Our mutual problem
Key points from this article:
-Establish Incident Command System with a hotline that can be advertised on tv and local radio.
-Establish local points of contact or leaders in mutual aid groups
-Establish Leaders in Voluntary sector
-To respond to demands these leaders communicate, allocate and divide tasks taking these back to their local teams.
The voluntary sector has a problem. We will need to provide emergency food, supplies and support for potentially hundreds of thousands of people over the coming weeks. We are all becoming increasingly aware that we need to connect efforts between groups, to turn our facilities into a connected production machine to maximise efficiency. But these conversations are still very young, and need to grow incredibly quickly.
We are witnessing many Foodbanks and other services like Bens center being forced to shut under the pressure. They are run and staffed primarily by older volunteers — the risk is too high for them to continue. Emergency food provision across the city is withering.
Becoming the mutual aid city.
Mutual aid groups have sprung up from the grassroots to take the load. But mapping these groups shows us something water clear. The areas with a high probability of having real need are the very same areas without mutual aid groups. This means there no mutual aid in the areas that need it the most. To be truly mutual, we must look after each another not only at a street by street level but also at the city scale too.
Mutual aid is an evolution of trust and can emerge anywhere that social infrastructure permits. Trust is grown slower in those areas where people are isolated from each other already, it is down to the urban and city planning. People who have helped each other in the past will network to help each other again. Trust doesn’t spring out of thin air instead it builds over time from a series of prior trusted interactions.
To understand more from a game theory perspective see the evolution of trust. This same trust allows us to mobilise and extend our hand more quickly help one another quickly in case of an emergency. People are in need, and it is important we can mobilise effectively around this need, where ever it is in the city.
Not all older people are on facebook
We have an advertising problem. All of these mutual aid groups are online, mostly via facebook. Yet ‘since 2011, adults over the age of 65 years have consistently made up the largest proportion of the adult internet non-users, and over half of all adult internet non-users were over the age of 75’ .
Older people are at high risk and most likely to fall into health problems because of food shortages. Old people consume media differently: they watch TV, listen to the radio because they are adjusted a different age, that of centralised media. Phones (remember those?).
We also have a privacy issue. The facebook groups posts are also very public. People might be embarrassed about very sensitive information stopping requests for help.
Facebook’s event horizon.
Whats more, Facebook seems to have drastically tuned down the reach of all posts mentioning [CV] since Wednesday morning. This is presumably to stop the spread of misinformation after reports that Russian pro-Kremlin media have mounted a “significant disinformation campaign” to aggravate the [CV] pandemic” An EU report published on the same day.
This means that anything that mentions [CV] is finding it difficult to publicise efforts. Hitting a wall in the facebook algorithm. The high reaching content is now restricted to information sources like trusted journalism and news websites. But this poses a very big problem for groups like us trying to get the message out to help.
A trusted medium.
There is an issue of trust and accountability knotted together. A “message is effective only if the receiver is ready for it and if the messenger is identifiable and reliable.” Scammers are rife and if you were already scared and isolated… do you really trust some random flyer posted through your door? The reliability is compromised because people target older people regularly, and they have been repeatedly warned not to fall host to scammers. Flyering is also vast and time intensive so the efforts feel like a drop in the water. With a quarantine impending it feels now like a sinking ship.
And this is the crux of the problem is as Ian Nesbitt points out “For us, there is no way to know who needs the support, when, and where they need it. I am sure with the mutual aid groups there will be a lot of volunteers. We can organise cooking, food deliveries, but how do people flag it up to us?”
The verdict?
All-together these issues create a lack of structure that leads to a communication breakdown. It not only stops people helping each other locally, but primarily stops the west of the city helping the east.
A solution?
We need to unify our the way we receive and manage our incident requests.
One solution to this is to create some kind of Unified Incident Command System. This is a system that allows us to take phone-calls and emails and this is connected with a route-finding system. Funnelling requests to the voluntary sector and relevant area groups. This is a way to galvanise and distribute information regarding calls for help.
There are very well explored organisational tensions here. Central state and decentralised structures don’t play well together. The main qualm being accountability.
Ideas from disaster planning indicates we need is a nominated leader(s) in each neighbourhood. Allowing co-ordination of mutualist groups is essential for task division matching the scale of the task at hand. ‘Points of contact’ or ‘Local leaders’, ‘Community champions’. Whatever they are called in this instance is not important. Their function is to allow an easy relay of information between the central information flow and their own wider community. This is a system well employed in disaster relief scenarios and there are mountains of evidence from the states that prove its effectiveness.
The best response is to make an easy cascading system so that voluntary groups can give a little formal structure to mutual groups, allowing them to mobilise volunteers and contribute to an accountability system, jumping over a few things here and there(because its a pandemic) but on the whole ensuring people are following the correct processes.
We have started these efforts in the NFS network with our mutual aid network training
Now … We can advertise!
Having this structure unlocks one crucial thing: WE CAN ADVERTISE. This means we can make TV and Radio adverts that are played on repeat that have a single hotline for people to call. Ensuring we hit the right times to fit the psychographic profiles of the listeners is essential. This will allow older people and most vulnerable to connect us. Over the coming weeks many people will need help at different times.
Advertising this way, through centralised media will boost the ability for mutual groups to respond to demands. We can ask the BBC and other channels to run them for free because of the importance of the cause and these funnel to a central hotline.
Division of labor
Voluntary sector groups themselves (Orgs and not just mutual groups) can also create a division of labor meaning a task allocation. I envisage the dividing lines to be somewhat like that below but these are subject to change. What is important is that by having a clear division of labor between groups it is easy for multiple voluntary groups to work together on particular blocks of activity.
For example, previously unrelated groups like Acorn and Opus might work with several other groups and mutual aid areas on communications and proliferation. Foodworks and open kitchen social club might specialise in prepping/or packing.
Funding
Largely it would be impossible to even consider bringing this many volunteer groups together without the adequate provision of resources dedicated towards a single task. We have made demands within the NFS to national government to ensure we are adequately resourced during this period. This includes a demand for funding in every UK Olivia Blake MP is preparing to state an EDM in parliament. Please send a letter to your MP to ensure these demands have gravity.
Why food?
Food and the security of food is a base need. Food is a human right. It is likely to be the most frequent need and after this is fulfilled, other needs can be integrated into the delivery and provision of this.
