In 1995, Barcelona, Spain, announced the creation of a new, 11th district of the city.

This District 11 wasn’t carved out of Barcelona’s 10 existing districts. In fact, it wasn’t within or anywhere near city limits. It was 1,000 miles away. District 11 was the Bosnian capital city of Sarajevo, then under siege by Serb forces, who shelled the city for nearly four years, killing thousands of civilians.

Three decades later, the wartime Barcelona-Sarajevo partnership endures as a model of the mutual aid and close connections cities will need to forge if they are to survive a 21st century of climate change, pandemic, and nation-state violence.

Barcelona and Sarajevo together demonstrated that the best way for cities to help each other in times of conflict is to eschew the bitter political arguments of the moment—and instead focus on what cities do best: emergency response, aid to neighborhoods, planning, and building.

Today, cities around the world are debating about how, and whether, to respond to global conflicts, especially the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Some localities have chosen to stay out of faraway wars, on the theory that it is not cities’ job to conduct foreign policy. Other localities have jumped in, declaring their support for a cease-fire, often on terms preferred by pro-Palestinian groups.

Both approaches have proved counterproductive, fueling conflict instead of solidarity.

Cities that tried to duck the debate over declarations have faced disruptive protests and boycotts for perceived callousness. In my own small Southern California town of 26,000, a so-called “progressive” group, angry that our council decided not to entertain a cease-fire motion, launched social media campaigns accusing council members of supporting genocide.

Meanwhile, those cities that consider cease-fire declarations have become bitterly divided, especially since declaration debates are often accompanied by antisemitism and harassment. And even when localities manage to adopt cease-fire declarations, they find that the statements have little real-world impact on the faraway people and places suffering from war.

That’s why the story of Barcelona’s 11th district deserves more attention now. Rather than just debating or issuing a declaration, Barcelona activated its people, its governments, and its resources to assist Sarajevo as if it were a Barcelona neighborhood, with Barcelona’s own people suffering under attack. Through the years of the war, Barcelona’s District 11 intervention provided humanitarian aid, including money, food, and medical supplies, to Sarajevo.

Why did District 11 come about? Barcelonans felt a close connection to Sarajevo, for several reasons. For one, Barcelona was preparing to host the Summer Olympics in 1992, and some local officials maintained working relationships with counterparts in Sarajevo, which had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. For another, residents of Barcelona, a diverse and freewheeling city, felt a cultural affinity for Sarajevo, a melting pot with no majority ethnic group and a tradition of tolerance. And Sarajevo, like Barcelona, was part of a province that had sought to achieve greater autonomy and independence from its central government.

Then, on May 17, 1992, the young photojournalist Jordi Pujol Puente—who came from Catalonia, the autonomous region of which Barcelona is capital—was killed in Sarajevo while covering the fighting.

The tragedy inspired a public outpouring in Barcelona. In 1994, Barcelona reinforced its support for Sarajevo with a written agreement pledging to reconstruct the war-damaged city and establish a Local Democracy Agency in the Bosnian capital.

After the war and siege ended in 1995, Barcelona and its provincial government expanded its support, by coordinating the rehabilitation of the Mojmilo neighborhood and rebuilt Olympic installations and a school.

In 1998, Barcelona and Sarajevo extended their agreement to include support for culture and sports, expand programs for youth, and promote business cooperation between the two cities. In 2000, Barcelona and Sarajevo signed a “twinning protocol” that made them, effectively, sister cities.

The Barcelona-Sarajevo partnership has ebbed at times, but never ended. In 2022, city leaders reinvigorated it, with 30th anniversary events and new bilateral agreements to work on university collaborations, sustainable development, gender policies, social policies, cultural policies, the green economy, youth programs, and peace initiatives.

I learned the story of District 11 during a recent visit to Barcelona to attend the first-ever local democracy festival, organized by ALDA, which was founded in the Balkans during the 1990s. ALDA has grown into the leading creator of collaborations between local governments and civil societies in Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa. It is expanding its work further into Africa, and into South America. A Barcelona official attending the festival told me that the city is working to assist Ukrainian municipalities damaged or occupied by Russia and has been increasing its spending on humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Back in Los Angeles, where I work, the city council is engaged in a divisive debate about a cease-fire resolution in Gaza. I find myself wishing that L.A., and other cities, would stop arguing about Israel and Hamas, and instead provide more direct support to municipalities suffering from war.

