Common Humanity Collective and the Politics of Mutual Aid, Part 2

In part 2 of our interview with Genean and Abrar from Common Humanity Collective we discuss building deep rooted and resilient organizations and how mutual aid transforms the people and communities involved in ways more powerful than electoral organizing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome. It could Happen Here podcast about things falling apart
and about how we can put them back together in
a way better than they originally were. And today we're
going to continue our interview with Janina Abrar from the
Common Humanity Collective. We've been talking about their work. We've
been talking about the origin of the mutual aid products.
We've been talking specifically about the political aspect of their

(00:25):
work and how they're reading this sort of anarchists. The
history of anarchist struggle in Spain and particularly vitual agree
in the Spanish Civil War helped impact and shape the
politics and work that they've been doing. One thing I
wanted I wanted to sort of circle back all the
way to from the beginning, was the stuff you've got
you were doing at the very beginning of the pandemic,
because I think that this is I've talked about this

(00:47):
before on here, but you know the difference between a
country like the US where what seven hundreds of people
are dead and places where that didn't happen, was that
your community mobilization. And I talked about this with the
Chinese example, is that, like yeah, I mean like that
the reason that China the pandemic sort of got contained there.

(01:07):
It wasn't because the state stepped in and was like,
we're going to do this. It was because hundreds of
thousands of ordinary people just took to the streets and
we're like, okay, we're doing a lockdown now. And you know,
and it takes a different form in China because you know,
there's there's a lot of different sort of things going
on there, but that kind of mass community mobilization in
the beginning of it's just like it it didn't happen
that much in the US. And I think, like, you know,

(01:29):
the world where we don't all die in the pandemic,
right is the one where the things that you all
were doing happen. I mean, one the way the things
I remember my sister is a bios grad student, and
she was telling me about how, you know, so so
the you know, one of one of the things, one
of the bottlenecks beginning of a pandemic, and it's still
kind of a bottleneck, was it was about being able

(01:50):
to be able to do COVID tests. And you know,
bio grad students can do PCR tests like it's easy.
This is you know, this is the only the first
things they teach you, and that capacity just was never used.
It just it was just sort of left and like
sat there and rotted. And it sat there and rotted
because you know, the actual pandemic response was run by
a state that just didn't care. Any bureaucracy that even

(02:12):
when it did care, was sort of you know, I
didn't have this capacity to mobilize. You know, it's it's
its entire existence is about making sure that sort of
the capacity for a honest moibilization never happens. And I
think that that was one of the most interesting and
powerful parts of what y'all were doing, was that you
just did it and it just it kept spreading. Yeah. No,

(02:33):
I think it's a that's a really good and important
point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before
we started doing any of this stuff with PPE, I
was actually you know, as word as as as the
um uh, the fear of the pandemic started spreading, and
we finally had a picture of what the US would

(02:54):
soon look like. I remember going to a union meeting
among my Spellow Grads student workers and talking some people
afterwards and saying like, hey, um, I don't think that
we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that
we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff, Like,
why don't we just is there any way that we
can just take pc art machines and set up these

(03:16):
little guerrilla operators and start testing people for free? And unfortunately,
one of the things I noticed was that people, you know,
we're just very confused by this idea. They had much
more faith in the state's ability to um assemble these infrastructures,
and I just realized that was not the way in
which I was going to be able to help out.

(03:37):
And so it's it's unfortunate, but a lot of people
have even though they have these instincts for sort of
mutual aid and for this kind of autonomous organized this
stuff lies just below the surface, often they don't feel
actually capable of it. And I think more than anything,
what we've done with this project is we've created a
context and atmosphere in which things which people typically feel

(04:00):
they cannot do they suddenly realize they can do. Again.
It's just to come back to that idea that most
of us, you know, we live our lives, we sell
our labor for wages. A few people who own the
means of production, you know, accumulate profits and use them
to manipulate the state for their own purposes. Um. And

