How remote workers can practice community care from home
Healthcare needs community care ❤️
Those of us who are lucky enough to be working remotely are in a place where we can help support healthcare and front line workers by rethinking care networks and building new (long) distance mutual aid practices from our homes.
In January 2020, we decided as a company that we wanted to experiment with making community giving a monthly endeavor rather than an annual gift to a single charitable organization. In February, we decided to make a donation towards an organization working with youth experiencing homelessness in Toronto. We reached out to local youth shelter, Covenant House, the largest agency in Canada serving and advocating for youth who are homeless, trafficked, or at risk. Staff from Normative consulted Covenant House about the types of non-perishables donations requested during colder winter months.
Here’s what we donated:
We hand-delivered boxes of non-perishable food items to Covenant House just before COVID-19 and the call for social distancing hit Ontario and people started to hoard non-perishables from grocery stores. Some of us, including the Normative team, are fortunate enough to work from home and have the opportunity to continue to help support communities and people at the margins, whose access to safe housing is more precarious.
Staying/working from home implies a safe home
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we are confronted, to a greater extent, with the importance of offering help to others through daily practices, and in particular, support with access to the essentials of food, health, and shelter. For those who are lucky enough to be employed in an industry that can work from home, we have an opportunity to use this privilege to find ways to help others whose access to safe shelter and food has been increasingly compromised.
During this time, the ‘safer at home’ adage implies a safe home to begin with. This is not the case for many people. In states of crises, marginalized populations, people experiencing homelessness, people without documentation, and many women and children living in domestic violence contexts are facing difficult and precarious conditions where home is not a place that is safe or stable.
Healthcare systems and frontline workers are overwhelmed and many people are struggling; charitable organizations across Canada and are launching appeals for help. There is an unprecedented and growing need to support frontline workers, food banks, seniors, children in need, women’s shelters, those experiencing homelessness, and many others in our communities. Here is a list of organizations that can use your support.
Nurturing our networks & each other
All sorrows are less with bread — Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in Don Quixote
During our grocery shop for Covenant house, my colleague, Laura, and I found ourselves talking about the role of comfort foods. We discussed the role of cooking in shaping our childhood nostalgias and the ways that food preparation and sharing serve as a significant way of bringing people together. Certain foods bring a sense of togetherness and comfort through hardships. Despite isolation, our team at Normative and people generally have been connecting, while apart, through recipe sharing, and a resurgence in bread-making.
This is a good opportunity to reflect on the ways that we can share and nurture each other by supporting local food producers and farmers through pickup/delivery services and helping to sustain smaller businesses that are impacted by this crisis. Staying in touch while apart is becoming increasingly important and we need to find new innovative ways to nurture our relationships. Sharing meals, recipes, and stories are all ways that we can continue to connect to one another ❤️.
Our current climate has a tendency to perpetuate a lot of uncertainty and stress, but it can also be an opportunity to recognize our deeply interdependent nature. In one of my favorite speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, his last Christmas Sermon on Peace in 1967, Dr. King illustrates how we are nourished daily by others around the world.
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
I love how this excerpt bridges our daily meals with global food chains and shows us the ever-important need to understand our interdependence. We have been incredibly neglectful in acknowledging this connection, and tend to only do so when our supply is threatened. The New York Times published an article about the precarity and irony of how undocumented agriculture workers have become essential laborers. It shouldn’t take a pandemic to demonstrate a deeply problematic double-bind that defines people as both illegal and essential to American (food) security.
Hopefully, these times reveal how deeply our lives are intertwined, so that we can build stronger networks founded on mutual aid and community support. And that we might come together to re-imagine those living apart and around the world as a network of long-distance neighbours rather than strangers.
Here are some ways we can support one another:
https://www.canadahelps.org/en/donate-to-coronavirus-outbreak-response/
Make a difference with local organizations:
Sunnybrook Foundation Covid-19 Response
Distress Centres of Greater Toronto — Covid-19 Emergency Readiness Fund
