The Response

In the latest episode of The Response Podcast, Chad Rittenberry discusses the community-led response to Winter Storm Uri in Austin Texas earlier this year.

What began with a simple Facebook post offering free firewood to friends and family in and around Austin, Texas snowballed until he found himself organizing the National Guard to distribute water in the pink vests previously worn by street medics at Black Lives Matter protests last Summer.

He shares his perspective on what worked, what really didn't work, and how local organizers plan to be even more prepared for when the next disaster strikes.

Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn

Series producer: Robert Raymond

Theme Music: "Meet you on the other side" by Cultivate Beats

As of now, the majority of the global population has been impacted by the pandemic for more than a year. For the first time in a century, pretty much everyone on the planet has experienced the same disaster at the same time.

And while most of us have had our daily lives disrupted in significant, and in many cases catastrophic, ways, there has also been an incredible outpouring of support for one another.

With the daily case count continuing at a high rate in many countries, now is a good time to pause and ask the question: what have we learned from dealing with the pandemic over the past year.

On March 16th, we partnered with Idealist to host a public presentation and discussion based on our free ebook, "Lessons from the First Wave: Resilience in the Age of COVID-19."

In addition to the extended talk delivered by The Response host Tom Llewellyn at the beginning of the episode, you'll hear short presentations from two mutual aid organizers from Idealist's global network, Liam Elkind, the co-founder of Invisible Hands in New York City, and Shila Jassal coordinator of Mutual Aid Road Reps - Let's Get Chatty Service in Medway, UK, before we open it up for a discussion with the live audience moderated by Carol Walton, a Community Organizer at Idealist, who co-hosted this session with us.

• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Series producer: Robert Raymond
• Theme Music: "Meet you on the other side" by Cultivate Beats

New TED Talk from The Response host Tom Llewellyn is out now: "Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disaster"

Watch it here: https://youtu.be/-SamQq9-wTg

I've been told that I never get tired of giving people bad news, so here we go.

The impacts of climate change are already being felt. This is no longer just a challenge that future generations are going to have to face. It's ours now.

According to a recent report from the UN, in the past 20 years, there were over 7,000 major disaster events causing 1.2 million deaths, affecting more than 4 billion people, and resulting in almost three trillion dollars in global economic losses.

Strikingly, the number of climate-related disasters nearly doubled from the previous two decades.

Last year we hit the hottest global temperatures on record, saw the first Giga fire (burning over 1 million acres in Northern California), and even had a Zombie Storm in the Atlantic!

The questions now are:

• How bad is the climate going to get?
• How quickly can it get better?
• And what are we going to do in the meantime?

I don't know about the first two questions, but I've seen a number of things that might just hold some answers to the last one.

That's just a short excerpt from the TED Talk.

Despite all this bad news, disasters can have a silver lining. Time after time, remarkable communities rise up after natural, social, or political disasters, revealing the core of our humanity and providing a glimpse at how we might respond in the face of even bigger challenges.

And after you watch the talk, please leave questions and share your stories of collective resilience in the comment section.

We'll be back in a few weeks with a new episode.

Last weekend, mutual aid organizers from all over the world gathered together for the Solidarity Summit. Hosted by Humans United for Mutual Aid Networks (or HUMANS), the virtual event took place in order to build skills, relationships, and momentum while benefiting local work.

During the Summit, we co-hosted a 2-part session which began with a screening of "The Response: How Puerto Ricans Are Restoring Power to the People" before transitioning into a live recording of The Response Podcast.

Today we're bringing you the audio from that event which featured several organizers from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (or MAD Relief), a grassroots disaster relief network based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action.

Rather than focussing on the nitty-gritty, of how MAD Relief is successfully organizing with a non-hierarchical decentralized structure, this conversation illustrated 4 of the many stories of what the work actually looks like on the ground.

Featured Speakers:

• Rain: co-founder/co-coordinator of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief focused on sustainable disaster response and rebuilding – Louisiana (transplanted from Florida) mostly responding to events in the Gulf South/SE states
• Vanessa Bolin: Richmond Indigenous Society, Community Roots Garden, madr, and The Eyes Wide Open Project – Occupied Virginia on traditional Pamunky Territory
• Siren Saricca: founder of the Michigan mutual aid coalition, a service that delivers groceries to seniors – Detroit MI
• Tyler Norman (co-host): mutual aid disaster relief – Wisconsin

• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Series producer: Robert Raymond
• Theme Music: "Meet you on the other side" by Cultivate Beats

The Response from Shareable.net, is a documentary film, book, and podcast series exploring how communities are building collective resilience in the wake of disasters.