(04:21):
this has an effect on us. I mean, this has
an effect on dulling our consciousness um. And it's an
extraordinary transformation in our social relations, in our sense of
our own individuality when we do realize in these moments
that we can be um subjects. And so unfortunately my

(04:41):
initial to try to stimulate some of this activity around
testing didn't work out. UM. But uh, yeah, it just
presents this recurring problem, which is that people are not
used to doing this kind of work. And Janine and
I have found many many times that you know, people
are willing to come and use their hands and build

(05:02):
something for a few hours. But then what we try
to do is get them involved. We say, come to
the meetings, you have decision making power. You can determine
the trajectory of this work. And that's always a very
very difficult thing to be doing now, given the way
that sort of people have been conditioned um right now.
And I think that's something which is concerning because these

(05:25):
uh traits of subservience and sort of submission I think
are incompatible. If there were a moment of revolutionary rupture.
I'm not sure that that would necessarily lead to any
better sort of society. So I think this stuff is deeply,
deeply important to get people involved in this kind of work.
I just want to go back to one of the

(05:46):
things you said, Like you mentioned the community aspect and
like those relationships, and I think that I know I've
said this so many times, both in like my organizing
space and even on this podcast today, but I truly
have felt like building community is one of them most
powerful ways to organize. And I think so many people
in leftist spaces right now see organizing as like a

(06:06):
place where you just do work UM, and I actually
think that that's a really terrible way to organize. I
don't think that you're gonna have people come back right Like,
I don't think that um, anyone is going to feel empowered.
And you know, kind of through talking to a bra,
I've started reading this book on the Free Women of
Spain and like thinking more about this also, right and
thinking about how they're talking about community building and how

(06:29):
they're talking about like community is believing in each other
and like helping each other realize their full potential UM
and as a way to actually find equity and equality
through like horizontalist structures, through allowing people to reach their
full potential UM And I think, you know, these are
some of the politics that have informed what we're doing,
that have informed how we're trying to allow people to grow.

(06:52):
And so many people have come to us and said,
you know, these mass builds are these air purifier olds
are like the highlight of my week or the highlight
of my month UM or I'm thinking about the like
the way that you're structuring UM your distributions and thinking
about how I can implement that into the work that
we're doing UM And I think that those things are
so powerful when you're able to create these spaces again

(07:15):
where people care for each other, and like you're saying,
that goes a long way towards being able to mobilize
UM when there are disastrous to being able to mobilize
around protests, to being able to mobilize around these ruptures
because you have solidarity that's built through relationships and that
is allowing you to build power. One of the things

(07:45):
that that YouTube a sort of getting it is that
you know, there's it's hard in a lot of ways,
because yeah, I mean, the US has and you baked
into just to every single part of your life is
there's going to be some one who is above you,
who can order you and tell you what to do.
And that's you know, that's that's that's that's the defining
characteristic of life in the United States. And the second

(08:06):
defining characteristic is if you don't do what they tell you,
a person with the gun shows up and either just
beats you or haulds you away, it enslaves you. And
you know that that that has these enormous sort of
psychological consequences that you know, create creates this culture where
people you know, I mean, and that this goes along
with there's there's this whole the skilling process that that's
been a sort of part of the broad arch of

(08:28):
capitalism that you all trying to reverse. But even even yeah,
you know it's talking about even the people who have
the skills just don't sort of they don't believe in
their own autonomy in a way, and that and that
that becomes this incredibly powerful, you know, tool of of
keeping people in line. But when that breaks and when
when people start to see it, it can take time.

(08:50):
But yeah, you know that the the kinds of power
in the depth of the sort of organization that you
build isn't from that is incredible. And I think this
is the only other things about the Spanish example that
people tend to forget, which is that you know, okay,
so that the c n T, which is the sort
of giant cn T f ayes the giants, sort of
u annacrist union that's that's running a lot of this stuff.

