Spokane's Underground Mutual Aid Organizations
Deep dive into the world of underground mutual aid and the community organizers who make it their mission to strengthen a community the city would rather ignore.
Twice a week around 6 pm, Jane and her group are preparing to head out on another outreach. They meet in a predetermined parking lot and begin organizing their cars and supplies. Their trunks are filled with homemade meals, hot water and snacks, and plenty of gear. Before meeting, Jane or someone else in the group stops at the storage unit and fills up their car with tents, blankets and sleeping bags, and all sorts of clothes and personal hygiene materials. There, they have stored month's worth of donated supplies along with gear that has been bought with donations. Even though there are only ever a few pairs of hands, the group works quickly, moving the equipment into the cars that are going out that night. At this point, the routine is practiced, polished. They are organized, but not officially. No one is getting a tax deduction for their donations. In fact, even the business whose parking lot the group is meeting in is not entirely aware of their presence.
In a winter as cold as the winter of 2021-2022, the materials Jane and her group have been able to distribute to the houseless population living in Spokane can make the difference between life and death. The city’s increasing sweeps and the constant usurpation of the belongings of houseless people by law enforcement and other city officials presents a near-sisyphean task for the group and groups like it. The team might distribute dozens of blankets in one night to people living unsheltered in below-zero temperatures, only to find out that many of those same blankets were thrown out during sweeps. The blankets could also have been stolen or lost or have gotten waterlogged and therefore become useless as the cold weather prevents anything from drying until the spring. Shoes could wear out, sweaters get rained on. Jane and her team do the best they can to distribute the necessary resources. The food cooked by volunteer chefs goes quickly, along with the hot water. Despite distributing over a hundred meals a night, at some point, they always run out. Still, the group has increased in numbers throughout the winter and honed its ability to serve the community. “I think support for the houseless community has been strong this winter, and I see it continuing,” says Jane. “I think there’s a lot of work to be done, though.”
On any given night of outreach, the plan might change. Jane and her caravan of packed cars often weave through the streets of downtown, stopping wherever it appears someone might need a meal or a coat. When they do stop for more than a minute or two to help a large group, again they work quickly, but this time with low voices and bowed heads. They are sure to conceal the large bins of shoes and sweaters as best they can as people rifle through them, looking for anything that can keep out the cold.
The group has had problems with police and landlords before. They know that other groups like theirs have too. Landlords and business owners who see congregations of houseless people outside of their property as an eye soar are apt to take action to get the organizers out of their backyard. They might come out and yell or threaten or perhaps they might just call the police. They might be fine with what the organizers are doing in principle, they just don’t want to see it. But of course, everywhere is someone’s backyard, so the team tries not to raise suspicion. The group follows the movements of the unsheltered community, and they know where is getting swept, who is getting uprooted, and where they will go next.
The police have proven no better. They might decide to fine Jane and her crew for blocking a sidewalk or littering or any other number of bum wraps that a cop could think up to put an end to the distribution. They’ve had negative interactions before. They know that, for whatever reason, the police are hostile to their line of work, so they avoid the detection of the city as best they can.
In the summer of 2021, Spokane had one of the longest heat spells in its history, reaching the highest temperature ever recorded. During this time people who were unsheltered were exposed to possibly life-threatening conditions without adequate resources to offset the heatwave’s effects. Although at the time the group was in its infancy, Jane and her team established cooling shelters downtown to provide water and other necessities. In the following winter, the cold snap that started in December led the city to set up a temporary shelter in the Spokane Convention Center. This shelter operated until January, but when a similar cold snap occurred later in the year, no shelter was opened. Throughout the season Jane’s group maintained their regular outreach schedule distributing blankets, tents, coats, and other much-needed winter gear as well as hot chocolate and warm meals.
Spokane already has a shortage of low-barrier shelter space. The majority of the shelters and programs in Spokane are high-barrier, demanding sobriety, conversion, or any other requirement to access resources. As the name suggests this places yet another barrier between houseless individuals and resources. Favoring high-barrier shelters places a moral judgment on the person, and it treats houselessness and drug addiction as a moral failing instead of a human issue. It hasn’t worked. As the city doubles down on its policies, other cities around the world are having success experimenting with low-barrier shelters and harm reduction. In November 2021 Mayor Nadine Woodward renovated the shelter on Mission Avenue into the Way Out Center, transforming 100 low-barrier beds into 60 high-barrier beds. In Jan. 2022, during the height of the coldsnap, only 16 beds were in operation*. This lack of low-barrier beds was one of the reasons the city opened the emergency shelter in December 2021. It is in this hostile climate that Jane’s group has continued operating, doing its best to fill in the widening gaps left by the city’s policies.
