This month is filled with excitement and anxiety.  Once again, temperatures are topping records.  Once again, hurricane season is heating up.  But we are getting ready; hot on the heels of our first innovative and inspiring “Building the Movement for Mutual Aid” Training Tour, the next round begins.  Because it is always training season, always organizing season, always collaborative community building season. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief trainers are responding to requests for workshops that will help communities around the Gulf of Mexico to prepare together.  We have scheduled trainings in Gainesville (June 22-23), Orlando (July 20-21), Lafayette (July 21-22), and Houston (July 27-28), as well as meetings with friends and allies in New Orleans and at L'eau Est La Vie Camp blockading the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. And some of us recently connected with friends from the other side of the Gulf too - two MADRelief trainers spent the weekend with Public Lab, an open-source citizen science and community technology organization that hosted, for the first time, a “Crisis Convening” that brought together dozens of organizers, educators, scientists, technologists, librarians, mental health professionals, permaculturists, [...]