leftist tiktoks about mutual aid
so you want to start doing mutual aid here are some ideas you know what you said to me make bags of tampons to give directly to houseless folks in your community if they want them you can also bring people food and snacks we dumpster and clean ours dumpster dive for purposefully slashed clothes repair them and give them to someone she said you can't fool me start a little free pantry here's something that you can do right now to reduce your participation in extractive capitalism part two one of the most helpful and empowering things that you can do is get involved in local mutual aid i'll explain how to get involved in a moment but first what's so cool about mutual aid is that it provides an alternative system for meeting people's needs outside of the capitalist market economy the idea is that people's needs can be met by other people in their local community without ever having to buy anything mutual aid happens at the community level so the best way to get involved is to search for mutual aid groups in your local area if you're american you should also check out this great website called mutualaidhub.org it provides a map of local aid networks community fridges and things like that in addition to helpful resources and guides on how to start your own mutual aid group if you don't find one in your local area and if you're already involved in mutual aid and you don't see your org listed there's a button below the map that you can use to submit your information and get it added to the map hopefully that'll make it easier for people to find you follow along for more tips on how to reduce your participation and extractive capitalism here's a peek into my community garden and some features i like and ones that can be improved upon i really love how my garden is not gated but open to the public to stroll through and enjoy the cost of renting a garden plot is low only 20 bucks for the entire season many plots create excess produce instead of going to waste food donation programs have been set up while food production is the goal of most of the plots you are free to grow whatever you want some gardens only grow flowers the more native the better and pollinators love it we also have a great composting system run by volunteers okay here are things i don't like we can improve on harvesting and water conservation we only have one raised bed raised beds help people with accessibility needs so it would be great if we added more research also shows that community gardens increase property value and we're seeing it here with old homes being torn down in new belts being put up in the area gentrification anyone it's not that i don't know what to do it's i don't know what to do first see i said that and then i went to the grocery store which snapped me back into the reality of who i am girl the answer is mutual aid yeah you do as many things as you can but if you only have the hope the time the energy of the patients to do one mutual aid is the one mutual aid is regular dealer people getting together to meet each other's needs with the understanding that the system we live in is not meeting those needs and that's why we have to do it yeah i can't just tell you to go google mutual aid because most of the definitions you find leave out that very important part anyway the whole reason why i was at the store is because i'm going to be keeping my cousins for a little bit over the summer because their ac is out and these companies really did just hike the prices up thinking that we wouldn't notice whenever i'm in front of a politician i don't ask them about their policies that's on their website i asked them how much is a gallon of milk and why should i vote for you if you don't know one time i asked the lady why she was supporting this anti-queer restaurant she looked me did in the face and said because i'm hungry regular regular people we just trying to eat so mutual aid then we add on to that here's what i wish i knew when i started the free art supply closet i wish i knew how many people were looking for a place to give away their gently used art supplies i wish i knew that people were willing to purchase art supplies to be given away for free and mostly i just wish that i'd started sooner mutual aid tip if you want donations from a business bring up the good samaritan act it says that businesses can't be held liable for good faith food donations so they can give you any extra food and you can cook or distribute it to anyone who needs it why is mutual aid better than charity you asked or you didn't ask but i'm going to tell you anyway for many reasons but one of them is that mutual aid assumes that we all have something to give and we can all use a little help while charity sets up a power dynamic between the giver and the receiver as i was filling fridges this morning i noticed some food left over from someone who had filled it previously normally i clear out some wilted potatoes or something but these were three plates of saran wrapped chicken most fridges ask you to not place things like this because they aren't usually taken i know it was placed with good intentions but if you're not sure what to bring to the fridges fresh produce is always great mutual aid is inherently sustainable when you think of mutual aid or giving away to others you might think of pb and jayathons and giving away things like deodorant and soap and toothbrushes but that's not just it mutual aid is dumpster diving it's hosting clothing swaps having buy nothing groups and meetups and using what you already have to give to others as opposed to buying new things mutual aid is anti-consumerism it's community gardens it's carpooling to work it's sharing what you have with others and distributing resources instead of buying a new toolkit you could just borrow one from your neighbor it's sharing a costco membership with someone so that they could get their food in bulk for cheaper making sure the needs of your community are being met doesn't have to involve plastic or waste it could even be harvesting medicinal plants in your area so you could turn it into medicine and give it