Many people are demotivated from providing mutual aid to their community because they assume itâll be expensive, complicated, and/or illegal. Not so! You can make a big difference in your neighborsâ 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 itâs 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 donât 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 doesnât have to be formalized and kept precise track of - âIâll owe you oneâs or just a general culture of âhomies help homies, alwaysâ 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 peopleâs fridge can hold perishable items if you can get a hold of the appliance itself and space/power for it; a setup like MITâs 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, theyâll 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 arenât 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 peopleâs 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)
Feel free to share other ideas below!
