By The snow has been falling for 30+ hours in Denver, and large-scale preparations to protect the city’s unhoused population during this latest winter storm began nearly a week ago.
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However, these plans were not being laid by the Mayor’s office, City Council, nor any department tasked to uphold housing stability or public health. In fact, Mayor Hancock signed off on the heartless eviction of over 100+ unhoused residents in the past week alone.
Instead, these life-saving efforts to distribute tents, blankets, sleeping bags, tarps, hotel rooms, street heaters, survival gear and hot food were organized by Denver’s dauntless mutual aid community. These grassroots support groups are organic alliances of fiercely dedicated friends, comrades and strangers, united by their refusal to sit idly by while the city abuses the most vulnerable among us.
Selfless, unpaid individuals and mutual aid organizations like Kelsang Virya, Comrade Cooperative, The Office of BS and Cats Not Cops held strategy meetings, designed social media campaigns, organized fundraisers, and gathered donations in a matter of days as Winter Storm “Xylia” crept ever closer. This historic weekend blizzard, dropping one of the heaviest snowfalls of the past century in Denver, was not their first rodeo. Two weeks ago, these and other front-range groups hit the streets in subzero weather, where they helped coordinate emergency motel stays for more than 75 people, along with distributing hand warmers, blankets, socks, gloves and hot meals to the city’s encampments.
Mutual aid is far from a new concept—working together to protect your community is a primal instinct—nor is it new to Denver, but these types of collective efforts ebb and flow over time. Last summer, America’s streets boiled over with protesters and pepper spray; for months, community activists marched for George Floyd and Elijah McClain, for black lives, justice, and the right to survive. That hot summer of protest and crisis was followed by an autumn of organizing, and now a bitter winter of saving lives. These humble and unsung heroes of Denver do not seek thanks or praise, but they certainly deserve to have their efforts known.
Monday Night Mutual Aid began last October as the benevolent brainchild of Kelsang Virya, a tireless activist, Buddhist nun and grandparent, and MK Thompson, a fearless fighter and weekly witness to Denver City Council. What began as a small table for distributing coffee and engaging in craftivism (making insulation sleeping pads and street heaters for the unhoused), has rapidly grown into a well-known weekly event with dozens of volunteers that has served hundreds of vulnerable community members.
These evenings (every Monday from 4:30-6:30 at 14th & Bannock) currently double as a donation drop-off and distribution point, but Virya’s future plans include de-escalation and first aid training, as well as a variety of speakers on overdose protocol, unhoused rights, direct action planning and more. These resource-rich evenings are open to housed and unhoused residents alike, and are opportunities to build bridges between these communities, as well as dissolve dangerous stereotypes through connection: “Eventually, we want to empower the unhoused community so they can go into a city council meeting and speak for themselves—to speak of their reality, as equal residents to everyone else in the city,” Virya explains. The unhoused issue in Denver is contentious, to say the least, but Virya believes that changing minds on a large scale must start small—“Regular community members often develop the wrong belief system by believing everything they read…. if they could just come out and speak with some of the unhoused, that would be a key to start changing things.”
Monday nights outside the City and County Building are also the place to link up with Women for the Revolution, a group that formed last August following an ice cream social celebrating the DPD—a tone-deaf event given the violent summer of anti-police protests. After talking to other women and femmes in the activism realm, co-founder Brittney Karst grew tired of hearing about and seeing women’s voices being overshadowed or sidelined. As such, the group’s work began as an effort to “ensure that BIPOC and women’s voices were being amplified in the movement for black liberation.”
Karst and her growing team of volunteers prepare care and hygiene kits, organize hundreds of pounds of clothing donations, plan new craftivism projects, and manage financial donations to cover food and survival supplies for the Monday night events and beyond. In their collaboration with other mutual aid groups, they exchange resources, pool energies and share information, rather than sticking to their own projects. According to Karst, Monday nights were initially a collection of separate groups, but those lines have blurred, or even disappeared: “Not getting engulfed in one name or group is critical; when you can have fluid partnerships, then you can legitimately work together and keep growing the network.”
