For such times as these.
Doubling down on care.
2025 has just begun and the fires have been raging in Los Angeles for more than a week. The recent gusting winds in Oakland that shook the towering redwoods outside my window, are the same Santa Anas that have propelled the flames across LA, forcing me to reckon with our precarity here as well. Fires could start any time, the new vegetation from winter’s heavy rains is the perfect kindling to a downed power line or human negligence. We’re less than a week away from inaugurating a president who doesn’t believe in climate change and who will all but certainly usher in an era of unprecedented harm and chaos. It is an ominous start to an undoubtedly challenging new year. And yet these devastating conditions sit in stark contrast to the beauty of the collective response to the LA fires: people are looking at what they have to offer, who might need it, and making it available. A flood of fundraisers for those who’ve lost homes were created in the first days of the fires, established mutual aid networks are surging with activity to make sure needs are known and visible, and resources are getting to where they’re needed most. Coordinated donation drop offs are popping up all over the Bay Area while caravans are organized to bring goods down to Los Angeles. Grief workers and spiritual leaders are offering free sessions and online meditation to help ground and sustain people.
Mutual Aid is something I first learned about from Mia Birdsong in her book How We Show Up. At the time, the idea struck me as both obvious and hard to imagine, my life having been organized around professional class values, work, and aspirations for most of my 20s and 30s. And yet I knew enough to recognize that in the pages of her book was a vision of community rooted in care and interdependence, something I longed for. I bought fifteen copies and sent them to the friends in my life with whom I wanted to build that kind of relationship. Community is a word that gets thrown around a lot and the imprecision can hollow out the meaning. I just went through an exercise of defining what we mean at Oakland Yard to arrive at the broader conclusion that a community made up of interdependent circles of relationships who come together to give and receive support, often in a physical place. The stores we shop at, the neighbors we look in on, the people we don’t know but recognize and say hello to anyway, the people we do know and share meals with, the school we drop our kids off to and the teachers and caregivers we depend on to keep them safe– these are all tended to through our interactions, our resources, our presence, our showing up.
This moment calls to mind the Napa and Sonoma fires of 2017, my introduction to living in California during fire season. Our friends who have lived, grown grapes, and made wine on the top of a mountain in Napa county since the early 1970s lost their home as did nearly 7000 other people. 110,000 acres burned and 24 were killed. There too, I recall the outpouring of love for the scores of volunteer firefighters who fought those flames day after day, the hundreds of fundraisers, and the relief coordination. And barely three months ago, Hurricane Helen ripped through the south east and brought with it torrential rains that washed out much of Western North Carolina, taking hundreds of lives and 70,000 homes with it and leaving $50 Billion of damage in its wake. My friends on the ground report some of the most powerful community care they’ve ever seen, describing it as an extraordinary example of cross-race, cross-class organizing.
The first time I lived through a climate disaster was in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy swept in. That Supermoon night, my friend Barry prepared his local bar as best he could and then walked home in knee-high water, electrical transformers blowing out overhead, sending sparks and live wires into the flooding streets. I took the following day off from work to lend a hand, starting at the only hardware store with generators and sump pumps in stock, and then headed to Red Hook Brooklyn. Depending on where you were in the neighborhood, flood waters rose as high as 12 feet on some buildings. Pulling up to the Bait and Tackle, soaked mattresses and sofas already lined the streets, dozens of people in a human chain from the ruined basement out to the street, passed debris from one person to the next: waterlogged kegs, beer cases, refrigerators, cardboard. As more people arrived, Barry began to deploy teams of folks to different residents he knew were going to be especially hard hit— elders and disabled folks, families with young children, local proprietors hit twice as hard at home and their place of business. By dinner time, there were tables lined up on the sidewalk with hot home-cooked meals to feed volunteers and neighborhood residents and some bar lights were plugged into the generators for an impromptu dance party. Over the course of the months that followed, Red Hook came together to support residents stuck in public housing for three weeks without power, small businesses who were all but certain to be forgotten by whatever aid would eventually come, and local residents who needed help cleaning out their homes, a place to get warm, a warm meal or both. The networks of care that were activated by the hurricane stood in stark contrast to the military tankers sent in by FEMA that seemed to sit on the streets for many days after the flood waters receded.
Whenever crises like these occur, they provide all the evidence I need– that we know a different way to live and be and take care of each other. We have incredible capacity to come together and organize to get resources and care where it is most needed. As systems are collapsing around us and more people than ever will feel the impacts of climate crisis, economic precarity, insufficient healthcare, housing insecurity, and legislated violence, I am doubling down on fortifying networks of care.
These more acute crisis moments give us the opportunity to practice how we show up and who we show up for in our everyday lives– on our block, in our city, in our state, and beyond. Here are a few ways to practice that care:
Fundraising for Los Angeles Area Fire Victims (Eaton & Palisades): Go Fund Me campaigns with less than 20% of their goal reached.
Fundraising for Essential Workers Impacted by the LA Fires: Includes organizations National Day Laborer Organization Network, This is About Humanity, Cielo, and Instituto Educación Popular.
Attend Welcome Wednesdays at Oakland Yard where proceeds will be donated to support fire relief, starting with Mutual Aid LA Network.
Yours,
Julia