Robert Raymond: In this second episode of our new radio documentary series The Response, we shine a spotlight on Puerto Rico. When Hurricane Maria slammed into the island about a year ago, it resulted in thousands of deaths and knocked out power for almost an entire year. The result was what many consider to be the worst disaster in the United States.

Further, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria exacerbated the ongoing debt crisis that has been crippling the country’s public services for years — a crisis that has forced many communities on the island abandon hope that the government will ever come to their assistance. And so when Hurricane Maria hit, it wasn’t a surprise to many of these already-abandoned communities when the official response was often nowhere to be seen.

This conversation has been told before by many mainstream news outlets. What you might not have heard, however, is the story of the grassroots response that arose after Maria. In the midst of all the austerity and hurricane-driven chaos, a quiet revolution has been slowly taking place on the island. What began as an impromptu community kitchen meant to help feed survivors in the town of Caguas has since grown into an island-wide network of mutual aid centers with the ultimate aim of restoring power — both electric and civic — to the people. We’ll hear from many of those involved in these centers and find out why they are growing so quickly and what they are doing to begin addressing both the acute and chronic disasters that Puerto Ricans are facing today.

Episode credits:

• Senior producer, technical director, and designer: Robert Raymond
• Field producer: Juan Carlos Dávila
• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Voiceover: Neda Raymond, Ellie Llewellyn, and Monique Hafen

Music by:

• Vladi (feat Skew.One)
• Papel Machete

Header illustration by Kane Lynch

Listen and subscribe with the app of your choice:

For a full list of episodes, resources to cultivate resilience in your community, or to share your experiences of disaster collectivism, visit www.theresponsepodcast.org.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure.

Judith Rodriguez: My name is Judith Rodríguez. My experience of the hurricane wasn’t pleasant. I was sleeping, when I heard a whistling sound. That whistling sound was the ugliest thing I’ve heard in my life. A whistling that was never silent. It was endless, almost two days.

I thought that my house was in good condition — well, at least I thought that. When I woke up at 2:30 in the morning, I felt scared. The first scare was when the back door went flying off — a metal door that was in the kitchen and just went off flying. We’re still looking for it.

Tom Llewellyn: When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico on September 20th, 2017, the mountain town of Cayey, where Judith Rodriguez lives, was, like much of the island, left without electricity for months on end. Winds reaching 175 miles per hour destroyed power lines and tore roofs off of houses. The result was the second longest blackout on record, and what many consider to be the worst natural disaster to ever hit the United States.

No electricity meant that people had no way of doing some of what we consider to be the most basic of things, like cooking food — and not just in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but sometimes for months. This was true in towns all over the island, and it was a big problem. In the weeks after Maria hit, Judith had heard of an interesting place that had popped up — a kind of community kitchen in the neighboring town of Caguas. They were cooking food for people — and they needed help. She wanted to do something to pitch in. She didn’t have much, but she decided to go up anyways.

Judith Rodriguez: I first came here ’cause I had a lot of dishes in my house, and I said, “well, they’re cooking for a lot of people, what if I donate the dishes that are just lying around in a corner of my house?” I couldn’t do anything with them at the moment anyways. I said “well, how can I help since this project sounds beautiful? People cooperating with each other.”

Tom Llewellyn: Judith wasn’t the only one who had the thought to help. In the weeks after Maria, something sort of remarkable had happened. The community kitchen had taken on a whole new life, and what started perhaps as just a few plates and volunteer cooks had grown into a fully-fledged community center. And in just a matter of months, it grew into an island-wide network of mutual aid centers which, as we’ll see, is quickly turning into a movement to transform Puerto Rico, one person at a time.

You’re listening to The Response, a podcast documentary series that explores how communities come together in the aftermath of disaster. I’m your host, Tom Llewellyn, and we’ll spend our second episode in Puerto Rico.

Judith Rodriguez: I came here to offer the dishes, and I said, “well, I’m in a hurry, because I fell and have a hurt back.” They said, “we’ll help you with that.” That’s when I discovered the amazing experience of acupuncture.

Tom Llewellyn: In addition to providing food, the center in Caguas had started putting on weekly acupuncture clinics to help address some of the personal and collective shock felt throughout the community after the hurricane.

Judith Rodriguez: I thought it was just putting in a needle, telling you something and teaching you how to breathe, and that was it. But, this is much more than that, a kind of way of life. You learn how to live more relaxed, how to do things more calmly, how to have better judgement, and cooperating with others — because we’re a community. Whether we want it or not, human beings are a community. If we’re in China, in Puerto Rico, in Japan, wherever, we’re a community. We have to help each other here in Puerto Rico, which I call the boat. If this boat sinks, we all sink. I don’t sink alone, we all sink.

Tom Llewellyn: Now, almost a year later, the acupuncture clinics are still going on.

—

Giovanni Roberto: My name is Giovanni Roberto, I’m part of the organizing team here in the Mutual Aid Center of Caguas. Today we’re having the weekly acupuncture clinic. We work with stress and post-traumatic syndrome, addictions, and other health issues.

Tom Llewellyn: Puerto Rico’s healthcare situation wasn’t great before Maria — and the hurricane only made things worse. Many hospitals were left without electricity for months after the storm, and primary care became a luxury that few had access to. According to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the death toll, now estimated to be in the thousands, was primarily caused by interruptions in medical care.

And a less visible effect of the hurricane was the trauma it inflicted on the Puerto Rican psyche. Suicide prevention hotlines were getting up to five, even six hundred calls a day after the storm, and physicians were reporting unprecedented numbers of mental health hospitalizations. Acupuncture clinics, like the one here at the mutual aid center in Caguas, made a big difference for a lot of people. Giovanni told us about the experience of one of the women that came to the clinic.

Giovanni Roberto: When the first day she came here she was almost crying, like in a really stressful way. She was the last person that day and since that day, and have never been absent. She’s not crying anymore, she’s sleeping better, she say today to me that when she came here she feels that she’s in paradise. You know, like in a situation in which she feels so good that she forget about all the things in her normal life. And acupuncture did that to a lot of people.

Tom Llewellyn: Similar to how the Occupy Wall Street movement transformed into a disaster relief effort after Hurricane Sandy, the seeds for the center that Giovanni co-founded were also planted by a grassroots social movement. What began with community kitchens for low income students at the University of Puerto Rico quickly gained momentum with the historic strikes that took place in the spring of 2017, where thousands of university students gathered to resist massive budget cuts to the school system.

