How to Get Started

Like many other anarchists, one of my favorite phrases is "the thing to do is to start" but I don't often suggest a specific thing to begin doing. Of course, you know best what your life and your community needs, what you want to do. But sometimes our imaginations and desires need a little kickstart.

So here are some projects that, if I had infinite time and energy, I would begin and try to build and sustain. Maybe they will inspire you to do something similar! These are explicitly ideas that a few individuals could begin without a ton of resources in a moment when the streets feel somewhat quiet, projects that would help immensely but don't require you to join a local org or get a huge number of people together to organize.

Fundraising Projects

-Stoop Sales for Abortion Funds: I've gained weight lately and have loads of clothes that don't really fit me anymore, or just that I don't like as much as I once did. Our two-writer household also goes through a lot of books. I would love to organize a stoop sale with a few other households, or even a regular stoop sale, announcing that the money is officially being used for the many abortion funds that need help. You could do this just as easily with a bake sale or something, and that would be a fun way to hang out with friends baking (ok, in the Philly summer that might be awful). What time and materials could you easily donate that would have an exponential effect, and would allow you to organize with friends and neighbors, and meet people in the community in the process? Rather than being a question of personal responsibility or feeling like charity, fundraising becomes a way of building deeper networks of care.

-Mutual Aid Post Aggregation: This is inspired by Gaza Funds, a website that highlights mutual aid funds from Gaza that haven't yet been fully funded, producing a single location where people can see what is needed. This is brilliant. If I had the time, I would like to do this for my local networks here in Philly, finding and aggregating local needs to help them receive funding. But while I'm good at combing socials and researching, I don't have the internet skills to build the tool, so I would team up with more tech savvy friends to make it. Maybe I would even reach out to Gaza Funds to ask if they would share the programming they did for the project.

-Movie Night Under the Stars: I love movies, I love watching movies outside, and I love screening cool movies for friends. I also have an old, janky projector that gets the job done, and a friend has a big white drop cloth from doing contracting work, and we know public locations where there are accessible outlets. This one requires some materials, but they're materials I know me and my friends have! I would organize a movie night at one of those spots, put on something fun that people wanted to see, and give a small talk before hand about what we were fundraising for and pass around a hat/have a cash app/venmo where people could donate. Would you throw a movie night, a dance party, a rave? What about a rent party? What kind of event would you like to attend in your neighborhood? Could you find a spot where using that open public space would in and of itself be reclaiming a site of capital flight or control (e.g: an abandoned mall, a closed down movie theater)?

Research Projects

-Empty Buildings Query: How many empty buildings are there in my neighborhood? Where are they, and who owns them? When I was in NYC I participated in a city-wide empty housing count, where we walked neighborhood streets looking for abandoned buildings. The grass roots unhoused organization demonstrated with that data that there were seven or eight times as many empty buildings that could be easily observed by volunteers as their were unhoused folks in the city. We didn't need new houses built, we just needed redistribution of the existing housing stock. A similar kind of research was incredibly helpful in Philly in 2020, where folks were able to locate empty houses owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority that were in good shape, and move families in there. These squats were eventually legalized and put into a land trust after protest encampments put huge pressure on the city and the housing authority. This worked here because of the particular set up of city government, but you and your friends learning about housing distribution, about which local organizations own or manage public housing or empty buildings, and what those processes are like could be exactly what unhoused folks need to start making radical moves in the city. I know I would enjoy expanding this work here, and throw myself into supporting the land trust with that research, if I had the time.

-Local Resource Mapping: I would love to have a map of my city that had all of the locations of businesses that support Israel or are targeted by BDS, so that I could avoid going into those shops. I'd also love to have a map that had the locations of all of the anti-abortion "pregnancy crisis centers" in my area. If I had the time and skills, I'd get folks together to build an open source map of the area with different layers that you could turn on and off: layers might include "city offices and bureaucracies", "prisons and jails", "police stations and outposts", and other information about how the city actually works. There's lots of information about the city I live in that I don't know: I don't know where (or if) data centers are located, or where and how food and rx enters the city and gets distributed. I think it would behoove us to really understand how goods, services, state power and information flow through the city, especially if 2025 is going to see a full fascist take over of the federal government.

