Mission: Help people connect with a mutual aid network in their community
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In March of 2020 it became clear that our main mandate as Town Hall Project: encouraging people to attend in person town halls, was going to be put on hold indefinitely. And while we found other ways to engage with politicians, like hosting virtual town halls, we wanted to find other ways to put our expertise to use to help people.
Mutual Aid Hub was the application of our existing skill sets: research, data wrangling and map visualization, applied to the organically growing set of mutual aid networks and food resources. Our goal was to connect people to resources they needed and let people know how they could help their neighbors, either by joining a network, or learning how to start one. |
The site
The site itself shows locations of networks and food resources on a searchable map. The data is stored in a Google Firestore database, and the map is built using Mapbox. The site itself is built using React and published on Github pages.
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Building community
A really common question we'd get asked is "There is no network in my neighborhood, how do I start one?". We are not mutual aid network experts, so we organized events to connect people to each other. This was largely the work of Shivani Desai, who joined Town Hall Project as the Mutual Aid Hub Organizer.