Los Angeles and its leaders might even follow Barcelona’s example. Adopt a couple cities (say, Rafah in Gaza and Kharkiv in Ukraine) as L.A. neighborhoods, and rededicate some of the money budgeted for L.A.’s 2028 Olympics for current aid and future reconstruction.

The post How Cities Can Help Other Cities in Wartime appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, the U.S. colony had still not fully recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017. Collapsed bridges had not been rebuilt, houses still lacked roofs, and most recovery funds had not been distributed.

Fiona’s rains only added to the woes, causing house collapses on the interior part of the island, devastating mudslides, and a widespread power outage that lasted for weeks. There was no drinking water: The Puerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority failed to acquire power generators before the storm hit, and drinking water or sewage systems run mainly on electricity. Simple tasks such as getting gas for the generator (for those who had one) or obtaining drinking water could take a whole day—and become life-and-death situations for people with chronic illnesses who needed ventilators or refrigerated insulin.

The three hurricanes severely impacted the island’s wellbeing. But their effects aren’t simply the result of intense storms. These “natural disasters” are political, stemming from a long colonial history culminating in years of austerity imposed by the U.S. With federal and local government support at a standstill, people in the colony are pulling together to make things better. Mutual aid groups and rural water systems have driven recovery pathways across the island, creating a new model for effective disaster recovery.

Puerto Rico’s history is one of exploitation. The island became a Spanish possession in the 1500s, with a colonial governance built on the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the mistreatment of land and animals to develop the coffee, tobacco, and sugar industries.

After the U.S. took control of the island in 1898, tax incentives for U.S. corporations have come and gone, driving increases in poverty, unemployment and emigration. Starting in the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap allowed companies to establish themselves on the island without paying Puerto Rican taxes; then, in 2006, the federal government swung in the other direction, repealing a corporate tax exemption on income originating from U.S. territories. Companies left the island, and the economy plummeted. Currently, 45% of Puerto Rico’s population lives below the poverty line, and its debt is estimated to be more than $70 billion—a debt that has never been audited and was pushed by Wall Street interests.

The U.S. government’s response—decreasing Puerto Rico’s debt through austerity measures—has made the island ever more vulnerable in the face of disaster. Under President Obama, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico was created to develop a deal for debt repayment between Puerto Rico and its creditors. However, the Board knew that paying back the debt would be disastrous for the island. Drastic cuts to the island’s education and health systems, including emergency medical technicians, meant that when Hurricane María hit the island, local agencies had minimal capacity to respond. Another measure, a new public-private partnership for the electric grid, has raised energy costs for consumers and caused regular power outages that create daily disruptions in education, water delivery, and health services. In disaster situations, these become catastrophic.

The U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ disaster recovery efforts have fallen short for Puerto Ricans. Instead, it is community strategies that have enabled life on the island to continue. Mutual aid efforts—defined as collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually growing from awareness that top-down systems aren’t working—have picked up the slack, establishing relief actions for the island such as providing water, food, shelter, and medicine in remote, mountainous regions.

One of the most important of these solidarity efforts are community aqueducts, which provide drinking water infrastructure to areas that the government’s water utility does not serve. The aqueducts usually consist of a water pump or gravity-driven channel that moves water from wells or small rivers to a central water reservoir. The water is then treated by a chlorine disinfection process, and distributed through pipes to houses, schools, churches, and public pick-up stations.

There are 241 of these aqueducts in Puerto Rico, and they are managed largely by the community residents who they serve. Most systems are operated by neighbors that take care of everything from initial installation to day-to-day oversight. (Aqueducts with greater financial resources tend to hire external operators.) Some members oversee physical components, including daily operations and pipe and plume repairs; others take charge of organizational duties, like organizing and running their assemblies and accounting. The aqueduct organizations can take many forms. Many have one person in charge, others have an informal board of trustees, and a few have 501(c)(3) status and a well-defined structure with positions such as president and chief operator.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, community aqueducts were often the only means communities had to access potable water. Having clean water allowed Puerto Ricans to recover some sort of normality, allowing them to clean, do laundry, and flush toilets. In addition, having drinking water saved residents hours that would otherwise be invested in buying or collecting it from public pickup stations.

The network created by the aqueducts also served a more expansive mutual aid role, becoming a conduit for collecting essential goods from foundations and NGOs and redistributing them to residents in need. Members drew on the aqueducts’ networks to facilitate resource-sharing. For example, a member of one community aqueduct in Añasco shared with me that because one person in the community had an excavator available to loan to the post-María cleanup effort, aqueduct managers were able to quickly remove debris and get their system back up and running.