When Maria hit the island, that network of activists and organizers didn’t waste any time. They knew they had to do something to help, and so they began cooking food. Lots of it.

Giovanni Roberto: Yeah we were serving three hundred, four hundred, five hundred that first week of people in lunch. And sometimes two hundred or close to three hundred at breakfast.

Tom Llewellyn: But they also had a larger vision.

Giovanni Roberto: Instead of calling it just the Community Kitchen of Caguas, we tried to put a bigger name. Because we have an idea of building a center that could be more than just food.

We know that after the hurricane food was a strong necessity, but after a couple of weeks or maybe a month or two, other necessities like health issues arose and people have like, living issues, and medical issues, and other issues that were not related necessarily, directly related to Maria but they were there before Maria.

Tom Llewellyn: The larger vision that Giovanni and his fellow activists had was to create permanent projects that would go beyond basic disaster relief — a way of addressing some of the more chronic challenges people were facing on the island.

Giovanni Roberto: So that’s how we came with the idea of launching a community space called Mutual Aid Center. We did it here in Caguas, but also we were able to discuss the idea with other activists who were already doing things. And through that discussion we came with the idea of doing the same thing in different places. So can we can create a network to make the idea of the mutual aid more stronger in the island.

Tom Llewellyn: So, it’s probably a good time to unpack things a little bit. What exactly are those chronic struggles that exist in Puerto Rico? Where to begin…

If Puerto Rico was a state, it would be the poorest state in the U.S. Forty percent of the island lives below the U.S. poverty line. And maybe you’re thinking, it’s probably relatively cheaper to live in Puerto Rico? Not really. The cost of living in San Juan, the capital, is higher than it is in the average U.S. metropolitan area.

Then there’s the fact that one in ten Puerto Ricans are unemployed. And, of course, there’s the debt. Puerto Rico has been struggling with a potentially illegitimate debt that has crippled the country’s public services. For example, between 2010 and 2017, 340 schools were shut down. On top of that pensions are being cut, healthcare services are being cut… the island is in bad shape.

So, when Maria hit, it didn’t just the tear roofs off of buildings — it tore the lid off of an ongoing disaster. It woke people up. And Giovanni, like many other activists on the island, saw it as an opportunity. A chance to intervene.

Giovanni Roberto: We see our project as a political project. We want Puerto Rico to be different. We want society to transform in some way. That means to transform values, the way people relate, the way people trust each other. The way people see communities. So, we see this space as a way of organizing people to gain in those values, to gain that experience. In our long term vision we want Puerto Rico full of Mutual Aid Centers. If we are able to have an impact in the way people see these kind of spaces, we know we want to develop the concept of popular power which is not a concept developed here in any way yet.

—

Astrid Cruz Negrón: My name is Astrid Cruz Negrón. I am a high school teacher, I teach Spanish and History. And I am a member of the Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico. That is, I’m active in the teacher’s union. I’m an activist and have been very involved in political, social, and environmental struggles in Utuado for as long as I can remember.

Tom Llewellyn: We’re now in Utuado, all the way on the other side of the island, in the Central Mountain Range.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: Utuado was one of the towns most affected by the hurricane. The fact that we have so much water meant that the effects were more visible here, I think it is the town with the most aquifers, with the most water in Puerto Rico. And the floods were huge.

But it’s essential to look at the social aspect as well, which is that Utuado was abandoned by the state and federal governments a long time ago. Poverty in Utuado is very high, unemployment is high, the biggest employer in Utuado is the municipal government and the Department of Education — the schools.

Tom Llewellyn: But schools in Utuado are starting to disappear, just like on the rest of the island. Because of budget cuts, a quarter of the schools in Puerto Rico are shutting down, displacing tens of thousands of students and their teachers. Three schools in Utuado were closed just this year.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: And plus the school isn’t just a school. It is a support center, in the hurricane it was a refuge, it is a social center, it is the library in a neighborhood where there is only one, where the only social worker in the neighborhood is in that school. The school plays such an essential role, so we cannot say that the state government abandoned Utuado because of the hurricane, they had abandoned it long before, and the same goes for the federal government.

Tom Llewellyn: Actually, after the hurricane, the federal government did show up in Utuado. But it wasn’t exactly in the way Astrid had hoped for.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: And yet, during the hurricane, the lines at the gas stations and in the supermarkets after they opened, were controlled by the National Guard who came in and gave the order to close a supermarket. There were trucks filled with water heading to local shops and they seized them. The National Guard seized the water going to the shops, which you might think that if the state seizes essential goods they are going to distribute them around town because that would make sense, but it wasn’t like that. We didn’t see it getting to the community afterwards, they kept these materials that they seized. In the federal post office of Utuado, the National Guard even seized containers to store gasoline, they seized the basic goods that our families in the diaspora sent us so we could survive that difficult time.

Tom Llewellyn: It was in the midst of all this when Astrid and many others came to realize that if they were going to survive, they were going to have to do it on their own. So, she started meeting with other members of her community, thinking about ways to move forward.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: The natural response of each one of us was to ask “what can I do?” Beyond the temporary state assistance and outside of the hegemonic responses from governments and institutions that want to perpetuate the situation that existed before the hurricane. As an activist one hopes for a better world and then looks for ways to not only solve the emergency, but every step we take is aimed at building that world we have always been working towards.

Tom Llewellyn: It was around this time that Astrid ran into a group of community organizers who had just arrived in town from Caguas. They invited her to a meeting, and that’s when things started to really take shape.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: They had seen the example of the center that was emerging in Caguas, so they had stories to tell about this movement or phenomenon on the island. And when we got together there was’’t much to say, we were all on the same page: we had a job to do for the survival of the people, so that the construction of something new and political would transcend from it.

Tom Llewellyn: The Mutual Aid Center of Utuado emerged somewhat spontaneously out of this shared vision for a better Puerto Rico. For a while they didn’t even have a physical space to call their own, and they were just working off the cuff, trying to get donated supplies out as fast as possible and putting on activities in public squares, community centers, and schools.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: We’ve done a lot of activities with few resources. Many deliveries of supplies, health fairs, community kitchens.

We’ve had talks about water purification, filter distribution, civil rights and legal talks. There was a helpful lawyer who led a conversation about the FEMA procedures and the rights of community members. It was very effective and people got very excited. They asked a lot of questions, and we could see that it created a lot of awareness.

