Climate-Informed Mutual Aid
What is Resilience?
Resilience ... has roots in systems theory, and it has a variety of interpretations and applications including for ecosystems management, disaster preparedness, and even community planning. ... Resilience is commonly defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.
What is Resilient Greenfield?
Building Resilience: Resilient Greenfield focuses on building a strong social fabric within the community, so that when challenges arise, people can rely on each other for support.
The Volunteer Clearinghouse: Resilient Greenfield is developing a platform to connect volunteers with organizations in need, making it easier for people to find opportunities and contribute to the community.
Call to Action: Ask how you can help with our contact form.
Flexible volunteering:
Whether we team up for ongoing local projects or short-term or one-time efforts (like cooking a Stone Soup meal, helping resettle Haitian refugees, or removing invasive species), we offer our time, skills and resources to groups that make our community stronger.
Celebratory organizing:
We need more parties and potlucks, not more meetings and Zoom sessions. We will connect regularly and get to know each other -- and also get to the serious organizing work needed.
Aspirational
Inter-generational
Mutual
Local
Action-oriented
Fun
Articles on Cultivating Resilience to the Climate Crisis
Eleanor Gordon-Smith, The Guardian
In this Q & A, the author responds: "Hope isn’t something you have in response to seeing glimmers of good out there. ... It’s also a matter of what you choose to pay attention to, where you spend your mental time. And that – more so than the state of the world – is up to you."
10/3: Grist, Eve Andrews
This story is part of Moral Hazards, a weeklong exploration of the complex — sometimes contradictory — factors that drive our ethical decision-making in the age of global warming.
Discusses the emotional toll that grappling with the climate crisis can take. Communicating this requires a shift from detached analysis to a more empathetic approach. Examples on how to communicate complex emotions and find comfort and solidarity with others.
Simply reporting the bad news does not inspire action. People who are aware of the crisis are more likely to take action than those who are not. The author calls for creative responses to the crisis. Musical performances can be a way to connect with others and build solidarity.
Mitigation:
To reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to limit warming and its impacts. This requires broad-based organizing for systemic change, like the Sunrise Movement or 350 Mass does.
To reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to limit warming and its impacts. This requires broad-based organizing for systemic change, like the Sunrise Movement or 350 Mass does.
Adaptation:
To harden and rework our physical systems to better handle current and future climate impacts, locally and regionally. This requires local will, skill and funding.
To harden and rework our physical systems to better handle current and future climate impacts, locally and regionally. This requires local will, skill and funding.
Resilience:
The ability of our social and ecological systems to withstand the crisis events baked in our earth systems now, even in best cases, and re-organize. This requires: all of us.
The ability of our social and ecological systems to withstand the crisis events baked in our earth systems now, even in best cases, and re-organize. This requires: all of us.
The Adaptation Game
What Does Local Resilience Look Like?
There are amazing Greenfield groups that address Adaptation and Resilience. Just Roots and Stone Soup make our food systems more resilient, sharing the work of sustainable farming, meal production and food distribution. Greening Greenfield, the Greenfield Tree Committee, and the Greenfield Garden Club help us learn about and care for our human and natural environments. The Sustainable Greenfield Implementation Committee, a staff and volunteer partnership, shepherds the adaptation changes called for by our master plan to build a thriving future for Greenfield and beyond.
Civic action groups like these build social bonds for those who participate and those who are helped, whether people, pollinators or public works. We help each other for the joy of it, and because we feel each others' pain.
Covid Pandemic and Resilience
Many of us tasted the power of mutual aid when COVID struck, reaching out to neighbors to walk dogs, buy groceries and lend money, knowing we might be sick next The interpersonal connections we made persisted since then, and we learned a lot about how to do mutual aid better the next time.
When lockdown struck, mutual aid organizations sprang up, inspired by the Medford Somerville model. including our own Western Mass Community Mutual Aid Network (site no longer up). Challenging questions included: how to quickly build capacity to provide skilled help? How to distribute pooled donations to people in need? How to match a coverage area to the capacity of volunteers? How to resolve claims of abuse or neglect, racism or classism? Mutual aid capacity does not arise instantly, and does not scale.
The study at right found that "community-based organizations and networks [build] social capital through mutual aid networks rooted in solidarity, care, and reciprocity and forging new collaborations with government, funders, and service providers."
Resilience and Mutual Aid
MIKE PHILLIPS, Stone Soup Cafe Trustee
I remember what it was like to have no food in the house and how traumatic this was for my family. I witnessed the pain and guilt that my mom lived with as she was forced to choose between meeting rent or feeding her children.
Mutual aid got us through tough times. I remember how relieved I was while playing at a friend's house when their mom would insist that I stay for dinner. Or when we were able to pick up a box of groceries or a hot meal every couple of weeks from a community support group in my hometown. This support made a huge difference for my family. People were looking out for us. I felt seen, valued, and a little more safe.
Degrowth as Resilience
[W]e can get nowhere unless and until there is a very different mentality, keenly aware that growth, affluence and capitalism have to be dumped, and that the answer is to adopt mostly cooperative, self-sufficient, self-governing, frugal, local systems. .. Perhaps the most effective way to do this is to get involved in “prefiguring” alternative ways, building some of the structures and processes the revolution is for, such as cooperatives, community gardens, community owned swap-shops, our own town aged-care arrangements.
from A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement - Ted Trainer
Facebook Groups
The Sustainable Greenfield Implementation Committee and many of our other mutual aid / resilience groups are informed and supported by Facebook Groups. Click the image at left to join Sustainable Greenfield.
Join our Google Group?
Visit the Group Home Page and click contact the group's owners and managers to get added. We'll use this for discussions, notices and file sharing for notes and plans we're working on. You need a Gmail account to edit the files, but any account will get emails.
We can set you up for each email, daily digest, or "no email" (if you'd just like to be able to see the group online and collaborate) - so tell us that when you ask to join. Thanks!