University of Minnesota's 4th Annual Thinking Spatially Symposium
In the days following George Floyd’s murder on Monday, May 25th 2020, demands for justice led by our Minneapolis community sparked worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Amid the uprisings, grocery stores and other critical infrastructure were impacted. Social media platforms were overwhelmed with information and urgent needs from the community, but these calls were often lost in a flood of other posts. To address confusion about which stores were open and which were closed, volunteer community members thought of making a public spreadsheet so people could get clear and accurate information.
On the evening of Friday, May 29th, one of our community members posted to Facebook asking for people to help populate the spreadsheet. They continued recruiting through the night and our scrappy team began to form. By the next morning, we had about 40 people on board making calls and entering data, and the Store Status Map was born. We updated this map based on community-driven data - and it worked. This first map provided crucial information about which stores were open and when.
The following day, we were asked to do the same thing, but this time for resource distribution and mutual aid sites that were cropping up across the metro. While some sites were being overwhelmed with goods, others were in desperate need. Listening to feedback from community members, we decided a Mutual Aid Map could help streamline efforts across the city. That’s when we recruited developers. Within two days of the initial call to action, TCMAP was a thriving project built on well-known tools - Google Sheets, Google My Maps, email, Facebook Pages, and more. But the initial tools didn’t refresh the map automatically and led to stale data on the site. The first developers to join the group worked through the night of May 30th to stand up a custom web application that used the Google Sheets API to display the current data on the map.
In the first three weeks of the map’s life, the project grew at an unbelievable pace. By the end of the Mutual Aid Map’s first week, we had a volunteer force of more than 100 people organizing in a TCMAP slack channel, plus a group of open-source developers who had found the project through GitHub or local civic hacking groups. We developed a multi-team structure, including direct outreach volunteers who worked with sites, learned their needs, and communicated back; and data entry volunteers who managed the Google Sheets with all the sites’ details. The map was being shared all over, and media roundups of ways to help routinely linked to TCMAP.
At first, data entry volunteers were overwhelmed by constant traffic—the minute we addressed one facebook DM from a resource site or on-the-ground volunteer, we received six more. In the beginning, we had almost 1.1-thousand hits per hour. We had overlapping shifts of multiple volunteer teams working literally around the clock for weeks and still could not keep up with the information load.
Over time, though, the general public’s sense of urgency faded, and attention to the site waned. The media moved on, and aid sites saw a dramatic decrease in donation traffic. “Out of sight, out of mind” is often human nature. We see spikes in site traffic and demand for information - both to give and receive - immediately following violent and tragic events that capture public attention, but there is a direct correlation between the magnitude of these spikes and the amount of media coverage surrounding the event. For instance, there was a 372% increase in site views in the week following the murder of Daunte Wright compared to the previous week, yet other violent events, such as the murder of Dolal Idd, which received less publicity saw far smaller site traffic increases. Regardless of cyclical decreases in visibility and awareness, however, our community’s needs persist relentlessly in the shadow of ongoing resource insecurity, COVID-19, the aftermath of the Uprising, and continued state violence at the hands of law enforcement. Because of this, we continue to be a hub that catalogs ongoing resource needs and availability throughout the Twin Cities.
As the number of sites grew we had to evaluate the technology used to support the map. We moved away from Google Sheets and currently use Airtable database to store site details. Volunteers update site information in Airtable and those updates get reflected on the website using Mapbox, a customizable mapping and location platform, to display sites located throughout Twin Cities communities. As of September 19, 2021, there are more than 380 resource sites represented on the map. And at one point we had close to 550 sites.
Since TCMAP was created to be in service to the community, we have an obligation to listen and make improvements to our data and the map based on community advice and feedback – not just around the quality of our information or the immediacy of our updates, but also how the map functions as a resource. Many of our added features have come directly from community requests, such as noting which sites do not require Identification or marking nearest public transit options. These requests often occur through communication via social media and through conversations we have with people in our day-to-day lives.
