Wed 21 November 2018, 18:15 – 20:30 GMT

Makespace Oxford: 1 Aristotle Lane, Oxford OX2 6TP, United Kingdom

REGISTER HERE

Building upon Shareable’s years of experience covering the ‘sharing ecosystem’ and the 137 model policies and case studies curated for the new book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” Tom Llewellyn, strategic partnerships director of Shareable, will show how the real sharing economy is already connecting people together, empowering community-led disaster recovery efforts, and working under the radar to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Tom Llewellyn is a lifelong sharer, commoner, and storyteller who travels the globe inspiring and empowering communities to share for a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world. He’s the Strategic Partnerships Director for Shareable.net, executive producer and host of the podcast documentary series The Response, and co-editor of the book “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons”.

Following the presentation, attendees will participate in an interactive ‘World Café’ style discussion, working together to evaluate Oxford by exploring the state of things, the available resources, the needs of residents, and what the steps might be to meet those needs together.

This workshop is for anyone interested in exploring how we might activate Oxford’s urban commons together to address some of our city’s most pressing needs. Please bring your enthusiasm, ideas, and any examples of projects you’re already aware of to share and connect with others.

This event is in partnership with the Solidarity Economy Association, an Oxford-based organisation supporting the growth of the UK’s solidarity economy through education, research, and awareness raising projects. The solidarity economy is made up of grassroots organisations, informal meetings, local community groups, co-operatives, associations and networks of organisations in every sector of our economy. They have been created to meet a need within their community, or broader society, that isn’t being met by our mainstream economy, or because those needs are being met in unethical or unsustainable ways. These initiatives all share a set of values that include equal decision-making, equity, sustainability, pluralism, and solidarity, and they are working towards a just and sustainable world, one that puts the real needs of people and our planet first.

The post Sharing Oxford – Activating our Urban Commons with Tom Llewellyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: The third episode of The Response travels to Northern California to provide a unique perspective on the topics of climate change and immigration. California’s climate-fueled weather conditions have left the state in an extreme condition that has led to an unprecedented number of wildfires that are burning hotter, faster, and ever more acreage. The largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history was the Mendocino Complex Fire, which scorched well over 400,000 acres during the summer of 2018. And the second largest fire in California burned just a year before that. As California Governor Jerry Brown says, “since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse.”

We’ve already reached a one degree celsius increase in average global temperatures, and we may be on track for four by the end of the century. As the reality of an increasingly chaotic climate begins to settle in, it must be viewed through a lens of social, economic, and political circumstances as well. What does the growing threat of climate-fueled disasters mean for the most vulnerable among us?

In this episode, we put the focus on last year’s Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, California — the state’s most destructive fire to date — and how it impacted the undocumented community. We explore how, in the face of ICE raids, labor violations, a housing crisis, and climate-fueled wildfires, the broader community is coming together to stand in solidarity with those who are being forced into the shadows.

Episode Credits:

• Senior producer, technical director, and designer: Robert Raymond
• Field producers: Ninna Gaensler-Debbs and Robert Raymond
• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Voiceover and narration: Luisa Cardoza

Music by:

• Chris Zabriskie
• Lanterns

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.

[Chanting from Rise for Climate Justice march]

Crowd: What do we want? Climate Justice! When do we want it? Now! [Repeats]

Tom Llewellyn: It’s an unusually warm and sunny September day in San Francisco, and we’re standing right in the middle of Market street, within a sea of banners, megaphones, drums, and about thirty-thousand people. It’s the Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice march — the anchor event preceding a week of official climate talks hosted by California governor Jerry Brown.

Within this crowd, There are groups representing all sorts of causes, from trade unions, to buddhists, to indigenous folks, and many more. And their message is clear: an end to fossil fuel production and justice for those impacted disproportionately by the effects of climate change.

Well in this episode of The Response, we put the spotlight on an especially vulnerable community here in California: undocumented immigrants. We’ll investigate how, in the face of ICE raids, labor violations, a housing crisis, and climate-fueled wildfires, the broader community is coming together to stand in solidarity with those who are being forced into the shadows. I’m your host, Tom Llewellyn.

Tom Llewellyn: Although still under investigation by CalFire, it’s likely, that at around 10pm on October 8th, 2017, power lines on Tubbs Lane in Calistoga, California, were downed by high winds. The live wires would have sent a shower of sparks through the air, thus starting the Tubbs Fire. Hurricane-force winds whipped the blaze southwest through the Mayacamas Mountains.

Fueled by this bone-dry landscape still recovering from a five year drought, it only took a few hours to reach the city limits of Santa Rosa, where, as the city slept, it jumped Highway 101 and continued its deadly march through the densely packed neighborhoods of Fountain Grove and Coffey Park.

Pastor Al: I was working in Healdsburg, I was coming back at eleven o’clock at night. And I came in, I just went right to bed. The kids were sleeping and I was sleeping and I was just tired. I just never thought that the fire would jump all those freeways.

Tom Llewellyn: This is Pastor Al. He was living in Coffey Park at the time of the fire. On his way home from work that night he saw an orange glow in the distance, but at that time it was still many miles away.

Pastor Al: A little bit after two o’clock, I heard the phone ringing. It was the police department saying, you know, “Get up and get out now.” The smoke was so thick that night. And, you know, I was like, “Okay,” I said, “We need to leave.”

Tom Llewellyn: Fifteen people had already died as the fire made its way down from Calistoga, and Coffey Park was just one of a long list of neighborhoods put on a mandatory evacuation notice that night.

Pastor Al: I opened the door and I was shocked, you know, and the wind, and the fire was all over the place and that was it. Survival was the only thing that I had in my mind.

Tom Llewellyn: Al woke up his wife and kids, and they rushed to get out. The only thing he had time to grab was his daughter’s asthma medication. As they made their way through the thick smoke and floating embers towards their car, he suddenly noticed that his wife was missing.

Pastor Al: And I started calling my wife, and then I heard my wife was knocking on one of our neighbors — he was about seventy-four, seventy-five. And all I remember, I heard my wife calling out, “Get up and get out!” And my wife went to four, five other houses she went to to knock on the doors. And I was like, “Man, get up and get out!” And so she came and we went.

Tom Llewellyn: As they scrambled through the smoke-laden streets, the houses around them were already starting to catch on fire. Eventually they made it out of the neighborhood, and headed south on Highway 101 where they ended up pulling into a Home Depot parking lot.

Pastor Al: So that’s where we hunkered down for the night and, you know, we were just waiting there until we see what we can do the next morning.