While community aqueducts have had success, they are not immune to the political and economic factors that constrain life in Puerto Rico. They deal with high costs for water tests and privatized energy, and marginalization from local agencies. But they are paving the way for new directions in the recovery and collective organizing. They underscore how collaboration can put even limited resources in motion to tackle emergency needs, in ways that are often more effective than government-sponsored relief efforts.

Mutual aid’s success doesn’t mean that governments should walk away. On the contrary, the U.S. and Puerto Rico should learn from these community strategies how to better respond in times of need. They should support community aqueducts and mutual aid groups, heeding their needs and concerns, and removing bureaucratic hurdles to accessing funds. There is progress: Legislation introduced on the island this year includes community aqueducts on an advisory committee developing drinking water strategies for the island.

As more and more extreme weather events take place across the world, building and maintaining solidarity networks that recognize our mutual interdependence are crucial to a resilient future. Puerto Rico’s mutual aid strategies offer an example to follow as we rethink disaster preparedness.

The post Is Puerto Rico a Global Model for Disaster Recovery? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Panelist John Malpede, an artist who founded Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)—a performance group of people who live and work on Skid Row in 1985—likes to say, “It’s the artist’s job to confuse the categories.” He believes that artists can create openings and bring different, sometimes unlikely people together. In 2000, when a major initiative mandating that adults convicted of possessing or using illegal drugs would be offered substance abuse treatment instead of incarceration was on the ballot in Los Angeles, LAPD worked with a Skid Row women’s recovery program and the policymakers behind the initiative to create a work called Agents and Assets. Subsequently, they took it to Detroit and elsewhere to advocate for change. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute, you’re trying to reduce mandatory minimums, but you’re also working for the recovery community?’” recalled Malpede. The juxtaposition may have been confusing, but it worked. “Showing up as artists is a way of being able to create these configurations.”

Artist and designer Rosten Woo, another panelist, has collaborated with Malpede and LAPD on various projects related to policy. Woo positions artists as the people who can work beyond existing legislation to imagine larger, institutional change. “A lot of the real change that’s worth doing isn’t even on the plate right now,” he said. “You have to change our whole culture, and you have to change our whole frame of reference.” Cultural work asks, “What kind of world do we want to live in?” he added. “That gets worked out in the culture, and then moves into policy 20 years later.”

Panelist Karen Mack is the founder and executive director LA Commons, which is currently working on a project called Creating Our Next LA that brings together communities, artists, and storytellers to share their visions for such a future. “What we’re trying to do is have everybody tap into their creativity,” said Mack. “We’re trying to open people’s eyes to this expansive view that Rosten is talking about. Artists, that’s what they do. Their job is to create. They’re making something out of nothing.”

At LA Commons, she said, they want to work to give “people power and control over their own story to then create a different narrative than the one that the powers that be had in mind.” Nodding to the current state of Los Angeles, she said, “The people in charge aren’t coming up with the solutions; we need to do it. We’re trying to create space for that to happen.”

At the prompting of the evening’s moderator, arts and culture writer Catherine Wagley, Malpede and Woo discussed their collaboration on a piece about land use and zoning called The Back 9, a miniature golf course that Woo designed and built and LAPD performed on. “The back nine is an old metaphor referring to private places where decisions get made before the public process,” said Malpede.

The course was an attempt to push back against the way public participation and land use review procedures can be used as mere lip service to communities like Skid Row. “I’m interested in trying to cash that check in a sense—you’re saying you want public participation, but what would it look like if you meant that?” said Woo. In this case, the miniature golf course began a dialogue between officials and residents that ultimately resulted in the creation of a new zone that’s only for affordable housing—something that’s never happened in the city of Los Angeles before.

But how do you find artists like Malpede and Woo “who can serve and navigate communities in empowering ways?” asked Wagley.

Mack said finding the right artists to do this work can sometimes feel like searching for “a needle in a haystack,” which is why LA Commons created a leadership development program to help young artists develop the capacity to turn their work into community engagement.

In response to a question from the audience, who participated via live chat, the panelists called out recent artworks that have inspired them with new visions for the future of Los Angeles.

Woo pointed to artist Lauren Halsey and Summaeverythang Community Center, which melds art, mutual aid, and community food distribution. “Seeing artists dig into their community and support them in expansive ways is something that’s really beautiful to see,” he said. He was inspired, too, by the toppling of a statue of Father Junipero Serra in downtown L.A. “Seeing that integrated public action was really powerful,” he said.

Malpede pointed to Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s abolitionist pod (prototype) “self-sufficient gardens rolling out around town,” which are “ingeniously designed” and “beautiful.”