As the map has evolved, so has the picture of need in our communities. This allowed us to create focused visibility and awareness campaigns through community outreach in 2020, including paying translators so the map and outreach flyers could be offered in over 10 distinct languages. Other than very specific asks like for translators, we decided not to accept funds as an organization (in the beginning, these were offered fairly frequently). As a collective that was growing at a dizzying pace we talked extensively about whether pursuing 501c3 status or a relationship with a fiscal agent was in line with our principles and mission. We did not want to be financially dependent on institutions invested in the charity model of resource distribution. Mutual Aid principles value solidarity, not charity. Charity practices involve resourced, privileged, or state-originated programs and people making decisions about the provision of support to under-resourced people. Determinations are made about who gets services, what the eligibility requirements are, and what people need to do to maintain services. Tracking the requirements imposed by traditional nonprofits and social service organizations showed us the ways in which government and charity frameworks legitimize certain kinds of needs and certain dimensions of identity while invalidating others. Mutual aid rejects the notion that anyone can make determinations about the survival and humanity of others, which is a crucial perspective in a system built upon white supremacy and social hierarchy, where people’s race, gender, and socioeconomic status are huge determinants of people’s survivability.
As we developed as a collective, we clarified and defined our values as community members navigating social and political crises. Our collective believes that mutual aid means creating networks of freely given assistance and shared resources in order to make us all stronger and safer. For us, supporting mutual aid means building connections with and between existing resource sites and mutual aid networks to create pathways for resource redistribution. We approach our work as a form of reciprocal care. TCMAP supports interdependent communities that collaboratively work towards an equitable future. We actively solicit the input and involvement of people with a range of perspectives and wisdom from many backgrounds. We succeed when we work in community with one another. We listen to the community’s expressed needs and welcome criticism, concerns, and new ideas. Recognizing we will make mistakes, we’re committed to continuous evolution. We are not a front-line project and we exist behind the scenes to offer support — not take the spotlight.
However, these lessons are not new. One of the most famous examples of community care practices in the US is the Black Panther Party’s survival programs of the 60s and 70s. These programs included a free breakfast program, free clinics, rides for elderly people doing errands, and more. We see similar actions occurring across historical and present-day Indigenous practices, labor movements… fights for liberation.
After a year of rapid development and collective burn-out, TCMAP shifted to a small group of 12 volunteers updating the map on a nightly basis. We formed out of crises and from that crisis, we learned many lessons about mapping resource networks, prioritizing public need over private interest, and the sustainability of mutual aid in practice. When you map grassroots resource networks, like supply depots, encampment support services, transportation aid, alongside other state/city infrastructure like metro transit, social service organizations, state-sponsored housing services, you can better visualize where social services provided by the local government are meeting population needs, where they are failing to meet needs, and where community-driven aid networks are filling the gaps.
Documenting landscapes and neighborhoods that are built along lines of mutuality, community, and care, rather than lines of district/county/neighborhood/zip code empowers community development and redefines urban spaces that have been historically shaped by racist urban policy (i.e., redlining, racial covenants, restrictive zoning).
We’ve learned this throughout history and we are directly learning now that mutual aid altogether is in conflict with the state capital apparatus because mutual aid projects and ensuring community members have a voice in their own survival are often against the interests of those who do not need its services, who are oftentimes those who make policy decisions. When there are mutual aid sites that are producing goods like vegetables through garden space – when these sites interrupt the local capital flow, it is in conflict with the state capital apparatus. This conflict at times puts you in opposition to the police because the police are a kind of enforcers of property value, you are not only in conflict with the agents of direct state violence, but you are in conflict with the more passive economic violence of the circumstances that lead to the need for mutual aid in the first place.
