#11: Porch Side Abolition
New Zine: "50 Ways To Meet Your Neighbor"
The Strength of Solidarity
Relationships are necessary to our survival. Up against the might of capital, technology, and arms, our power lies with each other. Dean Spade said something last year that I’ve been clinging to ever since:
“The best way through fear is through the strength of solidarity.”
Recently, many of us have been called to action in solidarity with our neighbors persecuted by law enforcement: ICE, BORTAC, ATF, the alphabet soup of cops seems limitless. This is not entirely new, just newly unleashed and empowered.
Midwest Resistance Melts Ice
Writer Margaret Killjoy reports, “From Minneapolis: I’ve Never Seen Unity Like This.” On her Substack, “Birds Before the Storm,” Killjoy relates the extraordinary experience of traveling to Minneapolis, MN to find a city wholly activated. (“Half the street corners in the city seem to have people on watch for ICE, ready to call in suspicious vehicles to the decentralized networks that monitor the movements of kidnappers around the city. It’s ICE that moves in secrecy around Minneapolis, while the rebellion wears reflective vests and puffy coats.”) Killjoy’s reporting is a gift for those of us keeping tabs from afar. Minnesotans are unsurprised.
Many of the models of community defense and rapid response we see mobilized in this moment are founded in relationships, community building, and organizing cultures built over many years. Many have sprouted in places where people have established a sense of belonging, shared interests, and connectivity. The places where people were pod-mapping, delivering groceries, and making homemade hand sanitizer six years ago are the places where you see neighbors monitoring school routes and corners, conducting know-your-rights and cop watch training, and organizing court and jail support. In Minneapolis, the people who took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, Jr. are the same people who are showing up en masse to foil the occupation of their city — even if much of what they’re doing is new and largely decentralized. Organizing runs deep in the Twin Cities. As Killjoy’s friend reassures her: “Minnesotans will be there. ICE will be miserable.”
Spotlight: Community Defense
Protect Rogers Park (Chicago, IL) The Protect Rogers Park model shows the enormous impact dedicated volunteers can have in community, and the value of establishing hyperlocal networks in advance of states of emergency. Protect RP trained up hundreds of volunteers years before the 2025 Trump administration set its sights on Chicago as a target for federal immigration enforcement. Not only did that prepare a core response group for the 2025 onslaught of ICE activity, but the community ties that Protect RP established aided in the groundwork for other work during the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Protect RP demonstrates the ways in which focusing energy on hyperlocal relationships can make a huge difference in the wellbeing of people and on the culture of our spaces, and how those efforts can reverberate out through our networks and nationally. Continue reading on One Million Experiments.
Explore other community defense experiments in the 1ME encyclopedia: Powderhorn Safety Collective, Detroit Safety Team, Brownsville Safety Alliance, Little Earth Protectors
Tools for Rapid Response Groups
If you’re working on a rapid response project, we highly recommend a new resource from Kai Cheng Thom, “Flocking Towards Justice: Mutual Aid & Crisis Support Pods in Action.” (You can also subscribe to her Substack, “Letters from an Extremist for Love.”) Cheng Thom adapts The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and author Mia Mingus’s “Pod Mapping” model for community-based crisis intervention “explicitly to be useable by individuals who need help but cannot or do not wish to, for all the many reasons, engage with the policing or criminal justice system.” Flocking provides a step-by-step guide to setting up a support pod and lays out clear scenarios where Cheng Thom has used the support pod strategy, and specific examples of times when the strategy has not worked well. Importantly, she includes prompts for practice pods so you that you can skill up before diving into crisis or conflict support.
Deepa Iyer also recently released, “social change roles coordination planner for emerging efforts,” a tool that lays out how Social Change Ecosystem Roles (see social changemap.com) can support coordination in this moment. Iyer recommends the tool as helpful to plan and facilitate meetings, coordinate and keep track of roles and tasks, avoid duplication with similar efforts, center affected communities, and evaluate and grow sustainably.