(09:10):
You know, they're almost completely destroyed at the drink, like
over the course of the spanis civil war, and there
you know, to distruber the stalents, distruber the fascist and
at the end, by the end of the war, you
know that the fascist control Spain for about forty years.
But even that, you know, I mean, they kill hundreds
of thousands of people, they like, there's massacres is you know,
it turns into literally a fascist police state. But the

(09:34):
moment that, the moment the fascist a tatorship collapses, the
cnt reappears. And they even even in you know, in
seventies Spain, in a place that is in a lot
of ways the industrialized, they still almost overthrow the government
one more time. And you know, I mean they're they're
they're still around the sort of much reduced form to
this day. But I mean, once once you build that

(09:54):
kind of power, right, even you know, even forty years
a fascist a tatorship wasn't an to completely destroy it.
It was you know, it was it was it was
still there, sort of waiting underground, and then the moment
there was a rupture reappears. This is a really important
thing that you're bringing up, Chris, because I think it
has um a lot to do with how we just
measure and talk about success on the left. Um, what

(10:17):
you're describing, which you know, Spain is typically by many
people on the left described as kind of a failed experiment.
Oh it was nice, but it ultimately failed. So let's
look at Russia, you know. Um. But uh, some people
have argued, and I think very correctly, that you can't
put the genie back in the bottle. Once something like
this happens, it's there. Those energies are there, they are

(10:40):
not forgotten, they're not lost, and there's you know, a
very vigorous sort of left wing radical anarchist movement that's
resonant um uh and very sort of consistent with with
the earlier movement. During the thirties, and UM, I think
that's that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about. We

(11:03):
tend to measure these projects in these very sort of linear,
sort of status terms, and we discovered, especially when we
were doing work in d say, that a lot of
people were trying to frame our own project in that way.
You know, what are the demands that you're making, what
are the what pressure are you exerting on the state? Um?
And so there's these criteria that people use to evaluate

(11:24):
kind of the efficacy or success of projects like these,
And the Spanish example tells you, UM that the way
that these things work is in fact much more complicated
and much more interesting UM. And that by assembling these structures,
these organizations, even if at some time or another they
don't necessarily exist anymore, all of those people who participated

(11:45):
in them are transformed, and the people that they interact
with might then also be transformed. And so something like
the c n T, which is, you know, an extraordinary organization,
the f AI is what you know, really gave it
the kind of anarcho syndicalists content that defined the quality
of that revolution UM, that never got lost, that never

(12:05):
went away, even when it seems to have disappeared. Um.
And so I think we have to learn to think
about success and failure um. You know, as we very
simplistically use these terms very very um differently, and this
is something which informs our own work when we're asking
was this successful? Was this not successful? Um? I think
that's a much more difficult and complicated question than we

(12:28):
often make it out to be. Yeah, and I think
there's something very specific about you know, if we can
go into sort of d s A factional politics for
a little bit, but like I think like in some
ways you see the shallowness of a lot of the
approaches that was happening in the d S A where
you know, like if if you if you look at
a lot of how the sort of Medica for All
stuff went or a lot of how the sort of

(12:49):
Bernie campaigning stuff went, right, it was okay, you know,
you have these you have these organizations that are like
a mile wide and inch deep, and it's like, okay,
they're they're capable of mobilizing people to vote one time time,
but you know, then they lose the election and then
what right so that they don't they don't don't they
don't have you know, there's they're supposed to be this
whole thing of like Bernie being an organizer in chief
and this whole sort of plan to use the sort

(13:11):
of lists he developed as organized anthing. It's never happened,
and you know, it didn't happen in a lot of
ways because it was just sort of they they treated
the whole process of building power as essentially a bureacratic exercise. Right,
it's how many people are on this list, how many
people are showing up to stay, like, you know, and
like how how many how many? How many doors have
we knocked on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's just you know,

(13:31):
and that's the that's the other thing you're talking about
with the fact that organizing spaces have to be more
than just another just another place you go to work.
Right is if you know, if if all you're doing
is just replicating these sort of bereocratic things, you're you're
going to watch them fail exactly the same way the
burocracies do. Except you know, you're you're you're not the
American State, you're not the Democratic Party, you don't have
an infinite amount of money or the ability to sort

