthy Wall Street investors who haven’t paid a penny for the financial mess they created in the lead-up to the current crisis, to the power-hungry politicians who literally surround themselves with gold while announcing an Age of Austerity for everyone else.

One Year Out, Sandy Survivors Human ‘Wave of Change’ to City Hall

October 28, 2013 Lauren McCauley, Resist! Climate Change, Mutual Aid, Occupy

A year after Superstorm Sandy flooded the streets of New York, carried away whole stretches of the Jersey Shore and caused untold devastation to half a million homes and countless homeowners along the northeastern seaboard, many survivors are still left adrift. On Sunday afternoon, survivors of the storm and other community leaders are convening at New York City Hall to "Turn the Tide" and demand a more equitable and sustainable rebuild. Protesters plan to carry handmade "waves" symbolizing the "wave of change" they hope to spark. Though millions of aid dollars were set aside following the storm, many communities—particularly minority and lower class—are still displaced. In addition to exposing the economic vulnerability of so many Americans, the storm forced many politicians and other members of New York's elite class to face the hard facts about our collective future in the face of global warming with its drastic weather patterns and swelling sea levels.

Activists Step Up For Flood Relief In Colorado

September 17, 2013 Christopher Mandel, www.PopularResistance.org Create! Mutual Aid, Occupy

At 9 or 10, I was invited to a page on Facebook named Occupy Boulder Flood Relief, and after joining the group I was invited to a Google Doc which contained a long list of relief organizations, relevant media sources, and other information. It also had a signup space for people who wanted to help organize relief efforts. I typed my contact information in and did a few edits on the shared document. By the time I went to bed at 2am the document also contained an invite to an open meeting for volunteers being held the next day in downtown Boulder. . . I walked to the building where the meeting was to be held and found a group of 10 or so people frantically typing on their computers and gesturing to one another as they desperately prepared for the meeting. An hour later I was facilitating a conversation with about 30 people, mostly college students, who were eager to go out into the community and help the thousands of Boulder residents affected by the flood. An hour after that, I left with the task of building a website for a budding organization vaguely associated with Occupy Boulder.

Occupy Sandy, Their History and Ongoing Work

June 21, 2013 Staff, www.popularresistance.org Create! Mutual Aid

The video below provides a brief history of the impressive work of Occupy Sandy. Occupy Sandy moved quickly to help the communities impacted by Sandy to get back on their feet, clean-up and re-start. Their mutual aid efforts are an example of the kind of world we want to create, where people help each other solve problems. Occupy Sandy continues to work in New Jersey, Staten Island, lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. As you can see on their website, their work is not done. There are plenty of ongoing projects that you can do to help from volunteering to helping to fund their efforts.

History Teaches That We Have the Power to Transform the Nation, Here’s How.

June 12, 2013 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.truth-out.org Strategize! Government, Human Rights, Mutual Aid, Solidarity

The fact is, United States and world histories show that an organized and mobilized populace is what has always caused transformational change. This history is not taught in our education system or emphasized in the heroes we idolize in our culture, but it is so significant that it cannot be hidden from view. The country could not operate if the people refused to participate in its corrupt systems. The ultimate power is with us, if we let go of fear and embrace it. Now that there is a history of more than 100 years of modern resistance movements, there is data to show what works and what doesn't. As a result, we can develop a vision, a strategic plan and tactics that make success more likely than ever before.

Occupy Oklahoma Relief: Mutual Aid Without the Bureaucracy

June 9, 2013 Zakk Flash, www.faulkingtruth.com Organize! Food and Agriculture, Government, Mutual Aid, Solidarity

Money sent to the big players was ending up in Washington, DC. Certainly some would be spent on affected people in Oklahoma, but the vast majority would be sent to other areas or spent on overhead, administration costs. At last count, the Red Cross was still sitting on $110 million allocated for Superstorm Sandy. While some NGOs have done some fantastic work , Oklahoma communities know their needs best. There had to be a better way. OpOK Relief stepped in to fill the gaps as part of the People’s Response. As a convergence of Occupy groups, anarchists, libertarian socialists, Food Not Bombs, Rainbow Family, IWW, teachers, social workers, and non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic relief groups.

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