I do not feel well. But I can share this since some folks are confused and despairing about what can be done.
NOTE: Choose which ones you wish to focus on. Do Not Think You Must Do All Of This as that will burn you out. This post is comprehensive, but it’s not meant as a ‘do it all’ post. It’s meant to give you ideas to consider.
Work with your friends and community on what action items will be doable. Evaluate what you are able to offer in time, energy, and talents and stick to that boundary. Set up schedules so people can swap out to recover/rest, but there’s still people available to help with the initiative your group focuses on.
The following quote is from the book A World Without Police:
These alternatives begin to emerge when we choose to call friends, family, and neighbors instead of the cops, and build outward in concentric circles. On the level of the block and the neighborhood as a whole, this means developing deeper relationships, overcoming isolation, and checking in on our neighbors more often. It means making runs to the grocery store and making sure older and disabled neighbors have what they need. More ambitiously still, it could look like going door to door to establish a neighborhood group chat, putting in the work necessary to make sure everyone is enrolled and feels welcome to message the community with concerns. When there is a conflict among family members or between neighbors, this broader fabric can provide a critical alternative to bringing in the armed guardians of the state, because community members have more of a stake than the cops do in treating others like they matter.
Here is a list of actions that dig deeper into what building community looks like:
- We need to build up worker cooperatives. These are worker-owned groups that exist in multiple industries. Could be a game cooperative, book cooperative (like AK Press or PM Press), manufacturing (there’s some that are woodworkers or work with steel), tech cooperatives (they build no-AI/open-source software or raspberry pi networks), repair cooperatives, etc…
- We need to support libraries and build up a library of things, and push local libraries to expand their library of things (my city’s libraries has an extensive collection of useful items one can borrow). These are when items can be rented for project, and the items can include anything from a themed-cake-pan to power tools to coffee makers to breadboards, etc.
- We need more repair libraries. These include mending for clothes and fabrics, repairing bicycles or various other vehicles, repairing disability aids and devices, repairing various tech items like phones or laptops, etc…
- We need more mutual aids that include houseless and home-bound disabled folks. Mutual aids are groups of people who work together to provide for their community. They rely on fundraising. They are often anarchic in nature — anarchism is based on mutual aid and community — so tend toward a horizontal democracy.* In my city Mutual aids include the Panther pantry which bring food and necessities to those in need (they have no restrictions unlike a lot of food pantries). This also includes mutual aids who help clean houses for bed-bound disabled folks, who make rake or mow yards, who may help repair or build or renovate people’s places, etc…
- We need more community fridges. This is a fridge that anyone can use and stocks perishables in the fridge, but also may have non-perishables on shelves in the fridge shed. The community maintains it and works together to stock it.
- We need more Mask Blocs to help fight against the pandemic and keep people safe. These are groups of people who obtain masks, tests, hygiene items, hand sanitizers, air purification units and filters, etc. They deliver to those in need. They also help people set up safe events that include pandemic mitigations.
- We need more doctors, therapists, and healthcare practitioners willing to work with vulnerable communities to increase access to healthcare. This is doctors and nurses willing to give of their time for free in free health clinics that anyone can attend. People can support these free clinics by helping fundraise so that if someone needs treatment that costs money, the fundraiser can help cover those costs. Of course, this one is pointed at anyone who works in healthcare, so not many can do this.
- We need people to help write and create art for zines, fundraising ads, websites, newsletters, and other important avenues for getting the word out and sharing facts and news with one another. This way we can combat the disinformation of the current news networks by crafting our own and doing communal fact-checking. This also helps reach other people with fun, artistic zines and fliers so people can stay aware of resources.
- Fundraise for community organizing and for individuals in need. Share what you can. It’s okay if you can’t donate due to not having funds to do so. Instead offer your talents in different ways such as creating art for the fundraiser, editing and writing copy, organizing fundraise drives, etc.
- We need creative folks to keep creating. Fun things are needed too! Keep creating what you do and share it with others. This can help avoid burnout if you take time to do what you love.
- Avoid Burnout by taking time to rest. Try to set up groups so that people swap out to rest and others are available to take up the mantle. Here’s a good thread on burnout that can help. Also, there’s a good book on avoiding burnout called Overcoming Burnout by Nicole Rose.