Tom Llewellyn: Like many of the twenty-thousand undocumented people living in the area, Pastor Al and his family avoided going to official shelters. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations are something that this community has to deal with on a daily basis, and the possibility of federal agents at shelters made them nervous. Many folks ended up just sleeping on the beach or in their cars.

When Pastor Al and his family were finally able to make it back to their house, everything was gone.

Pastor Al: You know, all of it. I mean there’s nothing. We looked around, you know, we were shocked. I mean all you see there, you just stood there and cried. I mean, it’s like, my goodness. Everything was burned to the ground. I mean the metal, it is unreal. And I think to us it was that my son came up and showed me this ceramic was given to us by a friend of ours. And the only thing the reading on ceramic was Luke: 137, that “Nothing is impossible with God.” That was the only thing that survived the whole fire. I said, “This is the only thing that we’re going to hang on to.” And I guess that’s part of our story. So I walked out, I said, “Okay, it’s only thing I can hang on.” And that it was only thing that survived the fire. Everything else burnt.

Tom Llewellyn: The Tubbs Fire was the most destructive wildfire in California history. It burned almost 40,000 acres, taking the lives of 22 people along the way and incinerating almost 3,000 homes in Santa Rosa alone — five percent of the city’s housing stock.

Historically, wildfire has always been a normal part of California’s ecosystems. It clears out dead litter on the forest floor and plays an important part in helping certain plants reproduce themselves. But what’s not normal are the climate-fueled extreme weather conditions that have lengthened the fire season and are leading to massive wildfires that threaten major urban centers and can take months to contain.

The largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history was the Mendocino Complex Fire, which scorched well over 400,000 acres during the Summer of 2018 and was still not fully contained at the time of this recording. And the second largest fire in California history? Well, it burned just a year before that. Last year’s Thomas Fire in Southern California blazed across almost 300,000 acres. So, as you can see, there’s a disturbing trend. This is California Governor Jerry Brown.

California Governor Jerry Brown: We’re being surprised. Every year is teaching the fire authorities new lessons. We’re in uncharted territory. Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse. I mean, that’s the way it is… We’re in for a really rough ride.

Tom Llewellyn: We’ve already reached a one degree celsius increase in average global temperatures, and we may be on track for four by the end of the century. As the reality of an increasingly chaotic climate begins to settle in, it must be viewed through a lens of social, economic, and political circumstances as well.

What does the growing threat of climate-fueled disasters mean for the most vulnerable among us? Here’s Irma Garcia, who, like Al, is an undocumented immigrant, and was also living in Coffey Park at the time of the fire.

Irma Garcia: We were asleep during the fires. We were asleep when my neighbor came and knocked on the door at three in the morning and told us there was a fire. We got up and just grabbed the basics and went to the veterans building.

Tom Llewellyn: The Santa Rosa Veterans building had been set up as an official shelter. When Irma and her family arrived, they quickly noticed that the whole system was a mess. They tried to offer their help, but the Red Cross staff brushed them aside. Still, they couldn’t just sit idly by. And so, despite everything that they were going through, they found ways to to make themselves useful. But even as they were helping to set up beds and clear out debris, they felt unwelcome. The Red Cross staff had begun ordering Irma around in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, and one of them actually yelled at her five year old daughter for being in one of the beds that Irma had helped to set up.

Irma Garcia: My daughter was 5 years old and she hadn’t slept, and she had behaved very well, so I told her to rest in a bed, and I said to the lady from the Red Cross, “Please do not talk to my daughter like that.” And she said again, “Get out of the bed and get out of here.” And then my husband said, “We’re leaving. We’re better off outside than here.”

So we left, and we were going to spend the night in our car because it was so sad to see what was going on in the shelter. And as I was leaving the building, we looked around and I realized that there were no immigrants, and that there were only Americans. There were just a few immigrants, but they were outside or in the corner. That was when I realized that our immigrant community was suffering a lot during this disaster. And to this day they’re still suffering.

Tom Llewellyn: The disrespect and hostility that Irma and her family were subjected to at the shelter was one of the most traumatic parts of their experience with the fire — particularly for her daughter. And though their house was spared by the flames, the hardships were really just getting started.

Irma Garcia: The fires had a big effect on us because we couldn’t work for three weeks. Imagine, three weeks without working. So we fell behind on our bills and on rent because rent is so high. And then, on top of that, we had to deal with the fear of ICE and that we wouldn’t be able to work or that if we did go to work, they’d show up and take us away.

—

Mara Ventura: The number one way that we saw undocumented folks impacted was actually through loss of wages.

Tom Llewellyn: Here’s Mara Ventura, the executive director of North Bay Jobs with Justice  — a community and labor coalition based out of Santa Rosa.

Mara Ventura: Either of their works burned down, or their works closed down because their bosses lost their homes or their bosses had to evacuate. And so, to give a brief picture for folks in other parts of the country, the main two neighborhoods that we really want to focus on when we’re talking about these fires is Coffey Park, which is a mostly residential area and home to mostly middle class families, but also were homes where two to three different undocumented families were sharing one home.

And then we also had another area, which is the area called Fountain Grove which was home to a lot of mansions. We’re talking multimillion dollar homes. And so there’s quite a differential in terms of the experience of the families, the income levels and so forth of the folks in between those areas. But in the places where undocumented families were impacted they either were losing their homes in Coffey Park or they were losing the places where they had more stable work up in the Fountain Grove area where many undocumented folks were doing landscaping work, were doing pool maintenance, were doing house cleaning, were doing domestic care, et cetera.

Tom Llewellyn: Unlike most people affected by the fire, the undocumented community had no access to federal relief funding to help offset any of their losses. They were largely on their own. Or, they would have been, if it wasn’t for a rapid grassroots mobilization coordinated by local organizations and activists.

—

Tom Llewellyn: We’re at the Santa Rosa Community College, where hundreds of volunteers and undocumented families have gathered as part of an application process for what is known as Undocufund.

Omar Medina: My name is Omar Medina and currently I am the coordinator for Undocufund. Undocufund arose out of the Northern California wildfires. It was a combination of three organizations that came together to address the issue of recovery for undocumented families that would not be eligible for a lot of the aid that was going to come out for the disaster. So we knew there was going to be a void and we decided that something needed to happen to help those families. And so Undocufund was developed to raise funds to help provide financial assistance.

Tom Llewellyn: Certain public services were available to undocumented families, but there was a lot of fear around actually accessing those services. For example, undocumented immigrants with naturalized children are eligible for federal relief funding — but many felt uneasy navigating the process or were just outright afraid.

