Jonquilyn Hill

How do you quantify that kind of thing?

Yeah, I mean, I have not been able to find, you know, any kind of authoritative survey of mutual aid networks.

But in speaking with organizers of mutual aid, I think anecdotally we can say often these kinds of practices really pick up in times of crisis.

So in 2020, there was a big uptick in mutual aid organizing around the pandemic.

As our schools and our jobs and sort of our daily life shut down, people got together to try to make sure their neighbors and the people they care about were taken care of.

We started with...

I think all the other mutual aid groups in New York in 2020.

We started as a phone line taking incoming calls from our zip code for people in need of whatever.

They could ask for information.

They could ask for a COVID test.

We wanted to specifically support houseless people who we noticed weren't getting any help.

resources from the government during the pandemic, like they weren't even getting information.

So we made pamphlets for them of what was going on and we handed out food and supplies.

If you're watching and, you know, hearing the news, you might feel like you really want to take steps to respond to any number of things that people are struggling with.

I mean, in the fall, the government shutdown meant that

Many people were not going to access their SNAP benefits.

So you saw like a real concerted effort to hand out food, like make food available to people.

Local Buy Nothing Facebook groups where neighbors exchanged spare items for free have become an unexpected hub for community members to lend a hand.

And I think that's one of the things that some of these organizers speak about is that

participating in mutual aid can feel very empowering you can immediately see the difference that you're making in people's lives and like they will encourage other people to really take action without like worrying too much about like are you going to do this tomorrow or are you going to have enough like you can set out a table with food on it and people will take it