When it comes to growing a powerful network of mutual aid support, Comrade Cooperative has learned a lot, and made a serious impact for those in need. In the past few weeks alone, their widespread fundraising efforts and direct distribution of survival gear to the unhoused community has saved untold lives, but their roots run deeper. Last November, co-founders El and Olive rallied friends to serve 439 Thanksgiving meals to community members; after receiving such an unexpected outpouring of support, the pair saw their own potential as organizers, and Comrade Co-op was born. What began with bringing homemade burritos to weekly sweeps has grown into a city-spanning, food-centered collective with 20+ regular volunteers distributing hundreds of hot meals every week.
The group recently hosted its first cookout, in conjunction with Little Read Books, creating an outdoor space for different communities to connect over a meal in the sun. El sums up their guiding philosophy well: “Hot food drives mutual aid, but it’s also about sharing a meal. Loving and caring and cooking a meal with people is so important. Growing food for people is an even deeper level of support and connection.”
In line with that ideal, Comrade Co-op will be planting seeds in the coming weeks for a new community project: a pay-what-you-will Gardener’s Market to serve a major food desert in the Swansea/Montbello area. This communal market will overflow with fresh produce grown in the home gardens of local volunteers, as opposed to other farmer’s markets in town, with stalls often hawking secondary products at Sunday brunch markups. The Co-op hopes this will become a monthly event in 2021, a festival-style celebration of community, food, and knowledge-sharing, complete with workshops and live music. When asked whether a day would come when mutual aid efforts like this would become obsolete, Olive’s answer is striking: “Mutual aid is one of the most anti-capitalist things you can do, but it only exists in a society where people aren’t provided for.”
Though mutual aid has swelled in the face of a Colorado winter, networks of solidarity and support for the city’s unhoused have been evolving since last summer. Tania of Denver Freedom Skool—a community education and empowerment group—explains the shift that occurred back in July. “Around the time of the Lincoln Park sweep, a group of us decided to learn the laws of [these actions], so our first class was about the legality of occupation.”
Since then, DFS has organized many BIPOC-led classes on subjects ranging from tenant-organizing efforts and self-care practices to restorative justice documentary screenings and courses on responsible firearm practices. “Younger folks were engaged all summer, but things naturally evolved into education. Direct action tends to slow down in the winter, and we started doing Zoom meetings because of the pandemic. This made it easier to reach different folks, as well as access speakers and unique resources.” Camille, another key advocate and activist from Denver Freedom Skool, sees their long-term goal as creating systems of care and levels of knowledge that exceed what the current system can offer. In her eyes, the first step towards that is education, being in community with one another, and providing the “tools of conversation towards liberation”.
Like many of Denver’s mutual aid groups, Help On Every Street (H.O.E.S.) began as friends attending last year’s protests and doing front-line work, before shifting to supporting the unhoused as the city ramped up sweeps throughout 2020. Dani and Mo, two of the founding crew, then set out to create a predominantly queer group where discussions around intersectionality and social justice would be more readily embraced. Their first donation drive was held back in September, and while their efforts have primarily centered around feeding and clothing the food-insecure or unhoused, they also want to “evolve with the times and needs of the people.”
Partnering with a legendary local spot like Mutiny Info Cafe as a drop-off point, H.O.E.S. is clearly interested in solidarity, not charity. Actions of solidarity not only provide relief to those in need, but also push back on, defund, or dismantle the systems creating such oppressive conditions, a critical step that traditional charity work rarely takes. As Dani explains, “The goal is to shift the systems entirely so these needs don’t need to be addressed like an emergency all the time… a lot of the push towards change happens when we partner with other groups. That type of behind-the-scenes work is how we impact things on a much larger scale.”
Given the confluence of crises facing Denver and its most vulnerable populations, anything less than the pursuit of large-scale change seems criminally negligent. Yet, with no sign of any epiphany or progress from Mayor Hancock, the mutual aid community will continue to show up, in support and defense, with empathy and outrage, honoring a mantra: We take care of us.
The snow is still swirling madly outside, piling into drifts taller than a tent. I think of the two sweeps scheduled to begin in less than 48 hours, and weigh the odds of the city cancelling such wanton cruelty on the heels of this latest storm.
Even those who choose to shy away from the issue of homelessness cannot deny that a blizzard will have traumatic and potentially deadly consequences for the unhoused of this city. We should also remember that the human toll of Denver’s housing crisis would be far greater without the efforts of community advocates and activists, of socialists and Buddhist nuns, of anarchists, gardeners, chefs, communists, and mutual aid warriors uplifting those who would otherwise be forgotten.
Perhaps it doesn’t take a village to raise a city, but rather to save one.
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