The coordinators of Undocufund knew it would take a lot of grassroots organizing to build trust and to spread awareness for their relief fund. It helped that the three organizations involved — North Bay Jobs with Justice, the Graton Day Labor Center, and the North Bay Organizing Project — were already known by much of the immigrant community for their advocacy work. Here’s Irma again — she actually works with the North Bay Organizing Project and the North Bay Rapid Response Network, which tracks and monitors ICE raids.

Irma Garcia: We learned all about the experiences of people in our community during the fires, and realized that many undocumented immigrants were sleeping in their cars or were going to the beach at Bodega Bay because they didn’t feel safe in any of the shelters. They didn’t provide any help for us, and we didn’t trust anyone. We didn’t trust the law, much less in the police or the sheriff. And we didn’t trust FEMA because FEMA is very discriminatory.

So we went to seek out stories, and as we learned about the experiences of people in our community, we began to spread the word. We realized that our people were suffering a lot — and our children too. So that’s how Undocufund got started with Omar Medina — he was the one who helped a lot with all this, along with the rest of the community. They started fundraising, donating, and doing events. It helped a lot of people.

But many people didn’t trust it at first. It’s difficult to give your information when everything is connected to everything else, so the last thing we wanted to do was to give out our information, to keep ICE far away from us.

Tom Llewellyn: This fear was also present for Pastor Al. At first, he’d avoided applying for Undocufund as well.

Pastor Al: We were just worried about who’s going to be controlling that information? If we’re going to put our names out there, you know, where is it going to go? That’s the other side of it, that I kind of of withheld this whole idea of going to them. I just didn’t know what, you know, I know it’s undocumented fund but I just thought, you know, how are these things going to work out? Who’s handling your information?

Tom Llewellyn: But eventually, Al and has family applied. And so did almost 2,000 other families. Here’s Mara Ventura again.

Mara Ventura: We recognized that undocumented families automatically had less access to many different social services, but particularly ones that were set up to help families recover during times of natural disasters. And so we wanted to ensure that there were funds available for them. And we wanted to ensure that they were unrestricted funds. That people could use them for whatever they needed them for and that there was a sense of ownership and autonomy that families could decide for themselves what they needed, and we would have a process that helped them think through all the different needs that they had — both before the fires and during the fires.

And so we brought I think a very unique perspective to putting a fire relief fund together, one in which we thought about what were different systematic, operational pieces we needed to have in the fund to ensure that it was accessible and equitable and truly reached undocumented communities where they were at. But also from the get go have been thinking about not just the immediate needs but also the intermediate and long term needs.

And as we were going through the process of helping families get aid from the fire fund, incorporated in our conversations an understanding of what was happening in people’s lives. So an example of that is that we really tried to ensure that as people came and applied for aid they didn’t feel like they were at an agency filling out a bureaucratic application. So we wanted an application process where folks came in and sat down with a trained volunteer and just started off with a conversation. Really ensuring right away, our job is to be here to help you get as much aid as you can get for the things that you need. And tell me a little bit about what happened during the fires and and really thinking about questions that also got at the systems that they were up against.

So really trying to understand like what systematic barriers were people facing even in the moment. Because it’s not something that you you’re always thinking about when you’re in the moment of a natural disaster and you’re in a high anxiety, high stress mode. So I think being social justice organizations we brought that really unique experience to creating this Fire Relief Fund where we tried to identify systems.

Pastor Al: We were very grateful for the help — the help that helps my family especially get situated, the food, the clothing, and that part of, we were very grateful for the of the fund that was given to us. I think what I discovered is that in these kind of situations it’s nice to have a place where you can go and just, you could hear others. And by talking about I think it’s so therapeutic. It’s so healing when people can understand and then listen to your stories and even just, you know, that you can express your emotions, your feelings. I think it does something to all of us.

Tom Llewellyn: With donations coming from over eight thousand individuals, Undocufund was a powerful demonstration of solidarity in action. In the beginning they thought they’d raise maybe fifty, or a hundred-thousand dollars, if they were lucky.

Omar Medina: Never did we expect the six million we’ve raised so far. But the generosity of people as the disasters were happening, as the fires kept going, and the media kept covering it, and people learned about us, and they sympathized with the need. They understand the need based on everything that we’ve experienced lately, you know, on a national level as it relates to the undocumented community. And the generosity of people came in. And so that gave us the opportunity to help a lot more people.

Irma Garcia: Undocufund definitely did unite the community, because, as an undocumented immigrant, you realize that the police, the sheriff, the system — everything — we’re outside of that. We’re totally excluded. But when Undocufund started and we saw so many people helping from all kinds of different places, we realized that although we’re outside the system, we’re not outside the community. And that the community supports us. We know now that at least we are not alone.

—

Tom Llewellyn: Like we learned in our previous two episodes on Hurricanes Maria and Sandy, when disasters strike in vulnerable communities, they tend to merely intensify issues that are already happening. For example, the loss in wages that resulted from the Tubbs Fire was a serious challenge to many in the undocumented community — but the truth is that their wages before the fire were already almost impossible to live off of in the Bay Area. Not to mention ongoing labor violations, sexual harassment and assault, and a housing crisis that was only exacerbated by the fire. Here’s Davin Cardenas, the co-director of the North Bay Organizing Project. He’s learned a lot more about these struggles during the time he spent coordinating Undocufund.

Davin Cardenas: You get your finger on the pulse of what’s happening with the immigrant community in terms of wages, living conditions, needs. And so it was really an experience of having your eyes open a little bit more. You know, I’d be in an interview one after the other after the other, speaking with local immigrant workers — women especially — who were being paid like ten dollars an hour for house cleaning jobs and that’s you know that’s below the minimum wage. And as an housecleaning is rigorous — it’s a very difficult job to do and it taxes your body. And so I think that being what it felt like was the norm — was severely underpaid workers working extremely hard to make our county beautiful. And so, for me, you know, we know some of these things but it’s also a stark reminder of the economic conditions that people are living in and trying to raise babies and trying to raise families here in the North Bay.

Tom Llewellyn: Because of these chronic struggles, the Undocufund coordinators didn’t want to focus their efforts only on immediate fire relief.

Davin Cardenas: I think the Undocufund becomes another space where we can talk about greater systemic issues. The fact that immigrants are subsidizing the way we live. They’re subsidizing the standard of living in Sonoma County. This is the wine country, and when people think about the wine country they think about kind of the iconic vineyard landscape. But we think about the workers who put the wine country on the map and the taxation that comes with the physical labor — the tax on your body, the tax on the land, the pesticides that are being pushed into our waterways and our rivers — those things are also an inherent part of what we call the wine country.