Find out more information about Mutual Aid Disaster Relief at mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/

Check out the work of Humans United for Mutual Aid Networks by visiting mutualaidnetwork.org

"Harm reduction is not just service delivery, it's not just a set of techniques, it's not just a viewpoint of how to engage problematic drug use or sex or whatever have you, it's also part of a social movement that looks for a more just world for drug users, sex workers — that population. So it has a social critique saying, no shit, this is not right." - Rafael Torruella

This documentary episode of The Response explores how community-based harm reduction programs are responding to climate-fueled disasters and other systems-disrupting emergencies. The 40-min audio documentary features interviews with Rafael Torruella (executive director of Intercambios Puerto Rico), Justin Kunzelman (executive director and co-founder of Rebel Recovery Florida), and Savannah O'Neill (associate director of capacity building at the National Harm Reduction Coalition).

Episode credits:

• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Senior producer and scriptwriter: Robert Raymond
• Field production and script editing: Tom Llewellyn
• Additional script editing: Elizabeth Carr and Neal Gorenflo
• Graphic art created for this episode by Kane Lynch
• Theme music: Cultivate Beats
• A special thank you to everyone who was interviewed for this project

Over the course of producing three seasons of The Response podcast, we've explored how natural hazards and other disruptions disproportionately impact marginalized communities at length.

But one population we haven't discussed before is people who use drugs. There is still so much stigma associated with using illegal and legal drugs despite the fact that it's a normal part of life for millions of people worldwide.

For the past 9 months, our team at Shareable have been working with Higher Ground Harm Reduction to explore how community-based harm reduction programs (and people who use drugs) are impacted by, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from climate-related and other systems-disrupting emergencies (like the pandemic).

I recently spoke at length with Christine Rodriguez, the executive director of Higher Ground Harm Reduction. We touch on her personal journey, what harm reduction actually is, how the current climate of disasters has impacted this work, and why we need to have more compassion for one another.

Next week, we'll bring you part 2 of this special series with an audio documentary exploring the impact of disasters on harm reduction through the experiences of community service providers in California, Florida, and Puerto Rico.

The Response is executive produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn, the series producer is Robert Raymond, and our theme music was provided by Cultivate Beats.

The Response is a project of Shareable, a nonprofit media outlet, action network, and consultancy promoting people-powered solutions for the common good.

Our latest book, "Lessons from the First Wave: Resilience in the age of COVID-19", is available as a free download at shareable.net.

Support for this project has been provided by the Threshold, Shift, Guerrilla, Clif Bar Family, and Abundant Earth foundations, Shareable's sponsors including Tipalti, MyTurn, and NearMe, and tax-deductible donations from listeners like you.

Additional funding for this research and 2-part series was provided by Resist, The Emergent Fund, Comer Foundation, NASTAD, and AIDS United.

A full transcript of this episode is available at www.shareable.net/the-response

If you like the show, please hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And send your feedback about the show to [email protected]

A groundswell of grassroots action emerged in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, hidden beneath the surface, the community-led response grew rapidly in scope and scale; often forming spontaneously by individuals and groups who recognized the immediate needs of those around them.

It's become such a widespread trend that the term "mutual aid" has increasingly become mainstream as local newspapers, CNN, and even Teen Vogue have published stories about it.

The glaring lack of leadership by some authorities put the burden of crisis response on ordinary people — and they're continuing to rise to the challenge.

Community organizers have formed thousands of mutual aid groups, makers are developing open-source medical equipment, restaurants are serving free meals to front-line medical workers, and much, much more.

As the daily case count is rising once again, now is the time to take stock of everything we've learned from dealing with the pandemic over the past year.

To aid in that task, we've pulled together the best of our recent reporting into a new book.

Today we're pleased to release "Lessons from the First Wave: Resilience in the Age of COVID-19."

The free book features 25 case studies, interviews, and how-to guides that showcase some of the most effective community-led responses to this global crisis.

Topics include:

• Ways to share during the pandemicNavigating multiple disasters during the pandemic
• Community wealth building
• The many ways libraries have stepped up to serve their communities (and how yours can too)
• Fostering community connection to reduce loneliness
• How to start a local mutual aid network (and a mutual aid fund too)
• And much more!