- Cultivate joy whenever you can. Yes, things are hard. Yes, this all takes energy. But share moments of joy with one another so you can rejuvenate and avoid burnout. Craft boundaries with trauma consumption (as in reading about all the horrors of the world) so you don’t burn yourself out.
- Avoid Calling Police if someone is in crisis. Instead rely on crisis lines that do not call police, and build up alternatives to police. (A good example is CAHOOTS, which responds to emergencies with unarmed workers trained in crisis, first aid, and de-escalation. Also work on building up Transformative Justice models to deal with violence of any sort). If calling is unavoidable, make sure someone is there to supervise the police and deescalate them. You Cannot Rely On Police To Deescalate. For more information on this, see The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, any book or article by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor or Ijeoma Oluo, White Rage by Carol Anderson, Policing the Planet Anthology, or We Do This Till We Free Us by Mariame Kaba.
- Be Accessible! Accessibility is a multilayered need. There’s different needs to consider in the different access realms, which includes physical space, information space, community space, labor space, sensory space, transport space, time-independent space, and justice space. I wrote an article on ways to approach accessibility and to build its framework into one’s organizing from the get-go, so that it’s easy to just implement the access when needed.
Good tips on how to keep going:
Ijeoma Oluo’s article has awesome tips: How We Get Through This
Beyond the Book: Buckle up y’all. Shit’s about to get really rough. …. I mean it, I truly don’t want us to give in to despair. I want us to have hope, and I want that hope to focus us and motivate us to action. So first, here are some things that I want to remind us all of. — ijeomaoluo.substack.com
These next few books are by Disabled folks about mutual aid and care work, since we’ve had to rely on mutual aid systems to survive for generations (due to the state’s failure and abandonment of us in crises):
Crip Kinship explores the art-activism of Sins Invalid, a San Francisco Bay Area-based performance project, and its radical imaginings of what disabled, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming bodyminds of color can do: how they can rewrite oppression, and how they can gift us with transformational lessons for our collective survival. — ak press
In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative “collective access” — access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure — in our communities and political movements. —arsenalpulp.com
“Piepzna-Samarasinha encourages the use of care webs, which are groups of individuals (who may be disabled, able-bodied/not disabled, or a mixture) who work together to provide care and access to resources for each other. Creating care webs shifts the idea of access and care of all kinds (disability, child, economic) from collective to collective while working through the raced, classed, gendered aspects of access and care.
Piepzna-Samarasinha discusses how predominantly sick and disabled Black and brown queer people have created ways for sick and disabled people to receive support and care through their autonomy without relying on the state or their biological families. She also spotlights care webs from the past that may not have been viewed as disabled care like the STAR House started by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. The STAR house created a safe space for trans people of color while also allowing shared access to gender-affirming supplies.” — From the Article Summary of Care Work Part 1
Some important things to consider while building community:
“Fair trade care webs draw on sick and disabled knowledge about care. Sick and disabled folks have many superpowers: one of them is that many of us have sophisticated, highly developed skills around negotiating and organizing care. Many sick and disabled people have experienced receiving shitty, condescending, “poor you!” charity-based care that’s worse than no care at all—whether it’s from medical staff or our friends and families.
Many disabled people also face receiving abusive or coercive care, in medical facilities and nursing homes and from our families and personal care assistants. We’re also offered unsolicited medical advice, from doctors and strangers on the street (who are totally sure carrot juice will cure our MS) every day of our lives. All of those offers are “well meaning,” but they’re also intrusive, unasked for, and mostly coming from a place of discomfort with disability and wanting to “fix” us.” ― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Here is a great resource for alternatives to police:
Creative Interventions Toolkit and Workbook.
Creative Interventions provides vision, tools and resources to help anyone and everyone create community-based, collective responses to domestic, family, and sexual violence. The community-based approach centers those closest to and most impacted by harm, honors their expertise, and builds collective knowledge and power as the solution to violence. … Aligned with transformative justice, community accountability, and, more simply, community-based responses to violence — Creative Interventions addresses responses to harm at all stages — prevention, early intervention, rapid response to crisis, and longer-term processes towards transformation. — creative interventions
That’s all for now. Please share, and if folks think of other items that folks can do to build up community and mutual aid, share that too.
Thanks for reading. Stay safe.
Reshaping Reality 
Thoughts?