And so I think with the Undocufund it’s an opportunity to start talking about equity amongst working people, talk about new voices and the people who make this county actually function and flourish. And it’s an opportunity for workers to start having their voices heard on a broader scale. Not only through the Undocufund, but immigrant workers have also been putting proposals to the county supervisors about what disaster preparedness should look like for Spanish-speaking peoples in the county. And, I think, also immigrants are stepping in to talk about just the anxiety that comes with the federal immigration situation, the Immigrant and Customs Enforcement. So they’re finding new ways to communicate. And part of the Undocufund infrastructure is also to make sure we’re developing relationships and beginning to heighten the voices of workers in all of these issues.

Mara Ventura: Undocufund folks we’re now continuing to have this conversation of what really fueled this this outpouring of support and how do we capture it? How do we use it to enable and continue to empower undocumented community members here to really say, like, people from not just Sonoma County, not just California — we received donations from all over the country — folks all around the country are concerned about your livelihood, and your ability to stay in this community, and not continue to worry about the displacement and the lack of services and the lack of the ability to stay in your homes and all these things that you’re already facing.

They’re investing in you and they care about you. And how do we sort of capture that and empower them to also figure out what are other systematic changes that need to be made here in our community to ensure that they don’t just have money today to pay their rent but that there are systems that we’re changing that enable undocumented folks to make a living and to have livable wages, and health benefits, and all the things they need to continue to live here.

Tom Llewellyn: Organizers have launched a series of people’s assemblies and listening circles with Undocufund recipients to learn more about the challenges they’re facing and the kinds of changes they’d like to see.

Mara Ventura: That’s really the next step in thinking about our resiliency is that undocumented people are leading and making the decisions for the solutions they want to see, that they’re getting the skills and the training they need to help see through the solutions that they want to build, that their voices are the decision-makers, that we’re actually changing systems — or building new systems — to address long term needs. And really trying to recapture going back to folks that came together for them during the recovery and during the fires and saying, “Here’s a more long term way that you can invest in our undocumented community and hopefully build a model for folks to then do that for their own communities and for undocumented people in their own neighborhoods.”

Pastor Al: What happened was just the incredible sense of people, just the people wanting to help out. I think that’s one of the things that I was so blown away. That people were basically saying, “What can I do to help you in your situation?” The amount of help, the amount of willingness — the heart was so open. That’s one of the things that I was so blown away.

—

Tom Llewellyn: This episode was written, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond. Interviews were recorded and conducted by our field producer Ninna Gaensler-Debbs and Robert Raymond. A big thanks to Chris Zabriskie and Lanterns for the music.

That’s it for the first season of The Response, we’ll see you again in 2019. Until then, be sure to subscribe on the podcast app of your choice in order to receive additional interviews and other bonus material.

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.

If you’ve been inspired by the themes and stories we’ve shared in this season of The Response, are interested in exploring how you can cultivate resilience in your own community, or would like to share your experiences of disaster collectivism, head on over to TheResonsePodcast.org. We wanna hear from you.

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.

The post The Response 3: The impact of Northern California fires on the undocumented community appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

How do we respond to natural disasters? What comes to mind? Large relief organizations like the American Red Cross? Or perhaps the Federal Emergency and Management Agency? Well, those images are certainly part of the story — but they’re not the whole story. In our new podcast series, The Response, we aim to share a perspective that isn’t extensively covered in the mainstream media. Specifically, we ask the question: how do communities come together in the aftermath of disasters — often in the face of inadequate official response — to take care of each other?

In the first episode of this series, we answer that question by taking a deep dive into the Rockaways Peninsula in New York City, to explore how, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a grassroots network of activists and volunteers emerged to coordinate one of the most effective relief efforts in the city. The group became known as Occupy Sandy, and in this episode, we tell their story, focusing on the personal narratives of three New Yorkers who were thrown into this spontaneous relief effort. We’ll explore how, in the midst of the unfolding catastrophe, unlikely friendships were formed, deep bonds were cultivated, and a perhaps dormant side of New York City was awakened — one based on collectivity, mutual aid, and solidarity.

Credits:

• Executive producer and host: Tom Llewellyn
• Senior producer, technical director, and designer: Robert Raymond
• Field producers: Paige Ruane and Jack McDonald

Music by:

• Chris Zabriskie
• Pele
• Lanterns

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.

Sal Lopizzo: I’ve lived in the Rockaways now about five years — but the night of the storm I was in Queens. And I was on the phone with one guy that I knew that had stayed, but he’s up on the second floor and he was giving me a minute-by-minute, “Oh my God, there’s a car floating down in the street right into your office.” He says, “The block is on fire.” So I’m trying to imagine this in my head. It was horrific.

But I — I don’t know, I…for some reason, I didn’t — I didn’t despair. I don’t know, even when I think about it now, like, would I have rather not had Hurricane Sandy? Of course. But, look what happened.

Tom Llewellyn: Sometimes there is a gap. A space that opens up. A break in the flow of day to day life that well, it kind of changes everything. It’s like…you know when your deepest pain somehow transforms into your brightest insights? Or when the thing that you feared the most turned out to be your biggest teacher?

It’s something kind of like what the poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once wrote, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Well, this is a show about those cracks. And the light that shines into them. It’s a show about rupture… about disaster — actually literally about disasters: like hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes… What can they teach us? What do they reveal?

I’m your host, Tom Llewelyn, and you’re listening to The Response. Today we tell a story about New York City — well, actually, it’s a story about what lies beneath the surface of New York City. On the night of October 29th, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the Rockaways, the borough in which this episode takes place, thousands of people had their reality, well… cracked.

This episode is the story about that crack, and about how the light poured in for those thousands of people throughout the city, including a guy named Sal Lopizzo, whose voice you just heard. It’s a story about unlikely friendships, radical recovery efforts, and, what you might call disaster collectivism.

[Sounds of Sal Lopizzo giving a walking tour of Rockaways]

Sal Lopizzo: Careful, watch out for the pole [laughs].

Tom Llewellyn: It’s a grey and misty day in June, and we’re walking down Beach 113th Street in the Rockaways with Sal.

Sal Lopizzo: So right now, this whole area was totally devastated, right? This place here is a nursing home, and the sad part of it is that everybody on the first floor was not evacuated, so we really don’t know the truth about who drowned and who didn’t.

Tom Llewellyn: When Hurricane Sandy barrelled into New York City, it left a trail of death and destruction in its wake. Fifty-three people died. Thousands lost their homes.

Sal Lopizzo: This was all flooded, cars were floating, the boardwalk was on the street. It was — you know, it was a wooden boardwalk — it was totally blown away. There was nothing left but a skeleton of concrete that was supporting it.

