In The News

Celebrities and regular folk alike came together to offer hot food, clean water, and warm beds.

About 70 Austinites gathered at the Homeless Memorial and Tree of Remembrance along the south bank of Lady Bird Lake on Sunday for a vigil in honor of unhoused people who lost their lives during last week’s winter storm and blackout in Texas.

The camp underneath Ben White Boulevard and Manchaca Road had fallen eerily quiet. “The power had gone out and the wind was blowing up drifts against the tents really, really fast and really, really bad,” Debra Sheffield said.

In the midst of government neglect, unemployment, and economic downturn, many political movements have arisen in attempts to change the structure of a society that has utterly failed the people in the most dire need of its help.

But it’s not a substitute for organizing.

With huge gaps in the state and local response to the winter crisis, volunteers are stepping up to provide vital services

A week that started with smiling snow photos and snowmen took a drastic turn in a matter of hours as San Antonio, like the rest of Texas, was left to freeze in the dark. But through it all the community has seen some light.

José Andrés' World Central Kitchen has also mobilized to feed people left without power, water, and food in record-breaking conditions.

Mutual aid builds the collective people power we need to take on the state.

Volunteers are needed to deliver food, answer the South Shore Blizzard Dig-Out hotline and to coordinate snow shoveling.

Four truckloads of donations from the Redding community were collected from last week's Women’s March partnership with the Shasta County Mutual Aid group.

The East Brooklyn Mutual Aid (EMBA) is hosting a fundraiser to keep their volunteer group organizing food distribution in Brownsville, Ocean Hills, East New York, and Cypress Hills for another month.

Lafayette Mutual Aid (LMA) is a student-led movement with two aims: to provide direct assistance to Black and Indigenous students and Lehigh Valley residents, and to shift the ideology of giving toward the direct and immediate assistance of fellow community members.

In March of last year, shortly after the city shuttered the first time due to COVID-19, Seattle’s Maria Lamarca Anderson wanted take-out. She called up a BIPOC-owned Filipino restaurant she’d been meaning to try, Beacon Hill’s Musang Seattle.

While much of San Antonio was frozen amid the harsh cold snap, small groups of volunteers have moved about the city, delivering supplies and offering warm places to stay to those without the necessities: food, water, shelter, and heat to stave off the biting winter freeze.

Prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba urged like-minded social activists to embrace the spirit of generosity, collective power, and mutual aid during the all-virtual 37th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation.

A plate of food for a good cause — it’s an attractive model for creators and customers that pop-up projects like The Side Hustle are taking advantage of.

The pandemic has been challenging Miriam Soto. “You have to stay home,” she said during an interview on Broadway in Newburgh. “It’s very depressing.”

All of the energy spent organizing in 2020 has allowed many local mutual aid groups keep people warm, housed, and fed during this weather emergency.

As governments fail Dallas’s unhoused population, a collective of organizers across the city worked around the clock to feed the residents of Camp Rhonda, an encampment for unhoused people that’s been under threat of shutdown

These mutual aid funds, nonprofits, and community groups are getting hot meals and other supplies to people on the ground right now