For the next two weeks, Mutual Aid volunteers are organizing food and toiletry drives and hope to continue their efforts as long as it is needed.

A grassroots movement has organized hundreds of volunteers to bring food, pet supplies and other resources to those who need it most throughout the Portland metro.

One Facebook post has now turned into a group of more than 3,300 people willing to help one another out. Shelly Kirsch has been spending most of her time lately at the Marketplace Community Church, making sure people have food in their pantries.

As the number of confirmed covid-19 cases increases around the world, people are struggling to keep themselves mentally and physically safe and stable. Some individuals and communities are having a tougher time than others, especially the marginalized.

An RN in Queens and her husband fell sick with the virus, then worried how they would obtain food and snacks for their eleven-year-old daughter. A formerly incarcerated man and advocate struggled to afford caring for his kids; his jobs were all on hold and their mother had been hospitalized.

Community organizing has blossomed around the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Mutual aid networks” are volunteer-led, grassroots efforts to connect people with resources that might be more difficult to access during social isolation.

As New York City became one of the first major areas in the country to order residents to stay at home as the coronavirus pandemic spread nationwide, a group of activists in the borough of Queens quickly realized that they needed to organize to help their neighbors in the weeks ahead.

Other than tending to her backyard rose garden, 82-year-old Breda Courtney hasn’t been out of her house in Berkeley, Calif., in nearly six weeks, knowing that a trip to the grocery store or pharmacy is a gamble she can’t take.

We are not accustomed to destruction looking, at first, like emptiness. The coronavirus pandemic is disorienting in part because it defies our normal cause-and-effect shortcuts to understanding the world.

TAMPA, FL - Dezeray Lyn has dedicated her life to helping those in need. She part of a disaster relief network 'Mutual Aid Disaster Relief.' Recently, they provided 120 thousand pounds of food and water to people in Puerto Rico. Areas, where they say, hadn't been helped at all after Hurricane Maria. "Many deaths could have been prevented by planning, by not allowing the genocide of abandonment to happen, we want those stories to be told," says Lyn.

In this edition of The Solecast I speak with Frank Lopez about his recent trip to Puerto Rico. We discuss the failure of the state to act quickly enough and the devastation he witnessed. We talk about how the people of Puerto Rico are helping themselves and how anarchists have launched mutual aid projects in the region.

Today we take a look at the high toll Puerto Rico is paying, in both money and lives, for the triple disasters of colonialism, Hurricane Maria and disaster capitalism

In August, nearly one year after Hurricane Maria wrecked Puerto Rico's electrical grid and plunged its 3.4 million residents into darkness, island officials heralded a milestone: The lights were back on. The state-owned electric company even tweeted a photo of a smiling family it said was the last to receive power.

NEW YORK - The scene at St. Jacobi church in Brooklyn is controlled chaos: scores of people sorting and distributing tons of aid for relief centers in the hardest-hit parts of New York. Everyone is a volunteer, and all seem to be working at top speed.

NEW ORLEANS -- Malik Rahim, a granddaddy with a broad face and long gray dreadlocks, leans across his wooden kitchen table and with a low Nawlins growl lets you know what he thinks local pols did for racial harmony.

In Katrina's aftermath in New Orleans, an unlikely group of four men -- white and black, old and young -- came together to form a relief collective unlike any other.

Dressed in cuffed dirty jeans, a purple T-shirt and dusty flip-flops, Amy Squires unloads bottled gallons of water for New Orleans residents under a distribution tent on Pauline Street in the Ninth Ward.

We speak with New Orleans community activist and co-founder of the Common Ground Collective, Malik Rahim, about his continued relief efforts in the Gulf Coast, the racism in the federal government’s response to the disaster and much more.

After Katrina, nontraditional, decentralized relief steps in where big government and big charity failed.