The Power of Shared Resources in Crisis Moments
When disaster strikes, something remarkable happens in neighborhoods across America. People who might barely wave to each other on normal days suddenly become lifelines. Over the past two years, we have seen many examples of people working together to keep their communities safe and healthy through mutual aid. In challenging times, mutual aid is one way that communities can come together to support one another when the government can’t or won’t.
Think about Hurricane Sandy in New York City or Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Just like the mutual aid centers, Occupy Sandy was the result of an already existing network of activists that formed their relationships and politics during the Occupy Wall Street movement a year before the hurricane hit. It didn’t take long for those networks to reconnect in the aftermath of Sandy and begin providing many different forms of relief which made a huge difference in poorer areas like the Rockaways, which was hit the hardest by Sandy and where the official response was all but absent.
Building Trust Networks That Last Beyond Emergencies
Existing social infrastructure like community spaces and libraries allow people to better support one another, share information, navigate resources, and build trust. These connections don’t just appear overnight. Neighborhoods that weather storms best are the ones that have already created these invisible webs of support through everyday interactions.
Neighborhood social cohesion, defined as the extent of mutual trust and support among neighbors, is negatively associated with parental stress, child neglect, and adolescent depression and positively associated with child and adolescent well-being and self-esteem, prosocial behaviors, and participation in physical activity. When neighbors know each other’s names, share tools, and check on elderly residents, they’re building what emergency managers call “social capital” – the foundation that makes rapid response possible.
The Science Behind Community Resilience
The Census Bureau’s CRE provide an easily understood metric for how socially vulnerable every neighborhood in the United States is to the impacts of disasters. Recent government data shows that communities with stronger social bonds recover faster from everything from floods to economic downturns.
We find that a 10-percentage-point increase in a key CRE risk measure is associated with one additional death per neighborhood during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. We conclude that, compared with alternative measures, CRE provides a more accurate predictor of community vulnerability to a disaster such as a pandemic. This isn’t just feel-good talk about being nice to your neighbors – it’s literally a matter of life and death.
Resilience Hubs as Community Anchors
Resilience hubs are a valuable resource that helps educate, create a point of collaboration, provide sustainable and continuous energy, and shelter from extreme weather and natural disasters. These aren’t emergency shelters sitting empty until catastrophe strikes. For one community in Los Angeles, their resilience center is a “living, breathing building used seven days a week.” The key distinction between community resilience hubs and other emergency shelters is they are not solely emergency shelters–they are also everyday community centers
The Wellness Center is a community hub that addresses needs such as concentrated poverty, disconnection from formal healthcare, and fragmented social networks and isolation in the local neighborhood by offering community programs. Stoudamire offers classes and activities year around across generations so community members can focus on their wellness, learn new skills and simply, connect with one another.
When Government Response Falls Short
When disaster strikes, government agencies often act like slow-turning ships. During these times, mutual aid can be critical because on-the-ground groups are quicker and more nimble, allowing them to get urgent help to those who need it. This isn’t about replacing official emergency services – it’s about filling gaps that always exist.
The examples are numerous and clear: mutual aid and solidarity is far more effective and efficient than top down approaches to disasters. Sometimes the most powerful help comes from people who understand the community’s specific needs because they live there too.
The Neighbor Helping Neighbor Network
The Mutual Aid System is an extension of the concept of “neighbor helping neighbor.” The Law Enforcement Mutual Aid System was established in 1961 and has been used to restore order during emergencies, including civil unrest, and to provide assistance to local agencies during other unusual events or catastrophic disasters. This principle extends far beyond law enforcement into every aspect of community life.
Neighborhood pods that are self-organized groups of folks who can count on each other for support. Check to see if someone is already organizing mutual aid in your community or work through your own networks to see if others want to join you to create a new project. These pods might organize tool shares, skill exchanges, or simply regular check-ins with vulnerable neighbors.
Social Cohesion’s Unexpected Stability
Our research updates these findings, showing that levels of neighborhood social cohesion remained steady through 2021. Our findings also highlight that neighborhood social cohesion is remarkably robust to broader social and economic context. The COVID-19 pandemic brought about significant changes and yet neighborhood social cohesion was unchanged.
This stability is both encouraging and puzzling. Even during the most isolating pandemic in a century, when people were literally told to stay away from each other, the bonds between neighbors proved surprisingly resilient. We found that neighborhood social cohesion was highest among two-parent households, households with non-Hispanic White children, affluent households, and in neighborhoods with more amenities (e.g., sidewalks, recreation center) and fewer problems (e.g., litter, graffiti).
From Food Distribution to Emotional Support
Food distribution projects that collect donations from grocery stores, restaurants, or individuals and then distribute them to people in need. Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer movement that recovers food that would otherwise be discarded, and distributes free vegan and vegetarian meals in more than 65 countries in protest to war, poverty, and environmental destruction.
Not only did they provide 60,000 volunteers, prescription drug deliveries, a legal team, a medical team and 20,000 meals a day, but they did it all with a community-led approach that focused on community empowerment The scope of what neighbors can accomplish together often surprises even the organizers themselves.
Technology Enabling Better Coordination
Through our partnership with SEADOG, Juvare helps facilitate the sharing of critical resources, information, and support during emergencies. This collaboration ensures that when a disaster strikes, member agencies can respond swiftly and effectively, drawing on the collective strength of the entire network. Modern technology now allows neighborhood networks to coordinate with professional emergency management systems more seamlessly than ever before.
To help identify where resilience hubs are operating, the Department has developed a tool to provide members of the public and private sector with the opportunity to learn of localized resilience hub efforts taking place in their specific region. The tool helps identify resilience hubs by name, facilitating organization, state, city, zip code, and organizational weblink.
The Health Benefits of Connected Communities
After adjusting for sociodemographic factors and baseline health, each SD increase in neighborhood social cohesion was associated with a higher likelihood that people would obtain influenza vaccinations (OR=1.09, 95% CI=1.04, 1.15) or cholesterol tests (OR=1.10, 95% CI=1.02, 1.19). Further, women were more likely to receive mammograms/x rays (OR=1.10,95% CI=1.01, 1.19) or Pap tests (OR=1.08, 95% CI=1.00, 1.17).
These findings suggest that individual engagement in healthy behaviors may be a mediator in the association between high NSC and fewer adverse health outcomes for individuals residing in neighborhoods where healthy behaviors are widely practiced. While these racial differences merit greater study, our results indicate that targeting community engagement and bolstering the social cohesion of a neighborhood could have significant benefits for communities’ public health. Strong neighborhoods don’t just help during disasters – they keep people healthier every day.
Creating Your Own Community Network
Develop a pod of support if you don’t have one already. You can do some pod mapping of people that you already know, or create a neighborhood pod, by reaching out to people who live in proximity, whether you already know them or not. Starting small is perfectly fine. Maybe it’s just three households who share phone numbers and agree to check on each other during storms.
Mutual aid builds solidarity, helping everyone involved by creating new communities of care with our neighbors to redistribute wealth and share skills and material resources with those who need help. The beauty of these networks is that everyone both gives and receives. The person who’s great at home repairs might need help with childcare, while the retired teacher might offer tutoring in exchange for grocery runs.