And Mack offered up When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. “I really loved that positioning of coming from love,” she said.

The post If You Want to Change L.A., You’re Going to Need Artists appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By “this stuff,” he meant mutual aid, in which members of a community work together to meet each other’s urgent needs. Normally, the day laborers and domestic workers who are members of his organization, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), work together on direct-action campaigns to fight exploitation and advocate for their rights. But the pandemic has pushed them into organizing mutual aid around food.

They are not alone. In recent months, members of progressive direct-action organizations have developed new systems for checking on their neighbors, dropping off food and medicine, providing protective personal equipment to incarcerated family members, and giving cash to those suddenly unemployed to meet immediate rent, food, and medical needs. At the same time, they’re continuing to press for workers’ rights and proper health care during the pandemic, as well as ensure access to federal stimulus money for individuals and small minority-owned businesses.

In so doing, these organizations are harkening back to their roots: people creating social ties by helping each other out, and those ties fueling collective fights for new systems and policies.

Combining mutual aid and direct action might seem like common sense, but in today’s corporatized and professionalized nonprofit world, this model had disappeared almost completely. Community-based nonprofits in the United States today are split into distinct silos, with service provision firmly compartmentalized in one box and direct-action organizing in another.

The roots of this split lie in the increasing professionalization of the sector over half a century, driven by no small amount of sexism, classism and racism.

Throughout American history, mutual aid societies existed wherever poor, disenfranchised people could be found, particularly Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. Chinese immigrants of the 19th century formed networks to defend against xenophobic violence and to fund their businesses when banks refused. Native Americans formed urban community centers in the 1950s and 1960s after the government terminated the rights of more than 100 tribes, forcing people off traditional lands across the Great Plains as well as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Montana. These urban centers provided employment support, housing assistance, and health care, creating both the material and political conditions for self-determination.

During and immediately after slavery, free Black people formed mutual aid societies to provide resources denied them by the white community. The first was the Free African Society of Philadelphia, founded in the 1770s to provide a place to worship and financial resources to members. Similar organizations soon sprung up in Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans and Newport, Rhode Island, providing non-denominational spiritual guidance and resources such as banks, schools, burial societies, newspapers, food, support for widows and orphans, and more. W.E.B. DuBois called these “the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life.”

These organizations were a threat to the racial status quo. Charleston shut down the Free Dark Men of Color in the 1820s for fear of slave insurrections and Maryland made it a felony to join a mutual aid society in 1842. Despite the crackdowns, thousands more societies formed after the Civil War, making enormous gains for Black communities. Decades later, these self-organized groups would become the infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement and the inspiration for the Black Panthers, who famously served up free breakfasts and health programs alongside their fight against police brutality and exploitation of Black communities.

European immigrant communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, too, relied on cooperative efforts that helped their members learn English, find decent housing, and resist labor abuse. Incorporating a mix of mutual aid, community organizing, and legislative campaigning, the social reformer Jane Addams founded Chicago’s Hull House in 1889, sparking a movement that counted more than 400 “settlement houses” within 20 years. Addams had been inspired by visiting an English settlement house where she saw boundaries of language, class status, and religious affiliation stretching and blurring. In the United States, settlement houses were community arts centers, social service providers, and civic action committees all rolled into one.

Formalizing social work for white people began with the settlement houses. In the late 1890s, Addams’ training of settlement house volunteers became the basis of early social work college programs. Settlement house workers increasingly felt the need for credentials because the medical doctors and lawyers who intervened in the lives of poor families routinely ignored the insights of the volunteers, mostly well-off white women, whom they perceived as amateurs. Early training programs were practical, such as the 1904 partnership between Columbia University and the New York School of Philanthropy. In 1915, medical educator Dr. Abraham Flexner critiqued social work as lacking professionalism of the sort that’s found in medicine, law, and preaching, and labeled social workers as “narrow minded technicians.” Colleges then began to push curricula that would elevate the “theory” of social work rather than the practice.

The settlement houses, meanwhile, continued their social reform projects, including sanitation reform, women’s suffrage, temperance, legislation against child labor, and labor law. Movement leaders such as labor advocate Frances Perkins wrote many of these ideas into the New Deal. In the throes of the Great Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 created pensions for the elderly, care for the disabled, a state-run medical insurance program for the poor, and unemployment insurance. But the legislation also reflected the prevailing racism of the time, excluding domestic and farm workers in a compromise that ensured that Southern Democrats and the agricultural industry would continue to have access to cheap labor. Left to fend for themselves, those communities, largely comprised of people of color, continued to rely on mutual aid even as they tried to organize for change.

