Many people are demotivated from providing mutual aid to their community because they assume it’ll be expensive, complicated, and/or illegal. Not so! You can make a big difference in your neighbors’ lives just by sharing what you have and building solidarity with them (Note: Your local public library, community garden, or makerspace may be happy to host one or more of these if you get in touch with them!)
Connect on social media: A good first step is to start a group message, Facebook group, Discord server, email list, or anything else that allows people to talk to each other consistently. From here you can start to build solidarity and discuss what unmet needs your community has and how to address them
Bartering, time banking, and free stores: From there it’s easy enough to start the conversation about how to provide each other with material aid. Poor communities often have needs and the ability to meet those needs right next to each other, but they are never matched together just because people don’t have enough pieces of paper to give each other. A way around that is to start trading with each other - a jar of jam for an old unused bike, car repairs for fresh honey, 2 hours of guitar lessons for 2 hours helping repaint your deck, etc. This doesn’t have to be formalized and kept precise track of - “I’ll owe you one”s or just a general culture of “homies help homies, always” are a great way to build up trust and a sense of community
Buying coop: Buying wholesale can save a lot of money, but a lot of people never have enough money at one time to take advantage of that (besides not needing an entire pallet of dish soap). A buying coop lets a group of people pool their money to buy wholesale instead, saving everyone money in the process
Food sharing: Food waste/excess and food insecurity are a perfect match, and as such there have been plenty of ideas for bringing them together. Community pantries can pool and hold nonperishables inside something like an apartment building; a simple veggie share can be built and set up outside for communities with a lot of gardeners/farmers; a people’s fridge can hold perishable items if you can get a hold of the appliance itself and space/power for it; a setup like MIT’s FoodCam can connect hungry people to unwanted leftovers; and Food Not Bombs collects commercial food waste to share with communities all across the world (your city might very well have one already - look it up!)
Tool share/library of things: There are a lot of things that you use once or twice a year at most and then let sit in your attic the rest of the time. Post hole diggers, Batman-shaped cake molds, 3D printers, turkey basters, etc. Not only do these sit around unused for a majority of the time, but worse, if someone in your community needs one, they’ll likely go out and buy a whole new one. Instead, try finding a community area where you can put a lending library. That way, everyone in your community can pool their scarcely-used resources, and rather than owning 20 hammers altogether, everyone can share 2
Little free seed library: Little free libraries are a fairly well-known way to informally share resources with your neighbors, but if you live in an area with a lot of gardeners, or hopeful gardeners, saving seeds can be another way to use the same design. Just set aside the seeds from your harvest, or your groceries, then put them in reused envelopes from your junk mail and leave them in the box to be picked up by your neighbors. You can also share cuttings and clones from your garden!
Community composting: Composting is a dead simple process for turning food scraps and other organic waste into rich fertilizer - saving any gardeners in your neighborhood money (and keeping harmful pollutants out of the environment) with no ongoing investment needed. Personal setups require specific inputs in specific quantities for best results, but in large enough piles those rules can be largely ignored and still give great compost. If you get enough people involved, then, your composter can be as simple as a large box on the side of the road. ShareWaste can connect you to people with food scraps, whether you have a personal or community composter
Bike/car sharing: People aren’t moving around at all hours, meaning a majority of the time their transportation is sitting in garages or driveways unused. Starting a bike share can be a fairly easy, low-cost way to address this and improve people’s mobility. A car share can be a lot more involved, but worth it for all the money and carbon it can save (especially for areas with little or no public transit)
Another idea: a Really Really Free Market! Since we live in a world with an abundance of stuff, it’s perfectly feasible to have a market space where everything donated is completely free to take by anyone who needs it. I’ve been to this particular market before and it’s really cool because everybody gets the necessities they need without worrying if they have the money for it.
When I lived in Missouri, we had this little commune groups of the local poor folks. We had anywhere from three to five households in our group, with one person elected as the coordinator. The coordinator’s job was to keep track of who needed what, and who had what to offer.
People with jobs contributed money to keep the utilities on in the homes of people who didn’t. People with cars made sure everyone got to work and the grocery store. People without jobs kept the houses clean and cared for little ones. People with skills did home repairs and stuff.
And every day, we had what we called a “stone soup supper.” We decided who was hosting that day, everyone showed up with whatever they had in their cupboards to add, and we pooled it to make a meal. It was our way of making sure that everyone’s kids got at least one full meal a day.
The coordinator wasn’t the leader. She was just the person who was the best at keeping track of needs and abilities. And it wasn’t meant to be this radical political thing, either. It was just that we were all desperate and needed each other’s help to survive.
So the debunking video above led me to watch another debunking video, which started down a very intriguing wormhole of asking why people are producing fake how-to videos like this, and the short version is they’re exploiting algorithms to generate ad revenue and the long version is they’re produced by a Russian content farm that has made some forays into American political ads.
She seriously doesn’t deserve the treatment youtube’s been giving her, so please support her as much as you can and make sure this shitty farming channel goes down in flames.
It promotes EXTREMELY DANGEROUS activities such as PUTTING STRAWBERRIES INTO A GLASS OF BLEACH TO TURN THEM WHITE WHICH IS POISONOUS. AND POURING LAVA HOT CARAMEL ONTO A SPINNING WHISK, WHICH WOULD EASILY BURN YOU AND LEAVE A SCAR.
It’s amazing how youtube still tolerates this kind of behavior just because it’s pumping out videos 24/7 and sucking up all of the views. It’s unacceptable and it needs to be stopped as soon as possible.
Again, support Ann Reardon and her cause as much as possible and report the opposing videos promoting this shit. DO NOT LEAVE A COMMENT ON THE VIDEOS! YOU’LL ONLY GIVE THE ALGORITHM THE IDEA THAT THIS VIDEO IS SHAREABLE!
I ADORE Ann Reardon’s videos. She’s got a degree in food science and she knows what’s she’s talking about. All of her debunking videos come with (very easy to understand) scientific explanations for why things won’t work and what to look out for in these videos. One example is the loads of mug cake recipes that you see floating about: if there isn’t something it the mixture that will act as a raising agent (eg baking soda, self rising flour or eggs) then your mug cake just won’t work. She debunks so many stupid (and often dangerous) cooking hacks, along with giving alternative recipes and hacks that actually will work and will be safe.
Plus she’s an Aussie and she’s just an absolute savage when she wants to be. Her humour in these videos is so deadpan and sarcastic and it’s so funny to watch, along with being educational! Her husband, Dave, is also really funny and a great sport (as he’s usually the test subject for the horrible food she’s made following these “hacks”)
But please please please don’t just support these debunking videos. Go watch her other videos! Her recipes are amazing and she’s made some incredible stuff during her time on YouTube (my personal favourite is when she made a portrait of Wonder Woman out of chocolate) and her videos (aside from the debunking ones) are actually really relaxing to watch. During lockdown I’ve been watching them before bed and trying some of the recipes the next day. Also the amount of work that goes into her videos is insane! Lots of them include stop motion animation!!!
So yeah support Ann Reardon and the how to cook that YouTube channel.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
