Last Tuesday morning at Middlebury College in Vermont, rumors swirled. Across North America, colleges and universities were suspending in-person classes and shuttering campuses in response to the coronavirus outbreak. An associate professor had sent an email to students in two of his classes, indicating that Middlebury classes would end that Friday, 13 March, and screenshots of the email began to spread through an increasingly anxious student body of more than 2,500 undergraduates.
“Everyone was like, ‘Is this real? What do I do? How do I prepare?’” said Leif Taranta, a Middlebury student. “Do we need to leave this place that’s been our home?”
About an hour later, Middlebury’s president, Laurie Patton, confirmed that students would have to leave campus by Friday for an extended two-week spring break. Remote classes would begin on 30 March, and students would be “expected to remain at home and not return to campus until further notice”.
Immediately, concerns abounded. How quickly could they find storage space for all their belongings, or arrange travel plans to go home? A number of students could afford to purchase plane tickets home with only a few days’ notice, but many could not. The announcement stipulated a process for students to request permission to remain on campus, especially if they were international students, but how exactly would that work? Would anyone end up homeless?
In the midst of this panic, Taranta and a number of other students created a publicly editable Google spreadsheet. “Please list anything you can offer the community under the offers sections, and any requests you have in the requests column,” they wrote.
The Middlebury Mutual Aid Spreadsheet circulated through social media, and within 24 hours, it was filled with responses from students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members from the surrounding town of Middlebury.
They offered each other rides to the airport in Burlington, or the Amtrak station in Port Henry. They arranged carpools to Boston, New York City, Philadelphia. Mike Roy, the dean of library and information services, volunteered his barn for storage space. They listed their spare rooms, air mattresses, couches and futons. They offered up food, healthcare supplies and emotional support.
“I have a car and as of now am staying on campus, so if you need help transporting things to storage or a ride to the airport let me know!” wrote one student.
“My wife, Pat, and I are healthy seventysomethings living in Middlebury,” wrote a local resident. “We have two bedrooms available in our home and are able to provide transportation support as necessary.”
“Is it your birthday while stuck on campus?” wrote Stacie Marshall, a staff member. “I will bake you a (mini) cake!”
Middlebury College itself eventually began to offer more resources, like financial assistance for low-income students’ travel arrangements. “Institutions can’t move fast enough to respond right away,” said Taranta. “They’re large and slow and bureaucratic. In the first couple of days, it was just student organizers and community relationships that stepped up.”
As schools continue to close, some have followed the same model of mutual aid, including Wesleyan College and Tufts University.
By now, most students have returned to their homes. For Taranta and others, however, the mutual aid effort has only just begun.
“Students have been vulnerable as they face these surprise evictions,” said Taranta. “But there’s also this reality that we are the least at-risk in terms of the actual virus, unless we’re immunocompromised. So having received all this amazing support, there’s this desire to give back to the communities that helped us. What can young people do that might be dangerous for older people to do?”
As the coronavirus continues to spread, policymakers and medical professionals have exhorted the public to practice social distancing – remove themselves as potential vectors for Covid-19 by limiting their interactions with others. This is the premise: for the sake of protecting those vulnerable, the elderly and the immunocompromised, everyone must sacrifice. Cancel your dates and your dinner parties, your weddings and your funerals. Remain indoors, mitigate the pandemic.
But many people are ready to contribute even more.
Walela Nehanda is a community organizer and poet based in South Los Angeles. Nehanda has advanced stage leukemia, and regularly uses a particular Lysol spray to disinfect surfaces. When panic-buying emptied store shelves, Nehanda’s partner spent days searching for the spray.
“It was sold out everywhere in Los Angeles,” said Nehanda.
Nehanda, who uses they/them pronouns, has been using social media to find a match for a bone marrow transplant. When they feared they wouldn’t be able to find disinfectant spray, they turned to Twitter.
“Within 10 minutes,” they said, two people volunteered to send them Lysol. “Even after I said my needs were met, people were still offering to help me.”
Realizing that others might be in similar situations, Nehanda started a Twitter thread where immunocompromised people listed what they needed, and people with access to disinfectant products volunteered to send them out.
“The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Nehanda, who eventually created a Google document to organize it all. Nearly 200 people from across the US and Canada signed up to mail out soap, face masks and hand sanitizer. Even more offered to make local food deliveries and run errands.
“I’m really proud of how self-motivated some people are to really ensure everyone is OK, and be committed to practicing mutual aid in real life in their own communities,” said Nehanda.
Mutual aid is a concept in organization theory, based on the late-19th-century anarchist writings of Russian economist and sociologist Peter Kropotkin. It describes people providing each other support, whether through resources or services, for the sake of mutual benefit. The hallmark of mutual aid is that aid flows horizontally – between peers, colleagues, community members – rather than from the top-down, as it would from a government, major charity or other institutional program to those in need.
It is fitting that mutual aid is rooted in anarchist theory: typically, in times of crisis, war, or natural disaster, when institutions begin to fail, human altruism comes to the forefront.
After the 2017 Mexico City earthquake, civilians organized brigades to move broken pieces of rubble, and volunteers directed traffic. In 2011, in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, a group of 200 Japanese elderly volunteered themselves to work to stabilize the nuclear plant, citing their likelihood to die of other causes before cancer from radiation exposure.
Even in the US, a nation characterized by individualism, disasters have had a tendency to beget altruism. John Abruzzo, a quadriplegic accountant, was working in the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks. His co-workers took turns carrying him to safety down 69 flights of stairs.
For some populations, of course, the disaster is constant. For many marginalized and vulnerable demographics, crisis only exacerbates already-dire circumstances.
As the threat of Covid-19 looms, many sex workers have seen drastic decreases in business.
“Any time the demand for services is really low, and people are pushed into a place of financial desperation, some clients will take advantage of that,” said Molly Simmons, a sex worker and activist based in Brooklyn. “They’ll ask people to cross boundaries they’re not comfortable with, perform services in unsafe areas, lower their prices. So people find themselves taking more risks because work is scarce.”
To compound the problem, sex workers are often unable to access social services. Sex work is largely a cash industry, and workers often struggle to open bank accounts or obtain health insurance. Some have criminal records. Some are migrant workers without documentation. They generally do not have paid sick leave.
“I don’t have a paystub to show anyone,” said Fera Lorde, another Brooklyn-based sex worker and activist. “I can’t prove to a bureaucracy that I’m poor.”
Simmons and Lorde are representatives at the Brooklyn chapter of the Sex Worker Outreach Project, a social justice network dedicated to the rights of sex workers. To support their community, they started a GoFundMe to raise an emergency relief fund for sex workers in New York.
Many of the donors are other sex workers.
“We’re always spreading the wealth around,” said Lorde. “Whenever we’re flush, we help each other out.”
For Taranta, mutual aid is the path forward – not just for this crisis, but for the next one.
“We’re about to face all these collapses,” said Taranta. “With the economy, and with climate change. We need to have these systems ready.”
