WHO WE ARE
Wicker Park-Bucktown Mutual Aid is run completely by volunteers who are here to make helping one another easy. In the midst of a global pandemic and recession, the best and most effective thing we can do—apart from social distancing—is to be there for each other.
Wicker Park-Bucktown Mutual Aid is part of an all-volunteer, city-wide mutual aid effort, organized neighborhood by neighborhood. We all live here in Wicker Park and Bucktown, and, when the coronavirus broke out in Chicago, many of us began looking for ways to contribute what we could to our neighbors. Seeing as we are stronger together, we are excited to join forces here. We know that during this pandemic there will be economic, health, and other hardships. We are here to support the community in fulfilling those immediate essential needs. We are providing food so no one goes hungry, prescription and grocery pickups for people who are sick, elderly, or immunocompromised, and whatever other needs arise.
WHAT IS MUTUAL AID?
Solidarity, not charity.
Here is the definition of mutual aid from the Big Door Brigade, a website started by activists in Seattle, Washington to lift up mutual aid as a strategy for survival and mobilization:
"Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW! Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. Most mutual aid projects are volunteer-based, with people jumping in to participate because they want to change what is going on right now, not wait to convince corporations or politicians to do the right thing."
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