If you’re not already in formation and are looking to join local efforts, we recommend Mariame Kaba’s 1ME Zine, “Making a Plan.” If you’re ready to dive in with your formation, Andrea Ritchie’s Block It! Toolkit is updated regularly with information and inspiration (and includes customizable posters for your actions by Monica Trinidad to boot).
So You Started An Experiment…
Last year, One Million Experiments launched three “agenda playlist kits,” topical compilations of short videos, slides, and workbook pages drawn from Interrupting Criminalization’s Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series to support groups getting ahead of the inevitable conflicts that come up in organizing. If you’re starting afresh or looking to brush up on skills, these are great starter kits for meetings and retreats.
Agenda Kit #1: Organization Building & Sustainment
Agenda Kit #2: Self-Accountability & Movement Building
Agenda Kit # 3: Restorative Conversations & Active Listening
Porch Side Abolition
As we come together to defend our streets, our schools, and our neighbors, countless experiments remind us of the importance of maintaining good relationships where we are, right now. Establishing trusted, reciprocal bonds with the people you spend your time with and around forms the basis of most mutual aid work, and scores of successful grassroots organizing projects. The community fridges and meal and yard-sharing projects, the free stores and libraries, childcare and wellness collectives, and back-to-school events and block hangs and parties, are all built on neighbors knowing neighbors, seeing and meeting needs. The people who show up for each other in small, everyday ways are more likely to be the people who show up for each other in times of great need. Racket, an alt-weekly-style publication in Minneapolis, is collecting a “real-time oral history of the ICE assault on Minnesota.” In a post that encapsulates the One Million Experiments spirit, “Just a Normal Mom,” writes:
In October, a neighbor gathered about 15 of us in her home, to get us thinking about how we can fortify our neighborhood to stand up to our authoritarian government. We brainstormed. We dreamed. We started a Signal. We proceeded to meet biweekly in neighbors’ living rooms. We handed out whistles on Halloween alongside our standard candy and hot dogs. (Yeah, we give out hot dogs on Halloween.) We bring cookies to neighbors we don’t know on our block to try to strengthen community. It’s fun. It’s quaint.
On the first Tuesday in December, a neighbor shared on Signal that ICE was on our block. For the first time, I grabbed my whistle and went running down the block. The whistles worked. ICE left…
When you get right down to it, the point of One Million Experiments is that we’re always in a time of great need, and the goal is to be in relationship in ways in which we can build for each other what we all need. Mariame often reminds me that, “the only way is through.” It’s obvious now that the only way through is together.
If, like me, you’re dipping your toes into neighborliness, I’ve created a new zine to help get us started.
To jump-start neighborly relations, try one of the 50 (mostly untried) ways to meet your neighbors. It’s not in there, but if you like “Just a Normal Mom’s” story, there are great resources to make your own whistle kits on Dan Sinker’s blog here — as seen in Mariame’s newsletter, “Prisons, Prose, and Protest.”
On the Death Panel podcast episode, “Dispatch from Occupied Minneapolis w/Melissa Gira Grant,” host Beatrice Adler-Bolton shares from her experience to say that, “Terror isn’t just violence. It’s an attempt to reorganize your sense of what’s possible.” The power of strategies like ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, Adler-Bolton says, depends on us believing that we are all alone. “And so even though we have to recite the terribles and talk about the horrible violence that’s going on, we’d be doing everyone a disservice to not contextualize that within the thousands of daily, truly ordinary but also extraordinary ways that people are showing up for each other.
And while Minneapolis is a special place, there is absolutely nothing special about the people who are doing this work or the work that’s being done itself. You can do this. You actually must do this yourself in your own location. And it works.”
Eva, One Million Experiments Fellow
Thank you for reading the One Million Experiments Newsletter. If you like what you see, please consider sharing it with a friend.
Explore our catalog of projects, podcasts, and zines at millionexperiments.com and follow us on Instagram @millionexperiments.
This is great practical knowledge sharing. In the UK we may still have a little time to put measures in place ❤️