We also brought in artistic workshops, we saw the need and people asked us for things other than technology to occupy their time when there was no electricity, activities to relax, activities to promote culture or keep busy, and so there were mandala workshops, origami workshops, plena workshops, given by the members of Plena Combativa, who brought in political themes because the lyrics they used as an example for how to compose a plena were rhymes with a political meaning, and it was really wonderful as people began to compose their plena with a message about their situation, it’s an emotional outlet.

So we also handle the cultural and emotional part, I would say, because there was that outlet, for example we brought in workshops on engraving, healing, massage, acupuncture and natural medicine. We have really done a lot of activities.

Tom Llewellyn: One of their more recent events was a disaster preparation fair with the focus on community education — teaching people skills like rainwater collection and map reading, for example.

Maria isn’t the only hurricane that’s hit Puerto Rico, and it won’t be the last. The reality of stronger and more frequent storms fueled by climate change makes this kind of preparedness incredibly important. But the activists and organizers here also always have an eye on the broader vision.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: The Mutual Aid Center definitely does not want to stay in the emergency mindset of surviving Maria, we want everything we do to build towards a new world, a new, more just, more equal society. We want to empower people to build popular power and gain more skills in terms of education, preparation, and resistance so they can be in a better state for creating and proposing new ideas.

Tom Llewellyn: They also put on musical performances and plays.

—

Tom Llewellyn: We’re just outside the home of Ramonita Bonilla in the mountain town of Las Marias. A group of volunteers are installing cisterns to catch rainwater — it’s part of a an ongoing program put together by the Mutual Aid Center of Las Marias.

Ramonita Bonilla: They came to put the cistern. Because that cistern is very good, because it fills up of water and you can serve yourself from it. The kids are tremendous, they are tremendous putting the cisterns there and working.

Tom Llewellyn: Perched atop the Central mountain range, Las Marias is very difficult to access — there are steep mountain roads and frequent mudslides, making this area especially vulnerable to extreme weather — and Maria left it devastated. Residents were cut off from food, water, and electricity for weeks. Word spread around the island that Las Marias was in trouble, and volunteers came from all around to help, including a group all the way from San Juan, which is on the opposite side of the island.

Ramonita Bonilla: We, of course. We were here without water forever and then they brought us water. The people were very good the people that brought us water and food and everything, They brought rice, beans, they brought everything. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t had eaten. We would’ve died, yes. And the many that did, was because of that.

Tom Llewellyn: One group of volunteers ended up staying long term. They founded the town’s mutual aid center, and two of them, José and Omar, are organizing today’s event.

José Bellaflores: My name’s José Bellafloras — I’m known as Guri. I’m from the city, from Rio Piedras, and I moved here after the hurricane Maria, to Bucarabones, in Las Marias, to help out with the community and started building from the bottom up a center where we could have cultural development and different types of opportunities for the community and us.

Tom Llewellyn: Before Maria hit, José was working three jobs in and around San Juan. He decided to give it all up to answer the call for help.

José Bellaflores: Once the hurricane passed, I don’t know what was it that my heart was beating fast. Every day, every hour when I went to sleep, just thinking that you know it’s the time. What time? I don’t know. But something was telling me that I needed to make a decision and just focus on the opportunity that we have right now. You know, other than Maria and the tragedy, the austerity measures that are been taken on our country. Well, I don’t know. I felt a drive and I and I just said, “Let’s sacrifice this and let’s see, if I put my strength, my focus, and all my energies on just organizing with the people. I think maybe I could kick off something that might become something bigger than what we’ve been imagining.”

Tom Llewellyn: Over the last few months, he’s seen that bigger vision take form in Las Marias, as community members have become more and more involved.

José Bellaflores: It’s very empowering, and to see people that maybe weren’t so active in life being active here in the center. Being active as a community leader. For me it’s beautiful and I couldn’t be happier to see that.

Tom Llewellyn: An here’s Omar Reyes. He also came all the way from San Juan in those first days, and helped found the mutual aid center here in Las Marias.

Omar Reyes: We have a better hope. Now we still had hope — we had hope before and we will have hope always. But now it’s a better hope. It’s a hope more clearly of our own. It’s our own option. It’s not the option that someone comes and just tell you that that’s your option. No. We are creating our own possibility and our own reality.

Tom Llewellyn: There are now mutual aid centers all around the island. But as their numbers continue to grow, so does the threat of more austerity and state negligence. In a chilling report recently released by FEMA, the agency acknowledged its poor response to Maria and essentially told Puerto Ricans to expect something similar this upcoming hurricane season. Here’s Giovanni Roberto, who we heard from at the beginning of the episode.

Giovanni Roberto: Now the government too here in Puerto Rico is selling the idea that people should do more self-management which is not to the same idea that we are talking. But self-management in the idea of the government is that you take care of yourself.

Tom Llewellyn: Many Puerto Ricans are careful not to let the government off the hook by assuming they’re just too incompetent or that they don’t have the resources to get anything done. And in many ways, there are no substitutes for the kind of large-scale recovery efforts and resource distribution that states can provide.

And the truth is, the government has been very active in many ways. Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló has been traveling around the U.S. in a kind of marketing campaign, promising to open the island up to foreign investors and selling off public infrastructure to the highest bidder. With this growing allegiance to a program of disaster capitalism, and after decades of neglect, it’s no wonder why many in Puerto Rico have little confidence that the administration will ever step up to the plate.

Giovanni Roberto: We don’t want the help of the state right now because, we don’t want it. We we want to build a project that can prove that we can do it without them. And then compete with them in the future, because they have the resources that we should have. So, we are not turning the back to the reality that we need to fight against the state. We are trying to build political power and social fabric so it makes sense to fight against the state. It makes sense because we have an opportunity. Right now we don’t have any opportunity against the state. Because we don’t have political power. No size, no number, no quality organization, values in society, you know, we — it’s gonna take time.

—

Christine Nieves: Mariana has been an example of a community that refuses to believe that we don’t have power.

Tom Llewellyn: This is Christine Nieves, she helped found the Mutual Aid Center in Mariana in the municipality of Humacao, just off the eastern coast of the island. She had visited the mutual aid center in Caguas in the week after Maria hit, and she immediately knew that she wanted to do something similar.