(13:52):
of you know, you don't. You don't have the ability
to call an arm to enforce what you need to do, right,
You don't. You don't have you do, you don't have
the fallback of bad methods of organizing, which is violence.
And when that happens, you know, and and suddenly and
you can't confront your own failures because you're stuck in this,
things just start to sort of implode, and you start

(14:13):
to lose people, and you start to sort of you know,
you see this sort of stagnation and decline that I think,
you know, talking about, Yeah, we're getting exactly too much
into what's going on in East Bay, Like that's that
that that's been everything I've seen out of it. Yeah,
And I think to go kind of off of what
a bro was talking about to kind of put this
into terms of the work that we've been doing, right,

(14:36):
you know, through the Mask builds um as they were
winding down, we weren't quite sure what our next project was,
and you know, we talked a lot about like how
do we keep this energy going? Like we don't want
to just lose this. And I also felt, you know
a certain amount of social obligation to you know, keep
this community together that had formed during the pandemic, and

(14:57):
so we started a book group kind of in interim
reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, and you know,
had around thirty people show up to that. Um And
I think, as you know, you're talking about the importance
of once you know, these relationships are formed, once these
ideologies start to percolate, that they don't just go away, right.

(15:19):
These people that we you know, brought into d s
A and a lot of ways the d s A
came to join this book group and later came to
join the Air Purifier project despite the fact that it
was more outside of d s A. A lot of
these people, because of you know, what we had built
and what we had created, continued to be such a
huge part and take on incredible leadership roles um and

(15:43):
you know, facilitate this project in a way that it
would not at all look like what it does without,
you know, these people dedicating so much of their time
and energy to this project kind of throughout the process. Yeah,
and Chris, I'm going back to what you're saying earlier.
I think, um M, I've I've seen a very interesting

(16:04):
um A kind of reflection come out of some of
these organizations, and you see these different splits and sort
of uh wings developing. But yeah, I mean I Janine
is a very sort of organic radical and revolutionary who
I've learned an enormous amount from. But I think my

(16:24):
own trajectory was much more characteristic of what you described earlier,
which is that you know, I put all my eggs
in this basket. I thought, Okay, Bernie Sanders, like, that's
that is that is the that is the beginning of
how we undergo a sort of democratic socialist transformation. And then,
you know, in a few snaps of the finger, even
though I had spent just like hundreds of hours just

(16:46):
knocking doors and promising all these things to people who
might you know, vote for him at their door, and
and all this stuff that and and and just sort
of regurgitating all these slogans and and talking, you know,
rapturously about these welfare programs. Um I saw all that
dissolved in a moment, and I realized that I didn't

(17:10):
leave anything behind. And there was you know, in D
S A and our chapter, you saw that there was
a large group of people who just wanted to keep
that flame burning and just say we'll do better next time,
you know, we'll do more work at the local level
to elect representatives. But then there was another group of
people it was much more disillusioned UM and really started

(17:32):
wondering is this what we should be doing, or at
least is this all that we should be doing UM.
And you see the same thing coming out of a
group like Sunrise, which whose primary sort of mandate is
to just put pressure onto Congress UM to urge the
necessity of a green new deal or whatever. And nevertheless,
out of Sunrise we've met people who, after the George

(17:54):
Floyd protests, after the dissolution of the Bernie campaign, have
been led down the same radical path as as some
of us UM found ourselves traveling UM in in East
by d s A. And they're the ones who have
now come to help our project, and you know, using
whatever autonomy they have at the sort of UM hub

(18:17):
level in Sunrise, because even though it's an organization with
sort of paid staff and something of this bureaucracy right
now in this moment, the individual little local hubs actually
have a surprising amount of autonomy and I really hope
they're going to fight for protect that autonomy. So they've
been able to use that autonomy to actually put a
lot of effort toward raise money thousands of dollars for

