Each Monday and Friday morning, volunteers from East Village Mutual Aid set up a care table to provide food, coffee, cigarettes, Narcan, and toiletries in the center of Tompkins Square Park for unhoused residents and community members who are in need of supplies. But the group’s organizing reaches far beyond their table. What began as a fundraising effort for protesters during the summer of 2020 has grown into a “network of neighbors” that helps and supports each other.
Caroline, a third-year fine arts student at Parsons, started the group to provide bail support for those who were arrested during protests after George Floyd’s death. Amid the growing awareness of mutual aid that followed the protests that summer, they decided to continue an East Village-centered version of that directly funneled aid. The current team, a core group of usually seven young adults, has since focused their attention on supporting their neighbors “in any ways that the city or state fails to,” said Zero, an organizer for East Village Mutual Aid and former New School student, who also prefers to go by one name. “Whether it’s housing insecurity, food insecurity or violence.”
In addition to food and harm reduction supplies, the group also gathers and passes out warm clothing, sleeping bags, coats, and other necessary supplies for survival to around 50 people each week. Outside volunteers and older residents from the neighborhood also donate groceries to the table.
But one form of support that they focus on does not hold monetary value: companionship. What makes East Village Mutual Aid a community-centered group is their genuine neighborly relationship to those in need of support around them. The “most basic and simple” form of care they offer is conversation and someone to listen to their voices as underserved people.
This effort, among other things, comes with emotional exhaustion for the volunteers. The New York City Department of Homeless Services reports that on Dec. 13 there were over 45,000 homeless individuals sleeping in shelters throughout the city, not accounting for the number who are on the street. Consisting of college students and young adults who have outside jobs, the group often has to check in with each other and themselves to judge how much they can take on.
“Something we always talk about is gauging your capacity,” Zero said. Interacting on the ground with people facing disparity takes an emotional toll, especially when outside forces complicate the work they do.
Last month, Tompkins Square Park began encountering more frequent and intense sanitation sweeps by the Department of Sanitation. While in some instances, the department simply requests for unhoused residents to “clean up,” others result in eviction of encampments and the disposal of belongings. After fundraising to provide many park residents with winter wear, sleeping bags and tents, East Village Mutual Aid watched the department throw most of it away.
The group’s physical presence during sweeps not only provides witnesses to the events, which often happen as early as 4 a.m., but can also help mediate the way that the Department of Sanitation and NYPD interact with the residents by communicating about what the unhoused residents are being asked to do.
“That’s a threat to the work that we do, but also to the lives of these people that are having their stuff thrown away,” Zero said.
The group functions financially off of minimal donations from social media requests on Instagram and a handful of small donors, most of whom are college students. The leaders hope to reach a more financially abundant demographic of people willing to fund their distribution in the future.
“I feel like mutual aid in this city is the same $15 getting passed around,” Zero said. “It’s good to see people redistributing their wealth, but that being said, I would love to see us and other groups tapping into wealthier, older people.”
While money is useful, especially in emergencies like evictions, one of the group’s goals is to reduce a reliance on the exchange of money to be able to provide care. They search for ways to source support for their community through pre-existing, locally donated goods like secondhand coat collecting, lunches from local schools and coffee from the Boris & Horton Cafe in East Village.
The same goes for what outsiders who want to lend a helping hand can offer. Beyond donating money, the group is in need of people with sewing skills and cooking skills, as well as people who can run errands and organize collected items. They are currently working on creating a volunteer agreement as a form of orientation for those who want to volunteer, as they have a range of jobs for newcomers.
Though still a small group, East Village Mutual Aid serves as an example of what mutual aid can do through the power of networking, social media, and commitment to the specific needs of survival. With the donations collected following recent sweeps, the group purchased a storage unit to offer space for unhoused residents to store their belongings instead of facing having them thrown away.
In addition to continuing to run their care table and facilitating outreach to other neighborhoods, the group is supporting the creation of a homeless union in New York, which would allow homeless residents to represent themselves rather than being spoken for. The group finds more value in doing what they can to provide a platform for those they serve than trying to speak for them, as individuals who do not face the same disparities. To do so, the volunteers at East Village Mutual Aid are using their network to find social workers who align with their mission and can tap into resources like access to the internet, sources of government income and more.
“I think our group is great, but at the end of the day we all have homes to go back to,” Zero said.
Outside of their current followers, the group hopes to see more of a cultural shift toward understanding mutual aid in the coming years with more people listening to and serving the urgent needs of their communities. In the meantime, each day they will continue to show up with meals, networked resources, and perhaps most importantly, open ears.