Christine Nieves: What I saw there just blew me away because I saw people that were together. I saw people that were smiling and happy. And there was color and there were artists playing guitars and there were signs with beautiful bright drawings. And I just took out my notebook and took out my camera and I started documenting everything that I saw.

Tom Llewellyn: Christine decided she was going to take a risk. She and her partner Luis quit their jobs and founded what’s now the Mutual Aid Project of Mariana.

Christine Nieves: So now we are being proactive about creating different economic models that create wealth for people in Mariana with people in Mariana in mind and in engagement, co-designing it. And everything that has been happening in the organizing has started from a place of dignity and saying we we know our rights, we know what we deserve, and we’re going to organize and we’re going to demand it and we’re not going to wait. And if we have to start making it ourselves, we’re going to do it.

So now what we are presenting is an actual example of how government must evolve in the presence of self-governed communities. What we’re doing is actually the government’s job and this is going to present something that’s at some point going to have to be dealt with because we’re building power. And when people are free and people are awake and people know what they’re worth then they’re not being manipulated anymore. And that’s our goal. And I firmly believe that the more of these communities that happen in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico will change because it’s just a reflection of a different country. And so if we start from the individual the whole community changes. And so that’s where we have to begin.

—

Tom Llewellyn: This episode was written, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond. Interviews were conducted and recorded by our field producer Juan Carlos Dávila. A big thank you to Vladi, Skew.One, and Papel Machete for the music.

Join us for our next episode where we’ll travel to northern California and explore how the undocumented immigrant community there is organizing against a combination of climate-fueled wildfires, a housing crisis, labor exploitation, and the constant threat of ICE raids.

This season of The Response is part of the “Stories to Action” project, a collaboration between Shareable, Post Carbon Institute, Transition US, Upstream Podcast, and NewStories, with distribution support from Making Contact. Funding was provided by the Threshold and Shift Foundations.

If you liked what you just heard, please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us. It might not sound like much, but it’ll make a huge difference in helping others hear this story.

The post The Response 2: How Puerto Ricans are restoring power to the people appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“That whistle was the ugliest I’ve heard in my life,” Rodriguez said. “A whistle that was never silent. It was endless. … I thought that my house was in good condition, at least I thought that. And as I woke up at 2:30am, I felt scared. The first scare was when the back door went flying off — a metal door in the kitchen.”

Like much of the island, the town of Cayey, where Rodriguez lives, was plunged into darkness for months, as winds reaching 175 mph destroyed power lines and tore roofs off houses. Already in the midst of a crippling debt crisis, and with no immediate relief in sight, communities like Cayey had to make due with the few resources they had.

“In my house I had a lot of plates,” Rodriguez says. “What if I donate my plates that are laying in a corner in my home?” She wasn’t the only one with that idea. In towns and cities all over the island, from Cayey to Caguas and Humacao to Las Marias, something began to stir. Plate donations grew into community kitchens which grew into community centers which grew into a movement. With its furiously whistling winds, Hurricane Maria had awakened something in the Puerto Rican people, something that storms, fires, earthquakes — and all manner of disasters and catastrophes — have awakened in communities all around the world.

“Human beings are a community. If we are in China, in Puerto Rico, in Japan, wherever,” says Rodriguez. “We are a community — we have to help each other here in Puerto Rico, which I call the boat. If this boat sinks, we all sink. I don’t sink alone, we all sink.”

In 2007, Naomi Klein presented her thesis of disaster capitalism to the world in her groundbreaking book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Klein’s ideas seemed to perfectly explain much of what was — and still is — taking place globally. The idea is fairly simple: Create market opportunities out of disasters. Klein sketched a picture of how powerful entities use political and economic crises to weaken the public sphere and strengthen the interests of private capital. The “shock” that comes after catastrophes presents the perfect opportunity for powerful interests to take advantage of disoriented communities with the hope of turning a profit.

Klein’s thesis has been helpful in contextualizing much of what we see happening around us, from the dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina to the privatization of infrastructure in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. But when we look closer, we see that the “disaster capitalist” isn’t the only character to emerge out of crisis situations. In these tumultuous times it is crucial that we remember disaster capitalism is only part of the story. There is another story taking place; one based on altruism, solidarity, and social responsibility — and when we look closely, we can see it happening all around us. This is the story of disaster collectivism.

There are innumerable instances where storms have swept in a flood of mutualism, where wildfires have sown the seeds of solidarity, and where earthquakes have strengthened collective values and brought communities closer together. We see these explosions of generosity quite often. It happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when an armada of boats that comprised the volunteer-run Cajun Navy descended upon waterlogged neighborhoods to rescue stranded survivors. We saw it again, on a smaller-scale, in November 2017, when dozens of New Yorkers spontaneously rushed in to help dig out trapped survivors from a collapsed scaffolding structure in Lower Manhattan.

Why do people do this? Why do we see such heroic acts of self-sacrifice and self-endangerment on such a regular basis? It certainly doesn’t seem to align with the story about humanity that dominates many mainstream narratives. This story describes humanity as Homo economicus, a species characterized by selfishness and competition.

“When a disaster strikes, like the flooding in Houston [after Hurricane Harvey], for example, you see everyday people pouring out all this generosity and solidarity,” says Christian Parenti, associate professor of economics at John Jay College in New York City. “Suddenly the idea that everything should have a price on it, and the idea that selfishness and competition are good, all that just gets parked. Suddenly, everyone is celebrating cooperation, solidarity, bravery, sacrifice, and generosity.”

This idea is reinforced by author Rebecca Solnit in her landmark book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” in which she explains that, “in the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.”

We witnessed this recently in the aftermath of the Fuego Volcano eruption in Guatemala in June. In the face of inadequate government response, everyday people came together to take care of each other’s needs. On the night of the eruption, a church in a nearby town “immediately started sounding its bells at an odd time, calling the community to come out to the church where they started collecting materials, food and clothes, and other things,” says Walter Little, an anthropologist based out of the University at Albany at the State University of New York, who was on the ground during the crisis.

Most people won’t think twice when they hear the bells ring, Solnit says: “Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this.”

After the Storm

But what is it about disasters specifically that inspire such acts of altruism? There is a thesis put forth by writers like Solnit, Parenti, and others, that has arisen around this question. It goes a little something like this: We’ve come to accept Homo economicus as the truth, perhaps not always consciously, but it haunts our dreams, our imagination. It confines our sense of possibility and imposes boundaries as arbitrary as those that carve up ecosystems and communities into nation-states. But, as we’ve seen, artificial borders cannot contain the flow of flora, fauna, and human generosity.