Tom Llewellyn: The Rockaway peninsula is a narrow strip of land lying along the coast south of Brooklyn. It was hit especially hard by the storm, and because it’s so removed from the rest of the city, official rescue efforts were dangerously delayed.

Sal Lopizzo: Yeah, the street was covered with a foot of sand, garbage, everything just floated right down — the boardwalk was destroyed. It really is heartbreaking. You know, some of it you don’t even want to remember.

Tom Llewellyn: Born in the fifties to a working class, immigrant family with ten children, Sal dropped out of school pretty early on. He did construction work at first, but, later, in his twenties, he got caught up in some illegal activities — jewelry store robberies, bank robberies, that kind of thing — which ended up landing him in prison with a fifteen year sentence. But, in an interesting twist, that’s where his life began to transform for the better.

Sal Lopizzo: So because I was in a cell, I turned it into a cell like a monk. When I look back on it, it was like a time for me to really indulge in books, understand politics, understand life, understand myself. Really was a good time for me to understand myself, and where I fit in in the planet and get me ready for when I got out.

Tom Llewellyn: So, fast forward about 30 years to early 2011. It’s a year and a half before Sandy hit, and Sal’s been out of prison for a while now. He’s been working to open a center in Rockaway Park to train residents in trades like solar installation.

Sal Lopizzo: The goal was a workforce development training center, because I felt like this area was an opportunity to teach people that don’t have degrees, teach people that don’t have academic backgrounds, how to get into mainstream. How do you get into mainstream? Very simple. You learn a trade. So that was my goal.

I saw Rockaway as a disaster zone. There’s a lot of disaster zones around New York City — around the whole country for that matter — but I live in New York City. So you can go into certain areas and you actually see a disaster. You see a woman trying to get money so she could buy diapers for her child. So that’s disaster. We’re living in a disaster area. These people are in isolated disaster areas. Whatever the causes that got them to that point — that’s where it’s at. And I saw that here in Rockaway and I felt like I could make a big difference.

Tom Llewellyn: Sal poured all of his time and energy into getting the center up and running. He was paying rent, getting supplies, building walls, all that kind of stuff. It took a lot of work, but after about a year and a half of prep, he finally got the center open. He was even able to run a seminar or two for a couple of weeks. And then Sandy hit.

Sal Lopizzo: Before it hit I wasn’t that concerned. I thought it was just another storm coming and me and a friend of mine went up to the beach and we just started collecting sand, making sandbags — we’re only one block away from the ocean. But then when I saw the storm itself, and felt it, I knew that we had to get out of here. It was just a really dark, dark sound — the wind was like a growl. The ocean was growling. It was, it was devastating.

Tom Llewellyn: All Sal could do was to put up some sandbags, board the place up, and hope for the best. But when he came back the following day, it was obvious that his efforts had been in vain.

Sal Lopizzo: My office was just a total wreck. Totally, totally wrecked. So while I’m sitting here looking at this, I just finished — took me almost two years out of my own pocket, you know, a few dollars here and there to get the place up. I didn’t know what to do. I was — I was, my friend said to me, “Sal, you just got to give it up. You did your best. And that’s it.” And as I’m pondering and praying I was like, “Oh my god, what am I going to do?” And a bunch of young guys come in and they were like, “Listen, we want to use this as a hub.”

And they were from Occupy Wall Street — so we dubbed it Occupy Sandy. And from that moment on people just showed up, gutted the office out, got everything out into the street. We started putting up tables, we started serving breakfast — put a big sign up. 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.

Tom Llewellyn: Sal was suddenly thrown into something much larger than he could have ever imagined. Almost overnight, his space was transformed into a relief hub and community service center which became known as YANA, which stands for, “You are Never Alone.” Fortunately, this kind of thing wasn’t unique — dozens of similar hubs began to pop up in heavily hit areas, in a spontaneous phenomenon that became known as Occupy Sandy, a community-driven relief effort that filled a vacuum left by the official response, and which grew out of the networks and strategies developed by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Occupy Sandy volunteers worked in partnership with local community organizations and activist networks, and their grassroots efforts focused on empowering poor and working class communities. With nearly 60,000 volunteers at its height, its own online relief registry, a legal team, a medical team, a team of translators, prescription drug deliveries, and serving around 20,000 meals a day, Occupy Sandy is considered one of the most effective relief efforts in the city.

Sal Lopizzo: I didn’t know too much about Occupy. I knew that it was Occupy Wall Street. I mean I grew up in the 60s so I understand protests and activism and all of that. And I just didn’t understand what their — at that time in Manhattan — I didn’t understand what their goal was. But when they came here to Rockaway it was very obvious what the goal was. And I really believed in this slogan that, ‘A better world is possible.’ And I saw that. I saw it in action. It was amazing. It made you want to cry everyday. You wanted to just lay down and cry like, “Holy mackerel.”

Tom Llewellyn: In her book “A Paradise Built in Hell,” author Rebecca Solnit, describes the idea of disaster collectivism, as, quote “the sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive.” She goes on to say, quote, “…we don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.”

Sal’s immersion in the community that spontaneously formed after Sandy gave him a new sense of possibility. This is a situation that people often find themselves in during the aftermath of disasters. This falling away of everyday normalcy opens up the space for the creation of unlikely connections.

—

Terri Bennett: When Hurricane Sandy hit I was living in Fort Greene in Brooklyn.

Tom Llewellyn: This is Terri Bennett.

Terri Bennett: We were out earlier in the evening and we were kind of out in the storm for a little while and then we just kind of went back to my house which is located on top of a hill and [laughs] we played cards, we were drinking, and I think I had gone to the store and gotten some like beans, beer, and toilet paper to stock up in case anything out of the ordinary had happened. Which in retrospect was not really a solid emergency plan but at the time it seemed to me what I should do.

The next day when we woke up, we were looking at the news and the first thing I actually saw — I’m originally from New Jersey — was I saw images of the Jersey Shore and the really iconic image of the roller coaster that was in the ocean. And that was the first indication that something really serious had happened. Slowly I started hearing about different kind of relief efforts — primarily people establishing distribution centers and people starting to get donations together. And at the time we had a fifteen foot cargo van that was empty, and we had a full tank of gas. So we went to one of the distribution points which turned out was operated in part by Occupy Sandy. And so we took the first van load of stuff down to the Rockaways.

Tom Llewellyn: The distribution point in Terri’s neighborhood directed her to a specific relief hub on the Rockaway peninsula.

Terri Bennett: Where that place turned out to be was a place called YANA, which stands for “You are Never Alone,” and which was Sal’s nonprofit that was destroyed after the storm, and so that’s where we went every morning for a long time after the storm and there was kind of a joke that I had like a little traveling office because I had like tote bags with a bunch of different clipboards in it with a list of every house we’d been to, and the people, and how many people lived in the house, and how old the people were who lived in the house.

