Our values
Through solidarity and community mobilization, we seek to directly connect people with the resources they need amid the ongoing pandemic. Mutual aid, intersectional coalition building, community care, and harm reduction lie at the core of our work, sustaining us in our fight for resource redistribution and collective survival. The things that carry our work forward are deeply intertwined. These pillars of our work include:
Mutual Aid and Community Care
We believe that when we band together and build solidarity to collect and redistribute the resources that we have as a collective to meet all of our needs, we practice mutual aid. Mutual aid is something that nourishes us all. Learn more here.
Harm Reduction
We believe that masking, air filtration, and safer gatherings play a major role in reducing the harms of the pandemic and the lack of infrastructure to support our communities’ survival. When the systems in place harm us or defund our abilities to keep ourselves safe, we rely on each other to reduce these harms. Learn more about liberatory harm reduction here.
Pandemic Justice
We believe that access to PPE, health care, housing, food, education, sick-leave, remote work option, and COVID-safe gatherings and spaces are all crucial elements in the broader movement for pandemic justice: everyone should be able to access protective measures against COVID-19, regardless of location, identities they hold, or their ability to pay.
Disability Justice
Disability justice asserts that "there is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate,” in the words of Aurora Levins Morales, and that “we value our people as they are, for who they are, and that people have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity.” In our work, this entails advocating for equitable access to resources, safe spaces, healthcare, and much much more, ensuring disabled people and their needs are at the forefront of all pandemic mutual aid. Learn more here and here.
When the systems in place harm us or defund our abilities to keep ourselves safe, we rely on each other to reduce these harms and keep each other safe. Community care work remains imperative in the face of a lack of a comprehensive, accessible, or adequate federal mask distribution network. When we take collective action and build solidarity to collect and redistribute the resources available, we practice mutual aid and support distributive justice for communal well-being.