For over a year now Jane and the group she helped start have been conducting houseless outreach twice a week without a break. They have been careful to operate under the nose of the city, of law enforcement, and of landlords, but that doesn’t mean they are off the city’s radar. In September 2021, the city of Spokane published an article titled “Serving Up a Problem,” targeting its ire at mutual aid groups like Jane’s team. The author spoke condescendingly about the groups, and although the author didn’t impugn the naive benevolence of their motives, he spoke about the effects of the groups work in language that would have been equally appropriate coming out of the mouth of The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns. The article said that these groups were enabling people, making it too easy to be homeless, and said that the groups were creating a new litter problem for the city to clean up. Without knowing it, this was, if not the start, then a powerful shot across the bow in the cold war between the city and the city’s organized mutual aid groups. To the members of these groups, they always knew that the city was never on their side, and especially not on the side of the houseless population, but this was in writing. It was no longer implicit in the actions of the city. The city was now taking aim directly at them, and like all great organizers, Jane and her team used this as a rallying cry.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a flourishing of mutual aid groups in Spokane. What sets these groups apart from the pre-existing non-profit organizations in the area is their focus on direct action, harm reduction, and non-hierarchical democratic decision making as well as their grassroots nature. None of these groups began with grant applications or pre-existing infrastructure, and none of them are registered in any formal capacity. Instead, they were started by primarily young dedicated individuals that set out to create a community around mutual aid. These groups took a DIY approach to community organizing. After moving back to Spokane after college, Jane was able to start her group with a team of friends from high school. “We got here and there wasn’t a single mutual aid group in town,” said Jane. “[...] Probably within three or four weeks of me moving back to Spokane, I was getting on the ground and doing outreach.”
None of this is to imply that the process of starting the group was easy. Jane and her team members spent many hours of unpaid labor creating the organization as it is today. From the outset the team’s goal was to create an organization with a democratic non-hierarchical structure. Even though Jane was there from the beginning, she is eager to remind people that she is not the leader of the group. “I don’t want to call it ‘my project’ because really, it’s not. I did help get it off the ground and it’s something I personally value and take a lot of responsibility for. So, I get why it’d be called that. I really don’t feel like a leader in that group and I just feel like a member, like anyone else.” This model has not been without strife, but it creates an environment in which any individual can take on as large of a role as they desire. Members are able to change roles without obligation or bureaucracy, and they are able to steer the group according to each individual's vision. In this way the group allows itself to change and adapt. “It’s not going to be a smooth process,” said Jane. “Whatever you start out to do, you’re not going to finish with that. You need to be okay with that.”
John is a community organizer who spearheads another mutual aid group with a similar mission and scope as Jane’s group. His group also distributes food and resources on a weekly basis and shares a philosophical foundation with Jane’s organization. Instead of viewing other groups in Spokane as competition, the groups work intimately together, sharing resources and manpower. He too shares Jane’s frustration with the city and community and has run into many of the same obstacles. “I think we’re kind of taught to look at houseless people and generally poor folk as lesser,” says John. “It has to do with a lot of propaganda that we see that ‘poor people are dangerous’ and ‘they commit crime.’ But then, we’re never told why that is. We’re never told why poor people are more likely to commit crime. It’s because of systemic issues.”
For the members, working with these groups has always been about the mission of joining and creating a community. When asked what an individual needs to begin a similar organization, Jane said “you really need to have a community that will support you and you need to support yourself,” but it is clear that there is a reciprocal relationship between starting an organization and being part of a community. Although it is necessary to have a core group of dedicated individuals to start, the growth of the group has attracted a community many times larger than the small number of original members. Another member of Jane’s group commented on this growth. “Recently, I feel like my passions for community organizing have really grown my political ideology,” they claim. “[...] my understanding of the world has grown to know that hyperindividualism doesn’t work and I think, ultimately, we each need to take care of each other. No matter what that looks like. Even random strangers need help.”
For these groups, outreach is just one way they are working to foster a community of like-minded individuals in Spokane. “I had to do outreach because I knew that it would connect me here,” said Jane. Her experience working in the group has proven her correct. Spending time with the group it is clear that the connection between members goes far beyond that of coworkers. The creation of this group has created spin-off groups, book clubs, community gardens, bands, and a variety of projects focused on other aspects of community building. Members of Jane’s group have started a community gardening program that will begin in the spring of 2022. For this program community members have volunteered parts of their lawns to be used as land to grow food which will then be used to make warm meals in the fall. This decentralized nature forgoes the need for a large donation of land in one location and it allows the group to avoid wading through the red tape and bureaucracy of working with the city to get the program organized. In addition to the gardening program, the group is organizing pop-up pantries, park cleanups, and public events.
As these groups look to the future, there is reason for optimism. The growth these groups have experienced hints at a strong desire in Spokane for organizations that serve underserved populations while fostering community without the bureaucracy of going through a nonprofit. As Jane’s group expands she is aware that the political viewpoints of members will become more diverse over time. Doing the work that Jane’s group does requires a certain level of disrespect for the city and its institutions, as well as a well-deserved contempt for unreasonable laws and regulations. This is something Jane keeps in mind when she is recruiting new members. “If they’re not fully on board with the radical train yet, that’s okay. Maybe we can get you a little more on board.”
In addition to the growth in members, organizers like John and Jane hope to see new independent groups crop up as time goes on. The existence of these groups shows that it is possible to create grass roots organizations that can function self sufficiently and have a large impact on the community. “As far as DIY community organizing, it is truly something that anyone can do,” says Jane. “We’re taught to not recognize that or think about it because it is really dangerous to the system when we start doing that. I would like to see more people form small groups, more people specialize in a certain thing they care about, and more people just do actions because you can.”
* https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/jan/16/whats-straining-spokanes-homeless-shelter-capacity/