Tom Llewellyn: Terri already had a background in marshaling relief efforts and she quickly became an important part of the recovery process, creating an organization called Respond and Rebuild, which was one of a handful of projects that formed the Occupy Sandy network. In addition to pumping and gutting flooded homes, Terri specialized in coordination: what volunteers and supplies needed to go where and in what quantity, the kind of thing that’s always changing moment to moment. This was the sort of thing that Occupy Sandy actually excelled at, despite — or perhaps because of — its loosely organized and flexible structure.

Terri’s project alone logged well over 40,000 volunteer work hours and worked on over four hundred homes. She put an incredible amount of time and energy into actually making personal connections with the folks she was helping — and she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.

Terri Bennett: When we were first driving around we just had this huge neon yellow van that has a sign that said, “We can pump you out,” I think. And it just had my phone number. And so right across the street from YANA was a couple who was a retired cop and her husband and we’d heard that they had water in their basement and so we kind of pull up with this big yellow van looking like we looked, which was like we hadn’t slept for days or showered or changed our clothes, you know. We show up and we’re like, “We heard you need your basement pumped out?” And we pumped their basement out and it was the first house that we pumped out.

And so this couple turned out to become friends of ours — and kind of unlikely friends of ours. I don’t have a lot of friends who are retired cops. But, I don’t know, yeah. Just — I, we developed a lot of unlikely friendships and we had a situation where we had this kind of unlikely group of friends who were really appreciative of all the volunteers who were coming down and started — you know they’re just — they’re people whose home was just destroyed after a disaster and they decided that they really were invested in having these volunteers well taken care of. And just, I guess the kind of people they are, right? But they started having just a cooler on their front porch that constantly had like sodas, and water, and they had bagels, or they had pizza that they would just leave on their front porch that volunteers could just come and eat, you know? And despite the fact that their home is just been destroyed they’re actually just also taking care of us. And then at one point in time we were hanging out afterward. You know, she said to me, “A month before the storm if I would have seen people looking like you, I wouldn’t have given them directions for the train. But then a month after the storm I’d given you keys to my house.” And I think those kinds of experiences really changed how I experience New York. And like, what my community in New York meant. And it really kind of diversified what my community in New York meant.

Tom Llewellyn: Occupy Sandy wasn’t your average relief effort. Instead of seeing themselves as a charity organization, Occupy volunteers saw themselves as participants in a process of mutual aid, a concept that rejects the savior/victim dichotomy that often exists in relief work, and which instead emphasizes working with communities in a horizontal way, blurring the line between what we traditionally consider to be victims and volunteers.

Terri Bennett: I really felt that it was important that we put the affected people’s experience first. So asking people what they needed and asking people what they wanted and asking people how they wanted that to work. It was really important to me that this huge outpouring of concern and willingness and labor was accountable to the people who needed the help, right? And so I think a lot of the reason we were able to sort of connect with people and have our efforts kind of snowball is that, like, we had these like little clipboards but we weren’t asking you to fill out a form and we weren’t doing something that felt impersonal and we weren’t stopping you from telling us what was going wrong because there’s no box to check off. And we just listened. And so if what you’re going for is mutual aid, some kind of like mutual recognition is the first thing that’s required.

Tom Llewellyn: This kind of approach couldn’t be more different from the relief efforts organized by institutions like the Red Cross or the National Guard. despite having played a key role in supporting many people who were impacted by the storm, these organizations could have been much more effective if they had worked in closer partnership with the groups under the Occupy Sandy banner.

Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of tension between Occupy volunteers and the official relief efforts. This might have had something to do with Occupy’s connection to radical politics and the different interests that are represented among grassroots versus official relief.

In fact, a lot of the time, disaster recovery can be aimed at simply restoring the status quo as quickly as possible, or worse, at taking advantage of shocked communities in order to advance an unpopular agenda.

But in areas like the Rockaways, the status quo wasn’t working for most people. So instead of limiting their efforts to getting the existing social order back into gear, Terri and the folks at Occupy saw the disaster as an opportunity to let the light shine into the cracks that existed in the Rockaways far before Sandy ever hit the peninsula.

They wanted to harness all of the energy created after the disaster in a way that could empower the community and leave them in a better position to not just recover from the hurricane, but to actually start addressing the broader social and economic challenges they experienced on a daily basis. The first step in empowering communities? Well, it might just be getting to know your neighbors.

—

Dennis Loncke: My name is Dennis Loncke, and I’m the Pastor of the Arverne Pilgrim Church.

Tom Llewellyn: Located in the neighborhood adjacent to YANA, Pastor Loncke’s church was completely flooded when Sandy hit. He lost almost everything. But, just like with Sal’s nonprofit, there was a silver lining.

Dennis Loncke:  We met Terri Bennett about the third or fourth day after the storm. They came in and inquire of me, “What is this?” And we explained, “This is the church and the spot was the dining room. And they begin to say what was their purpose here. They come to help with the recovery. And so they made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse. They said, “Can we use your facility? We are not a big organization with money, but if we use your facility we will assist you to rebuild it.” And I says, “Hallelujah. Thank you Jesus.” And they were kind enough to do all and more than I had expected. They were the ones who literally refurbish and did all the work and get it back up and running. It was a hardship that sometimes you wonder why people go through this to help others. It was a sight to see for yourself. To see others who will give up themselves — literally give of themselves to get other people back in their homes.

Terri Bennett: Pastor Dennis Loncke was someone that we worked with a lot in the Arverne section of the Rockaways. And so he’s a really good example of someone who saw his church destroyed — he had two homes that were both destroyed and saw the destruction of lots of his congregation’s homes. And so he also started interacting I think with a lot of people in the community he hadn’t necessarily interacted with before, in part because the Rockaways is a pretty segregated place. And so if you travel down the peninsula you can see that there’s one area of the Rockaways that actually I think may have the highest density of public housing in Queens, and then there are two gated communities on the peninsula, right? And so, people are segregated in a number of ways and maybe haven’t really interacted much before and seeing people transcend that I think was really important. And I think that that’s also not uncommon after a disaster.

Sal Lopizzo: This was — I’m telling, I told him this was look like — when I walked in here it was like Home Depot [laughs].

Tom Llewellyn: We met up with Pastor Loncke and Sal at the Arverne Pilgrim Church. They were hanging out, just talking about the days and weeks after Sandy hit.

Sal Lopizzo: We had a lot of really good meetings here, afterwards, right? Even did a play one night.