When a firestorm blazed through the northern Californian city of Santa Rosa in October 2017, the community came together to form a fund designed specifically for the undocumented community. Undocufund, as it became known, stood in direct opposition to the divide-and-conquer rhetoric that has been a staple of the contemporary political climate.

Tubbs Fire in Sonoma (CC BY-SA 4.0)

“[In] the beginning we didn’t know if we’d raise $50,000 or $100,000,” Omar Medina, the director of Undocufund, says. “Never did we expect the $6 million we’ve raised so far. But the generosity of people as the disasters were happening, as the fires kept going. … and [as] people learned about us — they sympathized with the need. They understand the need based on everything that we’ve experienced lately on a national level as it relates to the undocumented community.”

This kind of human kindness — often hemmed in by the myth of homo economicus perpetuated by mainstream institutions — is bursting at the seams, just waiting for a chance to emerge. Could it be that the collapse of normality that arises during and after calamity awakens something deep within us? Perhaps these moments open up a space, however briefly, for new forms of civic engagement and public life. But when it comes to the every day grind, those chances seem few and far between.

But there’s a deep need to connect. According to research published in the journal American Sociological Review, 25 percent of Americans report not having close friends or confidants. We are also seeing the number of individuals living alone rise sharply in recent years. As we become more and more isolated and atomized in everyday life, our craving for connection only increases. “Our species is a group species,” Parenti says. “There’s something deep and quite innate in us as a species to stick together.”

We saw this innate drive towards connection occur in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City, New York, on Oct. 29, 2012, killing 53 people and leading to $32 billion dollars in damage citywide. Places like the Rockaways, an exposed peninsula within the borough of Queens on Long Island, were hit especially hard. Yet even in a megacity like New York, often viewed as uniquely disconnected and unneighborly, disaster collectivism emerged in full force.

One major example of this kind of collective approach was the effort put forth by Occupy Sandy, a grassroots relief network that grew out of the networks and strategies developed by Occupy Wall Street. Filling in a vacuum left by the official response, Occupy Sandy volunteers worked in partnership with local community organizations and activist networks. Their grassroots efforts focused on empowering poor and working class communities and were based on mutual aid rather than charity. With nearly 60,000 volunteers at its height, its own Amazon relief registry, legal team, medical team, prescription drug deliveries, and meal deliveries everyday, it was able to make a significant impact in the days and weeks following the disaster.

Occupy Sandy image courtesy of Sofia Gallisá Muriente

Sal Lopizzo, a longtime resident of New York City, became involved with the Occupy Sandy recovery effort when a group of volunteers showed up at his flooded nonprofit and asked if they could convert it into a recovery hub. “People just showed up, gutted the office out, got everything out into the street,” Lopizzo says. “We started putting up tables, trucks just started showing up with supplies. Any supply you could think of. If you walked into Home Depot or into a Target store, it was in this office.”

Lopizzo’s building was just one of many hubs that emerged in the days and weeks after the Superstorm hit. It was fed by a dozen or more distribution hubs, which were located in areas that were not as heavily affected.

“There were churches in Brooklyn that were gathering supplies to put on vans and trucks and bringing them in here,” he says. “One time I saw a Greek Orthodox priest pull up in a minivan with a bunch of kids, and they had about one hundred pizzas. And he just showed up here, you know. I was like, ‘Holy mackerel’ — it was amazing.”

Lorena Giron, a Rockaways resident who was also part of the broader grassroots relief effort that emerged after Sandy, was similarly moved by what she saw.

“Just immediately seeing neighbors being worried about their next-door neighbors was something that really touched me, as well as the quick mobilization of the church and the willingness to bring in people into the church and then provide resources — whatever kind of help would be available,” Giron says. “Just seeing that and just the feeling of the fact that we were all watching over one another.”

Recovery hubs popped up all over the city, including at the Arverne Pilgrim Church, just a few miles from where Lopizzo’s converted nonprofit was located. Pastor Dennis Loncke, the owner of the church, explained how Hurricane Sandy created a space for the community to come together in a way that it hadn’t before.

“The storm really did unite in breaking some of the barriers down,” Loncke says. “Because most of us was living on opinion. We assumed that the other person had the grass greener on the other side, so they had no need for this one, and that had no need for the other one. But when the storm came everybody’s opinion just disappeared. We recognized that there are lots of people that had all different types of issues after the storm, and it was not just only the financial loss, or the the property loss. It awakened the community to what is going on inside the midst of us — what we have as neighbors.”

Once the door to another world is opened, it’s often difficult to close it. There are many instances of how the bonds and collective vision that are formed during the immediate aftermath of disasters have grown into broader projects that stretch far beyond immediate disaster relief.

For example, the focus around community empowerment encouraged by the Occupy Sandy relief efforts and organizations like The Working World, also based in New York City, inspired folks like Giron to help organize what has now become a worker cooperative incubation program that has helped to launch four cooperatives in New York City.

“This was very important and very exciting because the Rockaways and Far Rockaways [were] a very poor area, even before the storm,” Giron says. “The idea of a different way to promote work and promote employment [is] exciting. So my life, I feel it’s changed. The important thing for me has been this ability to help my community and to work with my community members.”

Another clear illustration of how grassroots disaster relief can lead to larger initiatives comes out of Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria, where what started in the town of Caguas as a volunteer-run community kitchen soon transformed into an island-wide network of community centers, known as Mutual Aid Centers. Today, these centers provide more than just meals — they offer all sorts of services related to art, education, and therapy.

Puerto Rico image courtesy of Juan C. Dávila

Giovanni Roberto, one of the founding members of the original Mutual Aid Center in Caguas, helps organize weekly acupuncture clinics for community members.

“This [clinic] happens every Tuesday,” Roberto says. “We work with acupuncture in the ear. We work with stress and post-traumatic syndrome, addictions, and other related issues — health issues,” adding that all services are provided for free.

The chaos wrought by Hurricane Maria went even further than the loss of life, injury, and property destruction — the storm had an impact on the Puerto Rican psyche which has had lasting and dire consequences. There are growing reports of a mental health crisis quietly unfolding on the island. It’s turning into a disaster of its own, especially since Puerto Rico’s already struggling healthcare system was weakened after the storm, leaving adequate healthcare inaccessible to many. But as Roberto’s work with the Mutual Aid Centers demonstrates, communities are coming together to tackle this epidemic in their own way. Roberto recounted the story of one of the regular volunteers at the center where he works who had been dealing with depression and post-disaster trauma.