-Court Watch: Nothing radicalized me quite so intensely as being in a series of elaborate eviction proceedings in New York City (story for another time). I spent many hours sitting in housing court rooms watching judges revel in the cruelty of denying people – almost always Black women – leniency or extra time in their homes. I remember one judge in particular who would lob jokes to the assembled crowd, all of us waiting for our own hearing before His Maliciousness, forcing laughs out of his captive audience as we waited our turn to be thrown out on the street. AJAB. Courts in the US are constitutionally open to the public, and you can learn a tremendous amount about what is happening in your city, how the law functions, and who the power brokers are by going and attending court. If I was free during court hours, I would try and build a court watch schedule and system, and regular meet ups with other folks who wanted to join to discuss what we were learning and what we might want to do.

-Covid and Long Covid Resources: Inspired by the project done by The City reporting on what is available in NYC, I would love to have a better idea of what kind of care, studies, and other resources related to Long Covid are avaiable in Philly. I would start by talking to my two friends whose lives have been substantially changed by Long Covid, which would be an opportunity to organize a project with them, honor their much-too-hard-won knowledge, and get a better sense of what kinds of networks, communities and resources were already available in the area.

Community Building and Mutual Aid

-Print Shop: This has been a long term dream of mine, and folks who know me are probably laughing right now because I've been threatening to do this forever, but I love doing pamphlet printing and production, poster and sticker making, making fliers and propaganda. A surprising number of businesses are closing down their offices–and if a financial collapse is indeed coming, there are going to be a lot more–and when they do they often give away printers and copiers. But there are loads of different ways to get access to printing, paper and ink resources. In our city there isn't a very good place however where unaffiliated movement folks (not in either a non-profit or some kind of alphabet soup cultlet) can get fliers and propaganda made. This has been an obvious lack at different points in struggle, and if I had infinite time and energy I would devote myself to building and maintaining this.

-Planting Seeds: I like to take walks, long walks, its how I do my best thinking, and something that has been so frustrating about the constant heat domes. As I walk I also see lots of opportunities for micro-interventions into the neighborhood: places that would hold a good sticker or poster (see above, lol), or empty overgrown lots where local wild flowers might flourish and help pollinators. I'd love to get together with some friends and make a bunch of seed balls (designed with wildflower seeds native to Eastern PA), and go for walks around tossing seed balls. I'd also love to learn more about local trees and plant guerilla trees on the sides of roads, in medians and other places where a bit more shade might help cool future neighbors going for walks.

-Make A Free Table: In our neighborhood, there's a wooden hutch on a corner someone built as a Free Table, where people donate clothes, books, house goods, random miscellany. It's near a major street with lots of foot traffic, and near where a bunch of unhoused folks hang out and busk. It provides a good way for folks to get rid of random stray unwanted items without trekking to a thrift store (or supporting the kinda sketch Christian charities that run them). I would like to figure out a way to build another free table near a park by where I live, that is near another major thoroughfare, and about a 20 minute walk away from the other Free Table, which is enough to mean it would be convenient and attractive for other people.

-Mask Bloc: I know folks do this in many places already, and maybe there's one in Philly too, but I haven't met them. I'd love to build a group that could use gathering and distributing free N95s and Covid tests as a baseline towards building a more generalized harm reduction crew – Nalaxone, fentanyl test strips, clean needles, condoms and lube, there are so many things we could give out at events – and Philly has a big harm reduction movement with a fair amount of infrastructure and history. Still, it's always helpful to have many people dispersed in different communities doing it, normalizing covid health protections and taking care of one another. We could go to outdoor events, table, share pamphlets like this 2024 COVID safety zine, or even just hang out at parks in the neighborhood – this kind of distroing work is something I love to do, and if I had infinite time, I'd do way more of it.

There's loads of other stuff I'd love to do, and there're things I am doing that I am not listing here, because we should not be talking about most of the work we actually do on the open internet! I hope this inspires you to make new moves or dream new dreams. If there's a project you'd love to see that you just don't have the time, energy or capacity to do, drop it in the comments, I'll edit the post to include any contributions y'all make! We will build the better world together. The thing is...to start. 😘✌️