(18:39):
our work at c h C and come to our
organizer meetings, become a part of the effort, and urge
upon their own um friends and co organizers and and
people they know in Sunrise to shift the direction of
their work of their branches towards doing more work like this.
So there are these kind of interesting parent uh splinterings

(19:02):
that you see happening, which give me some hope that
we're not just going to keep running the same tape
over and over again. So one of the other interviews
we did on this show was with a bunch of
people who were working with the basically this giant effort
in Atlanta to stop this like just atrocious sort of

(19:23):
destruct this destruction of a bunch of forests to create
this like weird teaching cops how to do kinter terrorism,
enormous academy thing that's being funded by like a bunch
of the logic corporations in Atlanta. And they were describing
you know, they didn't talk about sort of the exacting
process of solution, but you know, you saw they were like,
you know, one of the people with the hair was
from Sunrise and they were also talking about how they

(19:46):
pulled together. That's just like enormous coalition of munch of
community groups that was, you know, and like the their
their initial goal was they're trying to pressure the city
council into stopping the into you know, not approving and
that doesn't work. But you know, you know, some of
some of the other groups that were that were involved
in this, we're talking about like, okay, well, you know

(20:06):
that they're planning is like if this fails, we're gonna
go stop it ourselves. And I think that pivot right
is one of the most crucial things that is happening
right now, because you know, okay, if if you, if you,
you know, if if you, if you, you you pull
out your like Polly, your policy like policy space diagrams
right like it's it's the United States. The policy that's
enacted is the one that is the policy is decided

(20:27):
about the sixtieth senator and it's like, okay, so you know,
even even if if even if you're gonna try to
do an electoral thing, right, you need six, you need
sixty votes in the Senate. There is one arguably socialist
senator and we've never elected another one, so you know,
and you're just looking at this right and it's like, okay,
like you know, we we elect like to maybe three

(20:52):
socialists in in the House every year, and if you know,
if you continue at the same rate, they'll be like
what like like two years if we have a majority there,
And it's like yeah, you know, and at a certain
points like yeah, I mean, we're like we're not gonna
be around because we'll be dead, but like most of
most most of the stuff on earth will also not
be around because it will have been obliteral black climate

(21:13):
change there, and you know, and and at some point
you have to get to we're gonna have to do
it ourselves because no one, no one else is going
to do it for us. And I think that the
work you two have been doing is just incredible, is
just an incredible example of how that can actually happen
and what what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah, I
think that it is so important. And I think that
that's one of the reasons that to me, it was
also so important to get all of these groups at

(21:36):
these air purifier pims because I think oftentimes organizing is
so siloed and it really frustrates me. And people seem
very like loyal at least I've found this in East
by d s A to like their particular organization, any
other organization they don't even really want to talk about
or they don't even know still exist UM. And to me, like,

(21:57):
if we can give people the tools to organize, I
don't care who their organizing, UM, but if we can
also like have these groups communicate with each other, right,
Like different groups are doing exactly the same thing. Right.
We have the Ecosocialist Group UM in d s A. Right,
you have Sunrise, you have the I w W, and

(22:17):
then you have the Labor Committee of d s A.
And it's like sometimes there is cross communication, right, But
to me, it never feels like it's quite enough. It
never feels like we're really all working on this or
we're really all in it together. And I think we
really should be, because, like you're saying, like there's kind
of a ticking cloth, we all have a certain amount
of time to actually make the changes that we want
to see. And when we're not willing to actually work

(22:39):
with each other and communicate with each other, things are
not going to happen as quickly, UM, and so being
able to have like, you know, a table of people
assembling purifiers from d S a Sunrise tank, right, and
they're all talking about the organizing work that they're doing
and sharing stories and strategies so that we're not all
constantly reinventing the wheel that I've really working together on.