“The first day she came here she was almost crying, you know, in a really stressful way,” Roberto says. “Since that day, she has never missed a single day of volunteer work. She has changed. She’s not crying anymore. She’s sleeping better. She says today to me that when she came here she feels that she’s in paradise.”

As Omar Reyes, another organizer at a different Mutual Aid Center in the remote town of Las Marias, says “we started our center as a community kitchen because that was what was going on in an urgent moment. People needed to eat. But once the problem changed the instrument changed too. It transformed. And now we have a center for the development of education, recreation, cultural skills, and opportunities.”

The same sentiment was expressed by Astrid Cruz Negón, an organizer at the Mutual Aid Center in the town of Utuado. “The Mutual Aid Center definitely does not want to stay in the emergency mindset of surviving Maria,” she says. “We want everything we do to build towards a new world, a new more just, more equal society.”

The first step to building a more just world might be guaranteeing that communities have the power to keep the lights on, but the ultimate goal is to ensure that communities have the power to begin growing a broad movement with the strength to make serious demands on a government that has largely abandoned them. But until then, they’re taking things into their own hands.

The instances of disaster collectivism outlined here did not happen in a vacuum. They occur oftentimes in an ongoing tension with the forces of disaster capitalism. New York City was a battleground of opposing forces for years after Sandy hit, as communities and power brokers fought for very different types of recovery. The Mutual Aid Centers in Puerto Rico are up against a set of forces — the United States government, the Puerto Rican government, and corporate interests — whose power leaves the future of their project in the balance.

In the best case scenario, disaster collectivism occurs in conjunction with government support, at the local, state, and national levels, for small and large-scale intervention that is essential in relief and reconstruction. The challenge, however, is that as the decisions driving policies fall more and more into the hands of a powerful few, official disaster response will, without social and political intervention, likely reflect preexisting stratification often shaped along race and class lines.

Yet hope lies in the vast repository of history documenting that in times of disasters, communities take care of each other and often form new solidarities that can lead to political engagement. Recovery hubs emerge spontaneously. Religious institutions step in to help. Improvised kitchens emerge, preparing not just meals, but a new vision of public life.

In these tumultuous and divisive times, amidst both the acute and chronic crises our society faces, we see glimmers of hope — a possibility for us to come together to take care of the most vulnerable within our communities.

“It’s trying to create solidarity in the midst of chaos,” Davin Cardenas, an organizer at Undocufund, says. “Trying to create a semblance of purpose in the midst of not knowing exactly what’s happening.” After the fires in California, “everybody had a feeling of like, ‘oh my gosh, what do I do? I’m not doing enough. How am I serving the people?’ You know, we’ve heard that so many times over. [Undocufund] gave people a sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose is critical in the midst of chaos — people’s instinct is to demonstrate love, to demonstrate care, and to demonstrate solidarity.”

With an uncertain future ahead marked by deepening divisions and climate change, the many examples of collective relief and recovery efforts can serve as a blueprint for how to move forward and rebuild with a radical resilience. They can also provide a glimpse of another world, one marked by empowered communities filled with more connection, purpose, and meaning.

We are interested in learning if you’ve been involved in any disaster relief efforts in your local community. No matter how small or large the extent of the disaster or your level of involvement in recovery efforts, we believe sharing these stories about how people collaboratively uplift their communities in the aftermath of natural disasters will inspire many others to do the same. Please take a few minutes to fill out this form.  

Republished from Shareable. Paige Ruane, Juan C. Dávila, and Ninna Gaensler-Debs contributed research and reporting for this piece. Some of the interviews were done in Spanish and have been translated to English.

This story is part of a series on disaster collectivism, which includes a podcast (The Response) exploring how communities respond to crises, both in their immediate aftermath and over a period of months and years.

For more information about the series or to listen to the podcast visit: www.theresponsepodcast.org 

Header image by Kane Lynch.

The post Disaster collectivism: How communities rise together to respond to crises appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This logic of expansion and conquest undoubtedly changes the relationship between humans and their environment. In this context, the “debate” over climate change actually becomes a matter of human survival. Those who entertain climate change as a question at all have already, maybe unknowingly, chosen a side. The fact is that climate change will create more refugees and forced human migrations; it will lead to the murder of environmental activists around the world and start new resource wars; it will spread disease and destabilize everything in its path — and more. Unless capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for natural resources and the fossil fuel combustion that powers it is abandoned, the Earth will be forced to do away with humans cancerously plundering the carbon energy it has stored over millions of years of natural history.

What is most unfortunate is that capitalism, which has multi-layered discriminations encoded within it — racism, sexism, classism, and so on — affects how thoroughly people are capable of bracing for the damages wrought by climate change. Though nature is indiscriminate in its wrath, the sustained ability to protect oneself from rising temperatures and natural disasters is a privilege not all can afford. Those who are already harmed under the pitiless whims of capital are doubly hurt by the lack of protection afforded to them for life in an increasingly turbulent environment. The Global South is much more likely to feel the brunt of climate change, despite contributing much less to causing it. But even in the world’s wealthiest nations, the poor and working classes are much more vulnerable to ecological devastation.

If the people who understand the gravity of the situation want this state of affairs to cease, then the system of capitalism and the egregious consumption of the so-called First World itself must cease. That which puts all of us at risk cannot be tolerated. The vast satisfactions in wealth hoarded by a few does not outweigh the needs of the many suffering the consequences every day, as the Earth deals with malignant human behavior. The systemic drive towards excess that is pushing the planet’s carrying capacity to the brink must be brought to a halt throughout the world, but especially in the empire that exemplifies excess best: the United States of America.

The Myth of “The Nanny State”

Ever since Donald Trump became president, crisis and disarray have been regular in an extraordinary sense. Not that the United States hasn’t always been this way; it has been for many of those oppressed within this society. But the dramatic events unfolding today have been very confronting for those who are only now realizing that progress — or the things that represent it symbolically — can be done away with overnight.