In this April 16, 1969 photograph, Bill Whitfield, member of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City, serves free breakfast to children before they go to school. Courtesy of William P. Straeter/Associated Press.

At the same time, Black social work traditions grew out of mutual aid organizations, added journalism to the practice, and for decades had a testy relationship with the white social work establishment. Leaders like Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Jane Patterson founded the Colored Women’s League in 1892 to generate racial uplift through self-help. Thyra J. Edwards, virtually unknown in mainstream social work history, was also a trained journalist. These women made lynching their top priority.

Despite political action among social workers of all races, Saul Alinsky is the white man credited with codifying the social action elements. Starting in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s, Alinsky eventually became the nation’s most famous “community organizer” with his approach of starting with local issues in order to rally people to fight for broader political change. He described this approach in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “They organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats.” Alinsky built the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), one of the largest and most powerful organizing networks of the 20th century, uniting churches, ethnic associations, and neighborhood groups in direct-action campaigns. It was an IAF affiliate in Baltimore, for example, that won the first local Living Wage law in 1994, the precursor to today’s “Fight for $15.”

The Alinsky model came to dominate the way activists were trained and organized. It featured highly professionalized, well-paid organizers who kept any radical politics to themselves in the name of people power. The IAF also had a distinctly male culture. Alinsky expected organizers to work around the clock; women, he thought, were too delicate, even if he didn’t publicly discourage them from the work.

Alinsky’s influential “rules” saw services—mostly organized by and provided by women—only as a means to direct action campaigning. The goal was to deliver “winnable” material improvements as well as change the relations of power between everyday people and the institutions that shaped their lives. Described as “non-ideological,” this model characterized membership-based community organizations for many years. But over time, organizers who were women and people of color have disrupted and changed that norm, arguing that racism, sexism and capitalism would never be challenged under these conditions.

In any case, the split between providing services and advocating for systemic change had long been established in the U.S. When the National Association of Social Workers was formed in 1955, providing services via casework and organizing for systemic change had become distinct streams of social work. By 1960, they had their own tracks at various universities. Funding patterns followed. Philanthropists, too, viewed these functions as separate, driving far more resources to apoliticized service provision than they did to community organizing. When I was learning to organize in the late 1980s, I was consistently told that self-help schemes, lending circles, and cooperative businesses had little to do with “real” organizing.

Today, though, a new generation of activists is erasing that distinction.

The pandemic, in particular, has clarified that organizing cannot be divorced from actually helping people. In March, on a webinar about race and COVID-19, the moderator asked us panelists, “What inspires you?” I applauded all the self-organized mutual aid schemes and noted that prominent organizing networks have jumped in, including the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, Faith in Action, and Make the Road, among many others. All are responding to the immediate needs of their constituencies—food, masks, money, help navigating government assistance—and diverging from their pre-coronavirus activities. Another panelist countered: “But mutual aid can’t solve this crisis at scale. Only government can do that.” Some activists fear that politicians will try to replace government care with community care, or that mutual aid will absorb all of our energy, leaving nothing for political fights.

But especially in times when the state dramatically fails to deliver what people need, mutual aid is a powerful way, sometimes even the only way, to help people manage daily life while sustaining their spirits in the struggle for systemic change. Organizing requires courage; courage comes from community. Mutual aid fuels the audacity to demand more because it reinforces that we are not alone in our suffering.

Chai Moua, the Civic Engagement Director at Freedom, Inc, a 17-year-old coalition of Black and Southeast Asian groups in Wisconsin, told me that her organization has been ready for this moment. “We have always believed in combining service and organizing to get to a bigger future,” she said. “Our food pantry is actually part of our civic engagement work. We’re not just giving you food but showing systematically ‘this is why our folks don’t have access to healthy food,’ and then changing those systems.”

The United States, and perhaps the world, is at the beginning of a string of fundamental shifts in culture, politics, economy and daily life. The combined disruption of an ongoing deadly pandemic, record unemployment, and multiracial uprisings to defend Black lives will soon make many of our existing models irrelevant. Photos of sophisticated mutual aid operations at recent Black Lives Matter protests powerfully symbolize the future of organizing, protest, and direct action. Everyone is discovering what some of us have always understood: The social ties cultivated by mutual aid are the same ties needed to fuel a historic boycott, a union organizing drive, or a campaign to close down prisons. Our ancestors knew this well, and now we do too.

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