Alex O'Hanlon | Neighborhood Organizing For A Crisis
Alex O’Hanlon is a community leader who is committed to supporting resident-led projects that enhance their quality of life. She’s a member of Amplify’s 2020 Alternate Currents Working Group and has worked as a Garden Manager for City Sprouts South where she coordinated programs, workshops, and events. Currently she works as Engagement Coordinator at One Omaha. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy/History from UNO and travels to California every fall to harvest olives.
Neighborhood Organizing for a Crisis
Do you know when is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. Do you know the second-best time to plant a tree? Right now. Do you know the best time to organize your neighbors for mutual aid efforts? Also 20 years ago! Do you know the second-best time? Also right now!
That’s a little joke I’ve been telling lately. It doesn’t get many laughs, but it is true. And while this pandemic is a great time to work on my (clearly lacking) stand-up material it is also a great time to step into neighborhood organizing if you haven’t already, and if you already have, then it is a great time strengthen that organization.
I want to point out that there are many different types of and ways to organize, but in this article, I want to talk about neighborhood organizing. Organizing is a method of building collective power through personal relationships, neighborhood organizing is building collective power (access to resources, decision making) on a hyper-local level through personal relationships with those living around you. Right now for most of us, this probably looks like building out or establishing mutual aid networks to help each other meet our basic needs like food, medicine and social interaction (from 6 feet away or virtually, of course).
If you are already a part of an existing community group you probably noticed that it was fairly easy to establish (note I didn’t say maintain) a Covid-19 response (check out this folder here for examples of how to set up a Covid-19 mutual aid network). All you had to do was get on your group chat. The existing community infrastructure allows folks to quickly coordinate a response and provide other folks wanting to help out a quick way to get started and be effective immediately. Getting information to people is the hardest part, so having a structure for that already in place allows for a quick response.
When we are not faced with an imminent crisis that immediately changes our daily life, it can be hard to see the foundational aspect of day-to-day activities that help us communally prepare for life-altering shifts. Even something as simple as a group of people who pick up trash together at a park is doing important emergency preparation. By maintaining their relationships, they maintain an essential communication structure that will come in handy when information needs to be distributed rapidly. Groups of folks who get together to produce community events like markets, live shows, art walks, and block parties are also providing spaces for important relationship building that can translate into effective emergency organizing.
Maybe you weren’t already part of an existing neighborhood organization but you are moved to respond to people’s needs at this time. You are most likely either creating or plugging into a larger group of folks who have a similar goal. You might be establishing new relationships or you might be tapping into existing relationships and exploring them in a new context. These new groups that form can serve as strong backbones for new neighborhood organizations that can persist after the pandemic and continue to keep neighbors connected. Sustained connection could be maintained through block parties, community gardens, soccer camps for kids in the neighborhood, bike shops or even a once a year night out among other things.
Gifford Park Community Garden. Photo: Local Harvest
Neighborhood level connections serve as critical infrastructure in disaster response. Many public health programs try to recreate this structure in their efforts to disseminate information to people. It is important for us, in whatever ways we can, to support our neighborhood structures, especially when times are hard, but we need to maintain it when times are better, and luckily there are lots of fun ways to do so that make times even better.