In the midst of an onslaught of draconian far-right legislation, the liberal establishment has failed to muster a convincing rebuff. This is due in part to complicity in the shift towards the right, and in part due to a more general crisis of confidence within liberalism. But what is also failing today is the state itself. At a time when environmental, social and economic crises are running out of control amid authoritarian overreach, the state seems to be in a moment of purposeful neglect and disarray. This is leading people to take the response to the confluence of crises into their own hands, raising the question of the state’s raison d’être to begin with.

When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he said that President Trump’s choices for his cabinet would be aimed at “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon suggested that the primary goal should be to limit the regulatory agencies and bureaucratic entities getting in the way of the administration’s self-styled economic nationalism. “The way the progressive left runs,” Bannon went on to say, “is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” Years before this, in 2013, he had already told a writer for the Daily Beast that “I’m a Leninist … Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Without overemphasizing the irony and jocular misleadingness of the latter self-comparison, Bannon does raise a key question for the far right: what’s the use in a state? While such a question could potentially be put to progressive use in some hands, it is definitely dangerous in these. For the right, the question of the state’s usefulness is answered by the assertion of dominance and the infliction of violence — something that is clearly distressing for those of us resisting oppression. But at the same time, right-wing propaganda and talking points also depict the state as a “nanny state,” or an overprotective manifestation of liberal charity. Clearly, this characterization is as stale as it is untrue. The very idea that liberalism itself is charitable is a blatant falsification, yet the far right continues to disseminate this myth in its unending desire to maximize the state’s fascistic potential while depriving it of its limited welfare functions.

Austerity measures — something the world has become all too familiar with in recent years —provide us with the brutal confirmation that we never actually needed to dispel the far right’s propagandistic falsehoods. As governments around the world cut back on services, regulations and agencies that are meant to benefit social welfare and the public good, the trope of overzealous liberal government is shown to be untrue. Austerity threatens to undermine the very things that are supposed to make societies peaceable. But as consistently seems to happen in a world dominated by capitalism, those who are most vulnerable bear the brunt.

Dismantling Progress and Protection

In 2016, Oxfam announced that world’s 62 richest billionaires held as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. In 2017, this number decreased significantly to just eight people because new information came to light showing that poverty in China and India are much worse than previously thought, widening the gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the bottom 50 percent. While this information is certainly beyond troubling, capitalism largely continues its path of destruction without being disturbed itself.

A slew of hurricanes hitting the Caribbean in 2017 made the world pause to consider the dangers of climate chaos. Many of the conversations that took place as a result of the back-to-back destruction wrought by hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria focused on the threat of a disturbed environment. Under President Trump, these threats are only further exacerbated. As someone who campaigned on rejuvenating the coal industry and who has actively worked to transform climate denialist sentiments into government policy, Trump is one of the worst presidents anyone could hope for at a time of pressing climate disaster. With regard to the aforementioned “deconstruction” of the regulatory state that Banon spoke of, Trump accomplished major strides at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Under the regressive guidance of Scott Pruitt, a long-time fossil fuel defender, the EPA has seen absurd government moves to destabilize the very purposes of the agency itself in favor of corporate interests.

Pruitt built his career off of suing the EPA as attorney general for the state of Oklahoma. Under Trump, he can now secure his ultimate favor to corporate interests by dismantling the state agency altogether. Everything is up for grabs and the agency has become increasingly secretive about its agenda. The New York Times reported complaints of career EPA employees working under Pruitt, explaining that “they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is,” as well as doors being “frequently locked.” It has even been said that “employees have to have an escort to gain entrance” to Mr. Pruitt’s quarters, as well as some being told not bring cell phones or take notes in meetings. The Washington Post recently reported that the EPA spent almost $25,000.00 to soundproof his work area. For a state agency tasked with protecting the environment, the actions being carried out sound more in line with that of federal law enforcement or intelligence at the FBI or CIA.

The example of Pruitt is one of many hinting at an increasingly restructured state, in which right-wing corporate forces that once fought regulation now become the regulator themselves, showing how the will of capital will always fulfill itself in this system. At the same time, as the trifecta of terrible storms hit the Caribbean and the Southern US coastline, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) displayed a similar lack of social concern. In response to the lackluster response of the authorities, local communities were left to fend for themselves, with only a few celebrity figures tasking themselves with taking action. At a very emotional press conference, Mayor Carmen Cruz of San Juan compared the neglect taking place to genocide and shed tears demanding more help for US citizens in Puerto Rico: “we are dying here. And I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot figure out logistics for a small island of 100 miles by 35 miles long.”

A U.S. flag hangs in front of a burning structure in Black Forest, Colo., June 12, 2013. The structure was among 360 homes that were destroyed in the first two days of the fire, which had spread to 15,000 acres by June 13. The Black Forest Fire started June 11, 2013, northeast of Colorado Springs, Colo., burning scores of homes and forcing large-scale evacuations. The Colorado National Guard and U.S. Air Force Reserve assisted in firefighting efforts. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, U.S. Air Force/Released)

Citizenship, expectation and failure

The emphasis on Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the other storms often gives special attention to their Americanness. Despite the fact that the entire Caribbean was hit, the question is why US citizens would be neglected in this way. The logic of American exceptionalism should render everyone within the nation’s borders and territories — or colonies — special due to their citizenship within the bounds of empire. But as Zoé Samudzi and I argued in our essay for ROAR Magazine, “The Anarchism Of Blackness,” some US citizens, particularly those of us who are Black, are actually considered extra-state entities.

Though not all Puerto Ricans are Black, from Flint to San Juan we have seen that when certain geographies are associated with Blackness or the non-white Other, their citizenship can always be called into question. As Zoé and I wrote:

Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic. African-Americans, as an ethno-social identity comprised of descendants from enslaved Africans, have innovated new cultures and social organizations much like anarchism would require us to do outside of state structures.

Now, as Puerto Ricans have worked excruciatingly hard with the assistance of other people throughout the US to pick up the slack of the Trump administration, we can see the emerging contours of an anarchistic response brought about by the climate crisis. In the shadow of Hurricane Katrina and Flint, we have had it proven to us one too many times that the white supremacist state does not care about us. The consistent need to crowdfund and organize to fill in the gaps of the lackluster response of federal agencies for the richest nation in the world must call into question the very purposes of the state itself.

Trump’s proposed military budget of $700 billion is more than enough to end poverty in the US, make college free, or provide everyone with universal health care — let alone quickly fix the problems in places like Flint, Puerto Rico, and so on. Instead, people are left to fend for themselves, begging the state to carry out the functions it is supposedly obliged to carry out while depending on celebrities and liberal oligarchs to give like the rest of us. This is clearly absurd, given the endless wealth of the state and the gap between the rich and the poor.