(23:01):
This I think is so so valuable. And this is
something that we've seen. You know, one of our friends
who's helping lead one of the tank locals has come
to a number of our events and was telling us
how he's actually tried to bring things that he's seen
that we're doing into his own local and we've heard
this in other contexts as well. So things spread and

(23:23):
that's I think a really important thing that um, you know,
especially because of Janine's UM, you know, just just uh
attempts to try to get all these groups together into
one place to communicate, to build relationships. UM. We're now
seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere. And we're

(23:43):
also learning a lot from all these different people in
groups who come to our builds and then become organizers
in the effort. And you know, to mention someone like
you know, Gerald, Jannine referred to earlier, who is this
uh wonderful um Can Tanker is h ex black panther,

(24:04):
you know, who has such an enormous history of experience.
For him to give us that historical perspective for everything
that we're doing um has been an enormous boost of
confidence and it's allowed us to focus and you know,
just to reiterate what she said earlier, we were really
depressed when we went out and we were talking to
people in West Oakland and East Oakland, and everyone was

(24:25):
telling us we're gonna come, Yeah, we'll show up, we'll
be there. And then, you know, while many other people
showed up from Sunrise, DSA, c HD elsewhere, none of
those people showed up. And we said, Gerald, they're not coming.
What's going on? And he said, you know, keep going,
keep trying, keep doing it, do not give up. Do
not judge from that one experience. This is really hard work.

(24:48):
And these people have had the door shot on them
over and over and over again, and they're tired, and
it's the weekend. But you keep doing it and they
will come. And then next time they came, we may
not have gone on there again. Had it not been
for Gerald bringing in this enormous um breath of experience
to share with us. You know, at the end of

(25:08):
our previous bill, there's this there's this quote that I
remember from who it was. It was one of the
one of the people who've been heavily involved in the
Egyptian Revolution. She doesn't eleven had this quote and she's

(25:29):
talking about, you know, I should be doing this for decades, right,
And she's like, yeah, because you have a protest and
if if if a hundred people show up, you're happy,
and if a hundred people show up, you're depressed. And
then one day, eight hundred thousand people show up and
you kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah,
I mean that that is something that you know, Yeah,
you like, organizing is not easy. You're you're gonna spend

(25:50):
a lot of time like not winning. You're gonna spend
a lot of time feeling like you're barely treading water.
There's gonna be a lot of time where you know,
nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart. But
you know, if you keep pushing, people show up and
you know, and suddenly the regime is like taking like
you know, trying trying to catch planes out of the

(26:11):
country and yeah, and you know, and you get to
that that CLR. James line about how the ruling classes
not defeeding until it's ruling, until it's running for its lives.
But you know they do run for their lives. This
is the thing that happens. Yeah, and you know if
if we do this together, we can get there totally.
And I think you know, what a bar saying is

(26:31):
so true. And we also, you know, in doing these distributions,
talk to people and I literally would say, like what
we'll get people to show up? Right, there's kind of
like honesty in these conversations of like you know, this
is what we're trying to do, Like there's a reciprocal
relationship here. Again, like help us understand also like what

(26:51):
we need to do in order to make sure that
the reciprocal relationship is actually realized and actually happening. Um.
And I think that that was kind of an exciting
moment of like having people have a some autonomy and
like say and like you know, they know this community
better than we do, right, they know like how people
are going to show up and how maybe they won't.
But Chris, uh just to bring it back to what

(27:14):
you were saying, I think describing the kind of nonlinear
trajectory of uh popular movements in history is something that
we try to keep always in our minds. Um, things
may begin small, things may seem small, even when you
study the examples in Spain of sort of the groups
of people who formed sort of the early f AI

(27:36):
who were just sort of discussing these ideas around the
fire before they tried to sort of infiltrate the CNT,
and then this became the sort of predominant um mood
and sort of ideology that that that that characterized the CNT,
which then you know, spread out and sort of characterize
the Spanish Revolution at large and massive numbers millions of people,