Dennis Loncke: Yeah.

Sal Lopizzo: We did a play, right? Some actors came in, they did like a little play.

Dennis Loncke: Right.

Sal Lopizzo: Yeah, it was a — you know what it was? It was really needed. Because people were in a lot of pain, and suffering, and struggling, and frustration, and then they could stop for a minute — you know?

Dennis Loncke: Yeah.

Sal Lopizzo: And just enjoy each other.

Tom Llewellyn: Did you know each other before the storm?

Dennis Loncke: No, we didn’t.

Sal Lopizzo: No, we met each other after — during the storm.

Dennis Loncke: During the storm.

Sal Lopizzo: That’s what brought us together.

Dennis Loncke: The storm really did unite in breaking some of the barriers down. Because most of us was living on opinion.

Sal Lopizzo: Yeah.

Dennis Loncke: 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 with the storm.

Sal Lopizzo: Yeah. Good way to put it.

Dennis Loncke: So, 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 was — it awakened the community to what is going on inside the midst of us. What we have as neighbors and stuff like that.

Sal Lopizzo: True.

—

Tom Llewellyn: We asked Terri if she had any advice to impart after her experience with Occupy Sandy.

Terri Bennett: I do think that there are some things that you can do to make yourself and maybe people closer to you — at least in proximity — more prepared or more capable if you do have some kind of disaster. I think having organized neighborhoods helps. Being civically engaged helps. The best advice I can really give is knowing your neighbors, have people’s phone numbers, be able to get in touch, hopefully have them trust you, so that if you go in their backyard and you’re getting some kind of tool or something you have established those kinds of connections already.

Tom Llewellyn: Right, so, things like preparedness kits and disaster mitigation technology are important parts of keeping communities safe during a crisis, but how effective can they be when resources in society aren’t distributed equitably in the first place?

Without social intervention, the contours of a disaster will probably reflect pre-existing divisions — which are often shaped along race and class lines. So, like Terri suggests, maybe the best technology we can deploy is a kind of social technology: closely knit, organized, and empowered communities that are more resilient during catastrophes and that are better able to demand the resources they need to not only survive those acute disasters, but to thrive on a daily basis.

As terrible as they can be, disasters present an opportunity to expand our social imagination and dream up new possibilities. Perhaps these events can open up a space that is normally closed off, a gap in which we can begin reclaiming community agency and power, an opportunity to tell a different story about who we are and what gives our lives meaning and purpose.

For a few weeks at least, the driving narrative in the Rockaways was marked by altruism, solidarity and cooperation. And that shift in the mainstream story had lasting consequences. One can’t help but think, what if we structured our society along these lines normally? What if a mother begging for money in the streets evoked the same response as a hurricane? Can you imagine the impact?

Sal was never able to get his workforce training center going again after the storm. He ended up handing the space over to a church, and nowadays he makes a living by driving for Lyft. But he’s not bitter. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Sal Lopizzo: I definitely feel that if on a scale the good outweighs the bad, you know? That’s how I see it. I feel so grateful you know that this whole thing happened for me even though I had a different idea of which way it was going to go. But it still turned out pretty cool. You know, a lot of people got to see their own potential — and the potential of the community. And that’s what tragedies do sometimes. You know? That’s really where it’s at.

Tom Llewellyn: This episode was written, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond. Interviews were conducted by field producer Paige Ruane, and recorded by Jack McDonald. A big thanks to Chris Zabriskie, Pele, and Lanterns for the music.

Join us for our next episode where we’ll travel to Puerto Rico to explore how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, a few spare dishes — along with a transformative vision — grew into a community kitchen which, in turn, has now grown into an island-wide movement with the goal of restoring power — both electric and civic — to the people.

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.

We don’t have much of a marketing budget for this project, so if you liked what you heard, you can head over to Apple Podcasts and give us a good rating. It might not sound like much, but it’ll make a huge difference. We’ll see you next time…in Puerto Rico.

The post The Response 1: Radical approaches to disaster relief in New York appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reality is a bit more complex…

To prove that the sharing movement is alive and thriving, our dear friends from Shareable have been working on a very ambitious project: a collection of the most exciting and innovative cases of sharing and urban commons now underway around the world. With 137 case studies drawn from 80 cities in 35 countries focusing on housing, mobility, food, work, energy, land, waste, water, technology, finance and governance, the Sharing Cities movement is showing that local solutions can really tackle global problems.

Tom Llewellyn, Coordinator of the Sharing Cities Network, spoke to us about how these initiatives are paving the way to a better future.

Let’s start with the basics: how do you define a sharing city?  Is there a framework or methodology?

We set forth a series of 10 principles, rather than a specific framework or definition of what makes a sharing city. We feel that the idea of the sharing city is aspirational, meaning it is a process more than a finish line. In that sense, while there are a number of cities that have declared themselves to be sharing cities, there isn’t a single one that is all the way there yet.

Solidarity would be the first principle we feel a sharing city should work to meet. The idea is for people within the city to work together for the common good rather than competing for scarce resources. The sharing city is of, by and for all people, no matter their race, class, gender, sexual orientation or ability. At a core, these cities are primarily civic, meaning residents would be focused on taking care of each other as well as partner cities, creating a cross-city solidarity.

In your experience, is activating the urban commons more successful when done by grassroots organizations or by local governments?

This intersection was painted in honour of a grandmother who had planted a chestnut tree that died soon after she passed away. The neighbourhood gathers every year to commemorate the tree and reinvigorate the painting.

It takes both. The main idea of the commons, in general, is that for them to be successful it takes a community behind it – to manage that resource – and a certain amount of support from the government to make sure that resources can be managed in a sustainable fashion.

There is also a need to partner with the market forces. There are some great examples of that cooperation, one coming from Portland, Oregon called The City Repair Project. The community there wanted to rethink how to use the commonly held properties. They started by painting murals in the middle of intersections. It was done initially after a couple of children were run over in a neighbourhood, so residents came together to make sure it never happened again. They had a block party and painted the intersection with a mural as a memorial.

Initially, the city pushed back and they destroyed it. This caused a huge outrage in the city by the residents, not only those involved in the project. The government ended up legitimising the policy and allowing residents to paint their streets. Over time, some of the people involved in this project moved into the government, and are now able to help maintain the practice.

There are now more than 70 intersections painted with murals, many with benches on the corners, open libraries, etc. What is incredible is having the community driving it, the city supporting it by giving the permits for no cost at all as well as businesses involved. A number of local hardware stores have sponsored the projects, providing the paint and other resources. This is a great example of the relationships that can form around the commons and the balance between the community, the government and the market.