Unhoused populations are struggling to find enough to eat. Farmers are faced with both surplus produce and lower incomes as they are left without places to sell. Individuals have a renewed desire to plant gardens as they grapple with long grocery lines and rising food prices.

In short, the pandemic is surfacing many of the systemic issues in the global food system that we've been mostly ignoring for a long time.

But what can we do about this at the community, town, or city levels?

One grassroots organization in the San Francisco Bay Area is attempting to answer that question.

Today, we're bringing you the audio from a live roundtable discussion we co-hosted with NorCal Resilience Network last week as part of the launch of "Produce for the People."

The new initiative will activate NorCal's existing coalition of organizations and Resilience Hubs to address critical food security needs in a way that can be replicated on a larger scale in communities all over the world.

Featured Speakers:

Keneda Gibson: artist, community organizer with the East Oakland Neighborhood Initiative, and recipient of a Resilience Hub grant to develop a garden rooted in community at her house

Wanda Stewart: Executive Director of Common Vision and garden educator at Hoover Elementary School

AshEL Seasunz Eldridge: co-founder of Essential Food and Medicine (EFAM) which reclaims surplus and locally grown produce to make juice, soups, smoothies, and natural medicines that directly serve the most vulnerable people in their communities for free.

Moderated by Ayano K. Jeffers-Fabro: independent consultant for community food initiatives (most recently acting as project manager for incubating a community-led grocery cooperative in East Oakland).

Our panelists dove into many difficult topics and questions including:

• The history of racial inequities within the food industry and how this intersection between food justice and racial justice could evolve moving forward
• How communities have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic
• What an equitable hyper-local food web could look like in the future (based on the building blocks that currently exist), including resilience hubs as centers for food growing and distribution
• And how to "squash the beef" by physically working through conflict together while digging into common ground.

A full transcript of this episode is available at www.shareable.net/the-response

If you like the show, please hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And send your feedback about the show to [email protected]

The Response, a podcast series from Shareable.net exploring how communities are building collective resilience in the wake of disasters with host Tom Llewellyn.

One of the biggest challenges to executing an effective response to the pandemic is data. Without enough accurate data, it's impossible to know exactly how far-reaching and deadly the coronavirus is. There's still so much uncertainty about basic things like the infection rate of asymptomatic carriers, or how easy it is for them to pass it on to others.

As this crisis continues to drag on, we're starting to see some of the damaging results of incomplete data. As It's become increasingly difficult for communities to advocate for the resources they need without it.

One place, where the lack of support has become a lived reality, are the favelas in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro.

This week, we spoke with Theresa Willamson, the founder and director of Catalytic Communities in Rio.

Over the course of our conversation, we discussed many of the favela-led responses to the pandemic — things like food distribution, communication techniques, and the tracking dashboard.

We also touched on the importance of historical memory following disasters and other crises' and how Rio's legacy of being the world's largest slave port is continuing to exacerbate the ongoing social disaster the favelas were facing before the pandemic.

The transcript of this episode is available here: www.shareable.net/the-response-crowdsourcing-data-to-fight-the-pandemic-in-rios-favelas

If you're interested in contributing to Catalytic Communities' Covid-19 response efforts in Rio de Janeiro's favelas, check out their crowdfunding campaign at www.bit.ly/FavelaCovidResponse.

The Response, a podcast series from Shareable.net exploring how communities are building collective resilience in the wake of disasters with host Tom Llewellyn.

In this episode, we'll travel halfway across the world to the Western Balkans, where thousands of asylum seekers are being brutalized as they flee from places like Afghanistan, Syria, and Northern Africa.

The Western Balkans are the entryway into the European Union, and as they approach this region, many are hunted down by authorities, violently beaten, and forced into camps with terrible conditions.

In the face of this crisis, a project emerged to help provide food and other basic necessities to these asylum seekers. It's known as No Name Kitchen, but don't let the name fool you, as you'll see, the project is much, much more than just a community kitchen.

Response producer Robert Raymond, spoke with one of the project's co-founders, Bruno Morán, about what exactly is going on in the region and how No Name Kitchen is helping to build community while providing mutual aid to one of the most vulnerable populations in the world.

https://www.nonamekitchen.org/en/