(27:57):
you know, um, and and just seeing what happened with
the George Floyd protests, and studying the examples of you know,
Paris in where it at first just seems like small
groups of students and then you know, just a few
days and weeks later, you know there's thousands and thousands
and thousands and thousands of workers, um, you know, who
are out literally just pulling out cobblestones from the street,

(28:21):
you know, up against the police and and the way
that these things happen is very unpredictable. And I think
that's also a very important thing to keep in mind
as we're trying to evaluate, you know, what we're doing
in a given moment. Yeah, I think, I think I
think that's that's that's a very good note to end on. It's,
you know, every the the struggle we have embarked into

(28:43):
an incredibly difficult one, and we're not going to know
how it ends for a long long time. But that
doesn't Yeah, you know, that doesn't necessarily means it ends badly.
And the kind of resiliency we can build is incredibly
deep and incredibly powerful. Okay, plugs time, Where do you
too want people to go? What do you want people
to know? And yeah, we can. We can link stuff

(29:07):
if you want to send it to us in the
in the in the chat chat, we can. We can,
we can link stuff. We can, we can, we can
link stuff in the description of this episode. This is
why we have editors. Yeah, um, I think definitely like
our social media so Twitter and Instagram is see humanity,

(29:30):
see um for folks to be able to donate, um,
to visit our website, to be able to plug in.
If they are in the Bay Area and want to
get involved, they can find ways to do that through
those social media channels. You know, they can message us
um and then our fundraiser A Bar. I don't know
if we should just send the link or what The
best way to do that is if you go to
a Common Humanity Collective dot org, there's a donate button

(29:53):
which leads to the fundraisers. You can find it also
also if you if you go there, you can see
how they you can see instructions how to make the
fans and are so cool, like they're awesome, it's it's sweet,
it's so go do go do that too because it's sick.
And there's also instructions for how you can make them
as well. And we hope people do this elsewhere. Please
reach out to us. We want to not be the

(30:15):
only ones doing and so this is why we've tried
to just put everything online that others can replicate this model.
And this is why we're coming on a show like
this and going into so much detail into our history
just that uh, you know, we don't have to keep
reinventing the wheel. I think you know, A Bar and
I have learned so much from this project, UM, and

(30:36):
a lot of it really did feel like reinventing the wheel,
which is unfortunate because I know that, you know, mutually
aid has been done elsewhere, but with the organizers that
we were talking to, a lot of the things that
we were doing, we were having to kind of start
from scratch, and at least my goal is like we're
both very accessible people, like if there are questions, you know,
to be able to reach out so that we can
you know, explain our experience to other folks, UM and

(30:59):
talk through you know, our relationship with Sunrise started because
they heard about the mutual aid work that we were
doing and they said, we want to do that also,
and we're like great, and you know a Bra are
co organizer, Joe and I and this woman from Sunrise
met in a park and eat dinner and just talked
about mutulate, you know, the pitfalls that had happened and
what went well and how we could do it in
the future. And then like this beautiful collaboration began, like

(31:22):
a Bra was talking about so UM, I think, you know,
we're really happy to talk about where things have gone
awry and what we've learned from this project and thankfully
at this point to like what successes we've had. So yeah,
go go everyone, go go go go find them, go
out of your communities, go do this theirselves. And yeah,
go go go get us another Spanish revolution. We need

(31:44):
another one. Yeah, thank you, thank thank you to you
so much for joining us. I said a great Chris,
this has been such an huge pleasure for talking to you.
We've we've been covered by a lot of places, but
never quite Yeah. Just thank you so much for doing
this and thank you such an honor to be here
and so much fun to talk with you both. Thank

(32:06):
you so much for having us. Yea and yeah, so
this is this has been It could Happen Here Pod.
You can find us at Happened Here Pod on Twitter, Instagram,
and at cool Zone for just the rest of the
stuff that we do. All right by everyone. It Could

(32:26):
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. Well
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website pool
zone Media dot com, or check us out on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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updated monthly at cool Zone Media dot com slash sources
thanks for listening.