Have you noticed any interesting trends in the movement? Are some themes more popular, more successful, harder to implement, etc?

Yes! Food is the easiest place to start. Food is historically something that brings people together, be it community gardens or networks of food distribution, these policies are definitely amongst the most popularly adopted.

GrowNYC’s garden program builds and sustains community gardens, urban farms, school gardens, and rainwater harvesting systems across New York City.

A great example is the Grow NYC project. It started as a community that had an empty lot in their neighbourhood. They found out that it was owned by the city, so they worked with the local government and were able to turn it into a community garden. Through their research, they discovered there are 596 acres owned by the city. Some were held back for real estate development but a lot of them didn’t have plans in the near future. Now around 200 of those acres have been transformed into community spaces in less than 10 years. So it was the desire to come together around food that enabled the transformation of all those properties.

On the other hand, the hardest policies to implement are in areas where there is a history of ingrained institutions with a lot of power. The technology sphere is the best example, most notably internet service providers. In the US the market is dominated by three companies, so the entry barriers are immensely high. Yet there are also a number of projects trying to work their way, like FreiFunk in Germany where people have been able to set-up local community-driven internet networks. So even when businesses have a lot of control, there are ways to take a little bit of that back.

Many initiatives that work well in a city, sometimes cannot be scaled and should not be reproduced elsewhere, as the conditions that made it succeed cannot be easily replicated.  How can policy-makers and entrepreneurs better adopt the core learnings of the case studies presented?

This question is one that we reflected a lot when we were writing the book. We decided not to include cases that were hard to replicate in other cities or examples that only made sense in a particular context. The idea was that every single example is either commons-based or is enabling the participation of the community. And as proof, most of the things we chose have already been replicated.

What is the biggest myth or utopian dream that has been proven real by the projects you explored?

Our goal was to show what can actually be achieved; what we refer to as a concrete utopia, or that it pushes for that. Maybe the ideal sharing city does not exist anywhere right now, but the building blocks for that city exist; they are just all over the world. I believe proving that there are amazing projects in a variety of sectors across the world, breaks down the unachievable utopian critique.

Student Jordi PronkFoto tomada por: 19

Humanitas, the very first case study is a wonderful example.This Netherlands-based project has proven how intergenerational living works. This is an elder-care residence that also provides housing to students and young people. The exchange for living there is 30 hours of their time per month, engaging with the elderly community. The project has been so successful they have set up in multiple locations. This is a very encouraging concept when we think of the baby-boom generation globally ageing along with the housing-crisis the millennial generation is going through. This is a model for institutions to copy or for individuals to replicate.

Another great example of things that were thought impossible but are actually possible would be the Community Bill of Rights in the US. It allows a city or a county to draft civil laws that guarantee certain community rights, including the right to clean air, water, the protection of natural ecosystems, etc.

Now when a community passes a law (there have been over 200 so far) it can ban certain extractive businesses because they go against that community bill of rights. The best example is fracking. Many states have passed legislation to bypass local governments, so businesses were able to come in and destroy the local ecosystem. Up to this point, there hadn’t been any way for cities and communities to fight back. Now if companies want to frack they have to unequivocally prove that their activity isn’t going to hurt the environment.  And this was completely driven by the community, and a big number of organisations, most notably The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). It is incredibly encouraging that out of the 200 cases, only four were taken to court, the rest have been unchallenged.

What are your favourite three case studies in the book and why?

The first one is rooted in France and is the re-municipalisation of water. Back in the early 1990’s, originating in France and then becoming a standard global practice, large multi-national corporations started privatising regional water systems. Veolia, Suez and others began buying water rights all over the world claiming they could provide cheaper services. Over time it became clear that the companies were not actually delivering a superior product, on the contrary, the quality had significantly decreased as they were not investing enough in the infrastructure. Hundreds of cities and regions handed over their water to a very few number of international corporations.

What is really encouraging – and why is one of my favourite policies in the book – is that since 2000 this trend has completely flipped. Between 2000 and 2015, 235 cities have taken back their water. The most notable example is Paris. In 2008 the city council voted against renewing the contract it had with Suez and Veolia and spent the next two years putting in place their management system. By 2010, the first year it operated the city saved 35 million euros and reduced by 8% the cost for the population.

Another one of my favourites, which is very simple and OuiShare actually pioneered, is the idea of the “zero waste party pack”. Cities have started to take this on as well. The city of Palo Alto, California, for example, has now 22 party-packs distributed throughout the city.

And finally, I would say Spacehive, a civic crowdfunding initiative in the UK. In their first five years, they have raised 6.7 million pounds for 306 projects, and many of these projects have been getting support directly from the Mayor of London. His office has pledged 800,000 pounds towards these community-proposed projects. It was basically a pound for pound match against the 900,000 pounds that had been raised. So citizen proposals getting support and being enabled by the local government works. Most of the times we hear about the public-private partnerships, and I see this as a public-commons partnership.

In need of more inspiration? Read about the rest of projects and city-policies described in the book!

The post Concrete examples for utopian ideals: how the Sharing Cities movement is paving the way appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Most of the groups that participated in #MapJam in April launched community maps for the first time. They plan to continue the process of contributing to these maps in the coming months. Other groups that had already established community maps focused on updating and promoting them. You can view the full list of maps here.

Given the great turnout at all the events last month, we’ve decided to host two more rounds of #MapJam this year — in June and October.

If you missed hosting or participating in #MapJam in April, we invite you to join us during #GlobalSharingWeek — from June 5-11, for the second round.

To find an upcoming event or to host your own #MapJam, click here. And check out our extensive resources page, which includes a comprehensive guide for #MapJam hosts.

Need a little inspiration? Watch this awesome video from our friends in Beirut:

Are you ready to bring #MapJam to your community? We’re hosting a Q&A session today, Tuesday, May 17, at 9 a.m. PST. Just click on this link to join: https://zoom.us/j/225618826

If you have any questions, send us a note: info [at] shareable [dot] net

The post How #MapJam is Connecting the Global Sharing Movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is where you come in. For the next 30 days, our international team will be searching the globe for exemplary projects and legislations that are already showcasing what our cities can, and should, look like. While we have an excellent group leading this process, we need your help to increase the breadth and depth of our search.

We are currently examining 12 core civic sectors for the book as well as other sectors to be included in our database: housing, food, mobility, work, land, water, energy, waste, information and communications technology, culture, finance, and governance.

Do you know of case studies or current policies that should be included? Please contribute to the success of this project by filling out this form.

Written by Tom Llewellyn for Shareable.org

The post Sharing Cities Book Project Seeks International Case Studies appeared first on P2P Foundation.