The expectation that lower- and middle-income people will provide aid during crises with greater passion than the super-rich and state agencies, when we do not have nearly as much money as either of them, is absolutely and utterly ridiculous. But it is this utter ridiculousness that is the quintessence of contemporary capitalism. Though capital is unequally distributed, the burden of fixing whatever the problems of the day may be is all ours, while the elite shy away from ever having to pay as large a price as the cost of being poor in a capitalist society.

One of the most despicable examples of these injustices played out in California, where raging wildfires killed dozens of people in 2017, while inmates were being paid $2.00 per hour to risk their lives fighting the fires. Their confinement makes their labor hyper-exploitable and again flattens the burden of problems linked to natural disasters, while the elite who caused the problems remain unfazed in their chase to destroy the planet for profit. In Texas, inmates raised about $44,000 to aid those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After Hurricane Harvey, inmates remembered previous fundraising efforts and requested officials to restart a program that allows them to donate their commissary for relief purposes. After just one month, 6,663 inmates had donated $53,863 for Hurricane Harvey relief from the usually very small commissary accounts that they maintain (often $5.00 or less depending on the person).

Picking Up Where the State Falls Through

None of this is new. The Black Panthers focused much of their work around meeting the needs of the Black community that the capitalist state and market had failed to fulfill. Projects like the Free Breakfast Program and ambulance services give credence to the extensive history of this type of mutual aid. It was the Panthers who exposed the extensive sickle cell anemia epidemic in the Black community by carrying out the work that the state should have done.

The concept of “revolutionary intercommunalism,” theorized by Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, helped develop a strategy for structured community service programs also known as “survival programs.” These programs were meant to address the lack of helpful institutions and services in Black communities serving the needs of the people. The current situation demands proper respect given to its purpose. Intercommunalism focuses on and prioritizes Black self-determination outside of the state’s failures to adequately look after the needs of the Black community. The survival of underserved people is understood to be a part of the necessary politics of transformative change. Aside from the glitz of revolution that fuels popular depiction in the media, politics and culture, our current pre-revolutionary situation requires the everyday survival of those of us who would do the revolting in the first place. Intercommunalism pays respects to revolution as a process, and not merely an overnight reaction.

Across communities Black and all colors, we see a persistent need to address whatever shortcomings white supremacy delves out to us. It is not necessarily new for communities in the US dealing with white supremacy to support each other and build resistance from within. Starting our own services and building up each other is an everyday revolutionary politics of survival. However, what can and often does happen is that maintaining our own institutions within the bounds of capitalism becomes the objective when ending capitalism should be a necessary outcome. More than simply reacting to capitalism in anarchistic ways, we should be proactively working to overcome it by making our very models of resistance anti-capitalist. Depending on the likes of sympathetic capitalists and liberal elites is counterproductive in this respect. Instead of building ways to consistently respond to disaster, we must be proactive in ending the crisis of capitalism rather than solely attempting to counter it one day at a time.

A proactive pre-revolutionary situation will raise the consciousness of people to realize that they are already carrying out the radical politics they are often told to despise. Ahistorical liberal reimaginings of the past make tragedy into a necessary stepping stone for an empire that is learning at the expense of the oppressed. Real resistance positions people to build movements that undo the violence that oppression inflicts. We are not in need of excuses; we are in need of a better world. If we want that better world, we have to align our politics with a radical imagination, with sustainable everyday resistance and innovative strategy.

The task of making the planet a better place is a great task, but it is the only choice we have — lest we allow capitalism to destroy the carrying capacity of the one we currently inhabit. We can no longer afford to let crisis keep us entangled in this current state of disarray. Instead, we should charge our suffering to a system that must pay with its unacceptable existence.

Over 150 people worldwide have been murdered this year while defending the environment. This piece is in loving memory of those who have died and will die doing so. Thank you for all that you did for us.

William C. Anderson

William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV and Pitchfork among others. Many of his writings can be found at TruthOut or at the Praxis Center for Kalamazoo College, where he is a contributing editor covering race, class and immigration. He is co-author of the forthcoming book As Black as Resistance (AK Press, 2018).

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by David Istvan

The post Climate Crisis and the State of Disarray appeared first on P2P Foundation.

BARRIO SOLAR was created on September 21st, the day after Hurricane Maria devastated the island nation of Puerto Rico.

Our team at BARRIO SOLAR has developed a simple and cost-effective way to ship a variety of solar devices to the island, where they will be distributed to shelters, community centers and homes – especially the small towns in the center and south of the island – where immediate aid and reconstructed power sources are least likely to be deployed.

The solar devices to be shipped to Puerto Rico will be collected and distributed by a network of 35 women’s shelters and aid organizations under the leadership of Paz para la Mujer. By partnering with these women’s networks, we will be avoiding the risk of black market profiteering and, as we are at this moment a fully volunteer network, the entire distribution effort will be done for free.

Our goal is to raise $25,000 within the next few weeks, and to have the products on the ground in Puerto Rico by the first week of December.

We have purposely limited this fundraiser to $25,000, because it will be the first run of our new distribution network, and we want to ensure that our partners at Paz para la Mujer are able to accommodate this volume of solar devices.

We have teamed up with CENSA, the Center for the Studies of the Americas in Berkeley, CA, as our fiscal sponsor. They will ensure that the funds we raise go directly to purchase the solar kits and lights noted above.

With your help, we can provide immediate relief to thousands of people in Puerto Rico, who currently have no power or fresh water.

Once our goal of $25,000 is met, we will buy the products and have them immediately shipped directly to Puerto Rico within the first week of December.

People have asked us: why bother with this initiative when so many other larger organizations are taking solar power to Puerto Rico?
Our response? We at BARRIO SOLAR are proud to be among the many organizations that are bringing fossil fuel independence to the island of Puerto Rico via solar technologies, and we are excited to be part of these self-organizing solar support networks.

Please be generous in your support for the people of Puerto Rico.

Gracias! Thank You!

Fritjof Capra, Indira Cortes and Elizabeth Hawk for BARRIO SOLAR

Click here to contribute to the campaign

The post Barrio Solar: Solar Power for Puerto Rico appeared first on P2P Foundation.