to people that need them like these gongori leaves hope you learned something bye we used to give out blue tarps to help people stay warm and dry during the winter but after our participants showed us this trick we never bought a blue tarp again if you buy a 32 foot by 100 foot roll of black agricultural sheeting from home depot you can make 20 16 by 10 tarps that are higher quality than the blue ones for a quarter of the price just roll 10 feet out of the tarp and cut that off then find the halfway seam at about 16 feet and cut down that the rolls are sometimes folded differently so you might have to take a minute to find what the halfway seam is this will produce two 16 by 10 tarps roll up each one and secure it with a rubber band so it's ready to distribute we go through a lot of these so we buy the biggest rolls possible but there are also smaller rolls if that's what works better for your budget and community needs then just repeat this process until the role is finished so if you're looking for outreach ideas for the winter or the holidays this is a great one our community loves these and we hope yours does too all the neighbors have an unspoken agreement to give away stuff we don't want on this leg free art supply mutual aid project can also be that easy you just need space and creativity and to share with your community wherever that may be to trade art supplies in that spot welcome back to mutual aid 101 one of the biggest lessons that history continues to show us for people trying to do mutual aid is do not register your [ __ ] stories come out all the time of 501c3 non-profits being shut down by local governments most recently milwaukee foodist free milwaukee was servicing a hundred families at the time of it shutting down but it was ordered to shut down over contamination charges that many people are skeptical about their legitimacy read they probably didn't happen but the problem is it's a non-profit when you register mutual aid under a non-profit it's going to be regulated like a non-profit and guess who the people who write the 501c3 laws are capitalists every crumb of food that you get from mutual aid is one you did not buy at walmart if you want to learn more you'll find this right here let's talk about mutual aid by dean's space the full title of the book is mutual aid building solidarity during this crisis and next dean spade is a super super rad organizer in seattle and a professor at seattle university school of law the book is split into two parts the first part being what is mutual aid in the second part on working together on purpose like the title suggests the first part is really looking at how mutual aid networks have sprung up during covid um the history of them and how we can maintain them and grow them going forward the first part is like super informative on global context of mutual aid networks what they are and what they aren't and like really digs into the non-profit industrial complex second part is a lot more practical and looks at charity versus mutual aid and gives you help and like guides on stuff like group culture how to handle money um conflict collective decision making things like that it's really good it has like flow charts and all of this stuff just to like really lay it out like how do you start a mutual aid network or maintain one dean spade also created a like reading guide to go along with it which i found really helpful as i was reading it and it's really really short um it's only 148 pages and again it has like very like tangible guides in it i have found it super helpful just like in my own organizing and would literally recommend this book to anyone how to mutual aid find out what your community needs most and start small for us it was toiletry bags we started asking folks for toiletry donations we would then make as many bags as we could and pass them out at houseless hubs weekly once we perfected this we moved on to another easy donation item clothing as we got more comfortable we added food educational materials books and other projects we also created a social media presence we post daily and it has allowed us to gain many donations volunteers and collaborators mutual aid is about what you can do to make your community better even if it seems small there is no right or wrong way to practice to follow us on our mutual aid journey and to learn more follow us at es mutual aid on twitter and instagram anarchist cooking tip eggplants add texture and bulk to a light dish be sure to salt and press your eggplants before cooking keep in mind that the skins may cause discoloration skin them first to avoid this voila you are always catching up you are always reporting on your life and asking other people questions to hear their reports or you're celebrating because that's often when we get together which is fine but reporting and celebrating are only like two types of ways to be with people i think because of this i find that we manufacture social situations in which we're doing things together like taking a road trip or playing a board game so we like invent stuff to do together but we don't actually help each other with like living another thing that's really unfair about all this is that it's really unfair to people who are single it's worth watching the rest of that video the creator is amazing and it is deeply unfair for single people to have to rely on this sort of leisure activity definition of friendship that we currently have because the way capitalism and our matter normative culture is structured friendships are seen as secondary or tertiary to your primary romantic partner and your job and all of the other things you have to fulfill to become be a good citizen so friendship is at the bottom of the list it's something that you're only supposed to engage in in your off time your free time your leisure time so of course there's pressure on friendships to be fun and exciting and leisurely you're not supposed to rely on your friends for any substantive care or aid because that's up to the primary romantic partner to fulfill all of your care financial and emotional needs so it feels like too much to ask our