So how does this relate to interactive mapping? Mutual aid in practice is often under-resourced individuals supporting each other, which is a part of what makes it difficult to sustain; however, when those involved in mutual aid are in community together, there is a sort of epistemic advantage. They are receivers of the services they distribute, they see the harms, and they directly witness where services are needed. This is a kind of data collection that data analysts, academic researchers, legislators, and geographers don’t always make use of – it is a missing and undervalued almost ethnographic approach.
Creating these open-source and participatory maps shaped by public need rather than private interest pushes back against the power relations that can be embedded in historical mapmaking processes and actively decolonizes how we view urban space. There has been much literature written about the colonial histories of mapping and the ways in which maps have been used to enforce boundaries, xenophobia, environmental racism, and imperial ideas of property. Mapping visibilizes: and when it’s just one creator, mapping can visibilize their singular vision. In creating a map that grew from community voices, offerings, and needs, we are able to see much more about the ways that we and our neighbors experience the cities.
Shaping the map based on public need, we are able to provide more information about sites (nearby transit lines, whether they require ID or other forms of identification, etc.). Listing detailed information on the map empowers map users to truly have a choice in their destination: their participation in resource acceptance or distribution can be voluntary because they’re given the tools to make an informed decision about where they want to go and what they’ll experience when they’re there.
So, what can we learn from stories like TCMAP? Because TCMAP is not a success story. It is a story of state violence, of community trauma and crisis, of navigating the costs of labor. And it is a story about building a collective and a community that isn’t beholden to charity metrics and ideas of “measurable impact”. There is no happy story here about how good and sustainable support structures can be … there can be no such story when the institutions responsible for providing such structures are indifferent or hostile to the people who need them and the people who implement them, which is where we were. And where we largely still are.
And, this is inherently labor-intensive work. The resources required to make it successful in the long run are extremely difficult for the people who show up to provide, especially as the machine grinds on, violently “back to normal”, as people resume other work and the expectations of one’s day-to-day labor capacity increases.
There are many things that we have failed at. Feedback about the app often came mostly from people with more access (to systems/time/resources), we didn’t have the resources or focus as a collective to get more in-depth feedback to drive the site’s offerings more directly from the needs and wants of people seeking aid vs. others (e.g. people wanting to give aid were the most vocal users initially). Collecting and entering data that are inherently ad-hoc, interpersonal, and rapidly evolving is demanding and time-intensive. There are fundamental challenges of a tool designed to support people with less access that is reliant on internet access.
So how can we radically rethink support for community-based and led organizations that don’t fit into and/or radically challenge existing resource distribution models and mapping practices? It’s impossible to imagine a crisis in which mutual aid efforts are not needed. So if we really care about having policies and institutional practices that are supportive of work like TCMAP, it’s worth asking how resources can be directed to the organizations doing the work without requiring them to transform into something that fits the structures that produced the need for them in the first place.
If we think of TCMAP as a case study rather than a success story, we see that it makes the case for a paradigm change. Because social justice efforts are always happening, everywhere. We did not make a single aid site come into existence. All we did was make the effort to find, amplify, and make more accessible the information about resources that already existed in the community, and attempt to direct more resources to them.
There is always more work to be done in terms of discovering, resourcing, and visibilizing existing networks of aid. Because mutual aid is not a short-term solution as the barriers that systemically ignore and deprive communities are not short-term. As community members, we need to push harder against the failed structures that currently exist. We need perpetual advocacy for the value of, the need for, and the long-term availability of not only mutual aid but the direct action of including our neighbors in the sourcing of knowledge. By doing so, we can actively shift the concentration of power where power is concentrated—from boards of directors and philanthropic organizations to neighbors and elders, and youth. Ensuring that those receiving services have a seat at the table can create a system that includes rather than excludes our most structurally marginalized neighbors.
So I end this presentation to ask: what would it look like if instead of imposing those same failed structures researchers, geographers, urban planners went in with the idea that their job was to amplify existing place-based solutions and community voices? What would it look like?