Mutual Aid work involves a lot of behind the scenes organising and this month we tried out
a new scheduling system to make sure that the same people aren’t going out week to
week. This gives everyone a break and makes it easier to make sure that we aren’t
spreading any Covid germs to a more vulnerable population. We’ve also had to scale back
the numbers from 3+ people down to 2 people heading out on Saturdays to stick to the
new restrictions on people from different households meeting.
As this has been a bit of a month of change we’ve also switched up our route around
Dundee to make it more linear! As usual we’ve been handing out necessities like hand
sanitiser (the new decanting system into the small bottles that were donated to us has
been great for reducing plastic waste and saving money), face masks, menstrual products,
wet wipes, tissues and water. We’ve also been able to distribute fruit, which we’ve been
making into fruit salads in the Vegware tubs, and cakes from Serendpities each week.
Our new plan to be more receptive to people’s clothing needs has been working really
well, we were able to give hoodies and jeans to people who needed them and people now
know to ask us for the clothing items they need. We’ve also been doing some planning
behind the scenes to launch an Autumn fundraiser as last years was pretty successful and
enabled us to hand out loads of winter clothes and sleeping bags. Our work with Dog
Section Press is still ongoing too with Serendipities now joining in as a place where sellers
can pick up copies of Dope magazine. Dope is kind of like an Anarchist Big Issue but
sellers don’t need to pay anything upfront for the copies they sell meaning that they get to
keep all of the money from their sales, the response to this has been great. We’ve also
been researching additional training we can do to support the community & we’ll hopefully
have an update about that next month!
Towards the end of the month we started to see some new faces around the city so we’ve
been holding some strategising meetings to work out how we can start running our usual
stalls again. It would be great if there was a more obvious way for people to find us to get
some help, some food, and a warm drink as we move into the colder seasons. Lastly we
held a meeting with a new chapter of Food Not Bombs based in Glasgow to offer them
support and answer questions, this was really encouraging, we love meeting other people
who are getting involved in mutual aid work.