friends to engage in any substantive activities with us any activities of daily living any chores errands things that are mundane boring humdrum even though these are the things that we actually need help with and you can still bond with someone while you're engaging in these activities it's especially important that we don't engage in our friends to the detriment of our primary romantic partnership we can only hang out with our friends once we've already fulfilled all the duties and obligations of the primary romantic partnership because that's the serious business of life right friendships aren't serious they're just fun but this view that friendships are just fun and leisure cheats so many people out of the substantive possibility that you could use friendships in order to achieve community care aid important things that are life-sustaining that you don't have to rely on a primary romantic partner for so yes it's deeply unfair for those people in the solo and single communities who don't have a primary romantic partner to rely on and choose not to have one so let's rethink our definition of friendship as not just leisurely and fun taking my fans and i got a few biters up under my belt oh [ __ ] i'm a big gangster i turn around with this foreign love coke i ain't a slang let's go clean some fridges in brooklyn their first stop is never the marcy this fridge is located in williamsburg and had a bunch of green vegetables in it so we took the yellow leaves off those greens and brought some of them to our second stop penny's pantry the micro greens were already there when we got there so we put those back and then added more of the vegetables that we found at nevada the marcy i believe that is bok choy let me know in the comments if you know what kind of vegetable that is it was so popular at our third stop which was the bushwick grind fridge called the two fish five loaves fridge it was so fun to go around clean the fridges we went back to the resource hub and found watermelon in our own fridge which was a nice treat if this looks like fun to you come to our next meeting and join the squad this weekend i spent some time in my local park to put in a tiny little community garden and this like little amphitheater thing right now it's pretty barren and there's just dirt everywhere so i decided to clean it up and maybe put some plants in there so i had to break up some of the grass and the dirt that was kind of stuck onto the edge of like the circular form of the concrete and get it all up then my camera flipped over man this is a real workout like ripping up all this sod was a real pain in the ass but i eventually got it all so then i hand tilled some of the dirt just to break it up because it was like really compacted and it came out in these huge chunks so plants won't really grow very well in this i wanted to be sure that i maintain the soil composition as best as possible and not like disturb the topsoil as much as possible but i had to break it up and just get it all nice and loose so i took all the compact soil that i'm gonna use for another project in the park um later on and i took that out so that way i can make room for good soil then i added my own soil mixture nice and fluffy and i added those to the beds and then i just had to put the plants in here's pretty much the final product i added in some lettuce some pepper plants some flowers cucumbers zucchini all that in these beds looks a lot better than what it did before i've got some more plants to add and i'm going to add some solar powered string lights into this area too and then some tiny libraries in between those spots where people can sit mutually tip try reaching out to bakeries for donations they often have a lot of good food left over at the end of the day that would otherwise be thrown out if you're a socialist or a communist please stitch this with your best suggestions for organizing to fight talk to people it's something that seems really obvious but i wish it was something that was more imparted on me earlier you talk to the people at your job and a group of like-minded people become a union you talk to the people in your building and a group of like-minded people become a tenant organization you talk to the people in your neighborhood and a group of like-minded people become a mutual aid network like before you organize that march before you start that signal group chat before you set up that table and start handing out dishes of dumpster dive vegan whatever talk to people get to know people what are our needs what kind of support systems are we lacking what can we teach each other that's self-sufficiency and that's anti-capitalist work capitalism and all the oppression that comes with us relies on dividing us and separating us from being self-sufficient it might just be tinny all if you all are getting together and supporting each other that's anti-capitalist work thanks for making me stronger i can live with it is competition just human nature famous dictum survival of the fittest to human societies huxley and his peers had concluded that existing social hierarchies were the result of natural selection or competition between sovereign individuals and were thus an important and inevitable factor in human evolution attacked this conventional wisdom when in 1902 he published a book called mutual aid a factor in evolution in which he proved that there was something beyond blind individual competition at work and evolution krapotkin demonstrated that species that were able to work together or who formed symbiotic arrangements with other species based on mutual benefit were able to better adapt to their environment and were granted a competitive edge over those species who didn't or couldn't in today's metropolitan societies people are socialized to see themselves as independent self-sufficient individuals equipped with our own condos bank accounts smartphones and facebook profiles however this notion of human independence is a myth promoted by corporations and states seeking to mold us into atomized and easily controlled consumers concerned primarily with our own short-term well-being from