How do we go about supporting people?

easy, chill questions

q: How do I make it so my friends working two jobs for shit wage arent struggling to pay rent and dependent on food banks?

a: this question has thirty-second answers (host a rent party, send a mutual aid graphic around, apply for a rent fund, go to a food distro, post on a mutual aid chat, etc), but most anarchists already do these things. this is a structural question. so here’s my honest structural answer: get curious about what kind of care you and your friends need, and how to provide it to each other.

these types of ongoing needs might be solved in the short term by Venmoing someone or making a social media post, but really taking care of them requires more sustained labor. to use your food bank example—maybe your friends in that situation would appreciate if you organized a meal train for them. maybe a regular community potluck would help give them at least one meal each week that they don’t have to pay for or prepare. maybe you all want to plug into (or start) a Food not Bombs or similar organization. maybe you want to teach each other to dumpster outside restaurants, grow your own food, or cook affordable food in bulk. maybe, for you, food autonomy looks entirely different. but you’ll never know what would support your friends around food unless you talk about it in a way that takes the long view.

similarly, when thinking about housing, it could help to build infrastructure for these needs over the long term—starting a community rent fund or tenant’s union, initiating a Signal thread for couchsurfing or short-term housing in your city, or even finding a comrade who owns a home with guest rooms and seeing if they’re able to house people (someone in my city does this and it’s a big help to our anarchist community). if your friends find it stressful to fundraise for the month’s rent, maybe someone with more capacity could adopt that fundraiser. if a lot of your friends have this problem, it might be time to start or join a co-op or other radically minded housing option.

all this advice may sound impractical, and because we’re anarchists, of course it is;) but at a certain point, building networks of care can take less energy than the daily fundraising grind. survival crowdfunding is an important part of our mutual aid spaces, but not their only dimension.

your friends need food and housing, and anything you need to do to provide that—including making use of short-term mutual aid resources—is valid and important. at the same time, creating anarchist projects that meet these needs allows us to become less reliant on nonprofits, government resources, and nuclear family for material survival. when the prefigurative crowd talks about building a new world in the shell of the old, they’re missing the part where it can be incredibly hard to stay alive and well in the old world. but there’s still a grain of truth there. you and your friends are already an affinity group; go make the organizations you need. there’s nothing an anarchist can’t do <3