A few years ago, I started volunteering with my neighborhood mutual aid organization, LA Street Care. Every Sunday, the group hands out meals, water, harm reduction supplies, and hygiene kits to the unhoused neighbors in our surrounding neighborhoods. Sometimes we give out clothes, tents, sleeping bags, pet food, or other things that people request and that we can buy.

I join about one or two Sundays a month. I usually take one of the routes around Los Feliz and Silverlake. And a few times I have tabled at one of the encampments.

After the LA fires in January, neighborhood groups sprang into action, collecting clothes, diapers, water, granola bars, toothbrushes, for people who had lost their homes. Neighborhood bookstores set up collection boxes. In front of every school and local business accepting donations for distribution, there were lines a block long of people showing up to donate and volunteer their time. The entire Santa Anita Racetrack turned into a giant hub of clothing sorting and distribution, powered completely by volunteers.

Disaster movies would have us believe that catastrophes awaken our selfish and violent tendencies. In this Hobbesian view of the world, once an earthquake or storm or the zombie apocalypse strikes, everyone’s gonna be running through the streets with guns, fighting over the last scraps of food. However, there is research to suggest that people tend to help each other when the world falls apart. That instinct to help each other is where organizing begins.

Dean Spade’s book Mutual Aid gave me a deeper understanding of the radical potential of mutual aid networks. It’s a practice that differs from charity because of its emphasis on organizing, building and strengthening networks of community care.

Mutual aid work plays an immediate role in helping us get through crises, but it also has the potential to build the skills and capacities we need for an entirely new way of living at a moment when we must transform our society or face intensive, uneven suffering followed by species extinction.

—Dean Spade, Mutual Aid

No matter where you live, chances are there is a local mutual aid group you can get involved in. Maybe it’s Food Not Bombs, or a group that delivers food and water to unsheltered people in your neighborhood. And if there isn’t one, you can start one! Even if it’s just two or three people. As the world feels more and more overwhelming every day, I highly recommend just doing something.