the great pyramids commissioned by the pharaohs of ancient egypt to today's global spanning production and supply chains the primary function of the ruling class has always been to organize human activity and everywhere that they have done so they have relied on coercion under capitalism this activity is organized through either direct violence or the internalized threat of starvation created by a system based on private ownership of wealth and property capitalism can inspire people to do amazing things as long as there is a profit to be made but in the absence of a profit motive there are many important tasks that it will not and cannot ever accomplish from eradicating global poverty and preventable diseases to removing toxic plastics from the oceans these monumental tasks require a change in the ethos that would connect us to one another and to the world that sustains us a shift away from capitalism towards mutual aid it can be seen in neighbors coming together to organize a daycare collective and in the aftermath of disasters such as hurricanes katrina and sandy when in the absence of state institutions perfect strangers rush to one another's aid it can be seen in the bravery of the white helmets of aleppo who risk their lives to pull children from the collapsed ruins of buildings hit by assad's barrel bombs imagine a world in which human activity was not organized on the basis of ceaseless competition over artificially scarce resources but the pursuit of the satisfaction of human needs and you will understand a vision of the world that anarchists seek to create charity versus mutual aid what is the difference charity is based in the idea of superiority and white saviorism which is the idea that it people aren't in a position to have a duty to save other people we can see this from the first colonizers to arrive in the americas and i'm sure before that too if someone has more info please share in the comments as stitches it people came here to bring civilization to the barbarians but who were the real barbarians the people living generally in peace and respecting the earth are the people who committed atrocities against indigenous populations charity comes from a place of power or superiority it says i have something you don't and if you behave in the way i believe you should or if you ask nicely enough i will give you some of what i have it ignores the underlying structures that put the giver in a position to withhold the necessity in the first place mutual aid addresses those underlying structures through activism assistance and reciprocity mutual aid is intersectional and seeks to fill the gaps left by structural inequalities without causing people in need to be ashamed of their position within society mutual aid is how we build community and undermine the oppression of capitalism it's really easy to look at a mutual aid group and see all of the ways they are not left enough or practicing correctly when building community we have to understand that we likely won't see our idealistic results right away nor are our idealistic results always what's best for a community each one is different and should be treated as such mutual aid often mirrors charity when it first begins due to an individualistic capitalist and colonized culture we must and learn instead of criticizing contribute to the change hello um welcome um i'm gonna go do some mutual light on skid row so come with me so first thing i'm gonna do is go to world harvest that's this really cool food bank store you can buy stuff in the front and in the back there's these carts and you can fill them up for forty dollars and you can fill them up with as much as you can so you can see me squeezing in some limes we kind of get whatever they have and then we fill up our cars i know my car's disgusting i also teach surf lessons out of the back i know um but we get whatever we can find and then we make whatever we can with what we have a lot of us store food in our own homes and so today you'll see that i used some potatoes and those were frozen from last week but here's me carrying it all into my little apartment yay and then i go buy the other stuff that i need i'm gonna make scalloped potatoes guacamole and some other stuff that i guess i'll talk about when we get there um i was gonna make this cute and aesthetic but unfortunately i listened to podcasts or other things 24 7. so in addition to like cute little chopping sounds there's also like other noise so it couldn't do that but inside i'll talk to you because i'm annoying so all of the food you can see me making in this video is um for this org called city hall sessions or chs in los angeles which is committed to kind of fighting for the unhoused people of la and so one of our big things is on friday we serve food free of cost um with kind of no stipulations uh in skid row on sixth and san pedro and if you're in la i would love to have you come down and join us it's something really kind of rewarding in a lot of ways and it's a really cool community building activity that i do but also la has taken this really aggressive attitude against houseless people um which involves a lot of sweeps and clearing people out of places that they have lived for a very long time and well obviously we don't want people living on the street if you're just displacing them for no reason that's absolutely horrific and so we also fight against that and work a lot of other community orgs to kind of spread awareness about issues and protest so you can see us setting up on our corner we also got a bunch of donations of packaged food so we'll hand that all out today as well and then my other favorite part of this activity after we hand out food here or during it depending on the day we also fill up these carts and cards are super cool because it allows us to reach a population that doesn't usually get served by org so you can see us taking food down and this is actually one of my favorite corners in sierra it's an open mic night and i'll let you guys enjoy that for the rest of this video thank you guys so much and feel free to donate to chs is good old days you
2022-08-12 00:03
