VTDigger: Many Vermont mutual aid efforts born during Covid-19 continue their work
This story about the Free Food for Families program of the People’s Kitchen titled “Many Vermont mutual aid efforts born during Covid-19 continue their work” by Olivia Q. Pintair was published on December 10, 2023. '
To quote the article:
In 2020, 50 new grassroots mutual aid groups emerged across Vermont. Since then, many of those networks have lost momentum, due mostly to lack of volunteers, a recent survey by VTDigger found. Others have steadily persisted, responding to ongoing needs for food, shelter and community.
Toward the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, one thing was made quickly and strikingly clear: To survive a crisis, people need each other. For the thousands of Vermonters who helped galvanize a swell of grassroots mutual aid efforts that year, that was a reality worth acting upon.
“Once the pandemic started, the need for food and meals just went way up,” said FaRied Munarsyah, a member of the People’s Kitchen, [a] mutual aid group that has distributed weekly free meals in Burlington since 2012. “The world was ending, but we were thriving. I don’t know what that means for the world we’re living in.”
On Nov. 4, at a rally in Battery Park in support of a cease-fire in Gaza, Burlington resident Nour El-Naboulsi, of the People’s Farmstand, spoke about his relationship to mutual aid as a Palestinian American.
“(At the People’s Farmstand,) we want to show our refugee neighbors, our neighbors of color, our houseless neighbors, our queer neighbors, that you are welcome here and you are loved,” El-Naboulsi said, standing on a stage before about 1,200 protesters, to the left of a People’s Kitchen pop-up.
“As a Palestinian, I’ve felt alone and out of place my whole life,” El-Naboulsi said. “To see my community come out in support like this helps me get out of bed in the morning.”
Lydia Diamond, another longtime organizer with the People’s Kitchen, was one of the children who received breakfast from the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program — one of the most famous and large-scale examples of mutual aid — as a kid growing up in Brooklyn.
Now, Diamond carries on that legacy each week while distributing food at South Meadow and Baird Street in Burlington.
“Food insecurity was one of the things that people struggled with immensely during the pandemic, and it hasn’t changed,” Diamond said in June. “I love to invite folks to come and hang out with us and see what we do. … It’s a mutual aid of love as well.”
Traditions of mutual aid — such as barn-raising, communal haying and responding to snowstorms — have existed in rural Vermont for a long time, according to Reddy. “Practices of mutual aid (have the potential to) transcend political divisions, which are themselves fomented and utilized by (structures of) power to undermine the power of the grassroots,” Reddy said.
As Reddy, Wayland and several other organizers put it, the outpouring of mutual aid that the pandemic catalyzed in Vermont tended to people’s visceral and immediate needs for food, housing and connection.
Simultaneously, they said, it did — and continues to do — something that is far less easy to quantify by compelling thousands of Vermonters to imagine and act upon the idea that our social ecosystems can and should be different.
“(Our) economic system tries to commodify everything, whether it’s the relationships you have, the content you make (online), or the carbon in the air,” Reddy said. “Mutual aid (posits) a different way of doing things that isn’t based on commodification. I think we’ll need it more as natural disasters or man-made disasters or capitalist-made disasters continue to proliferate.”
