as the preexisting networks and connections formed in the OWS movement, Occupy Sandy organizers maintained the ability to effectively strategize and communicate their movement objectives to increasingly larger circles of organizers, donors, and volunteers. Moreover, these past experiences granted initial Occupy Sandy organizers an improved ability to confidently train and organize newcomers in the delivery of mutual aid. Despite Occupy Sandy’s name and many of its initial volunteers’ prior affiliations with the OWS movement, both of these groups maintained their political and ideological distance from one another; volunteers and donors participating in mutual aid disaster relief with Occupy Sandy were not at all required to support OWS or its various ideological positions. Regardless, it is critical to recognize the ways in which Occupy Sandy volunteers and the overall organization benefited from their prior organizing experiences and preexisting activist networks, which likely drastically improved their ability to confidently strategize and include others in a movement to provide mutual aid-informed relief efforts to affected communities. While Occupy Sandy offers a grand vision of grassroots climate and environmental disaster organizing beyond state and nonprofit institutions, Occupy Sandy remains only one of numerous examples of care web-like, equitable natural disaster relief outside of state-determined limitations and control. Prior to concluding, it is critical to recognize additional grassroots natural disaster relief efforts that operate outside of the state, or even in-spite of the state, with all of their variations, even if I cannot discuss them extensively in this essay. For instance, a second example comes from the cataclysmic damage Hurricane Maria brought to Puerto Rico in 2017, when there emerged a collective of small-scale mutual aid-informed disaster relief groups or projects that organized under a larger umbrella group known as Red de Apoyo Mutuo de Puerto Rico (RAMPR) (“Mutual Support Network of Puerto Rico”), which still operates today. Within this collective, there exist various Centros de Apoyo Mutuo (CAMs) (“Mutual Support Centers”), each of which range in their focus, scale, and regions of operation. For example, La Olla Común (“The Common Pot”) in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico—only one of fourteen CAMs affiliated with RAMPR—provides community breakfasts, rehabilitates abandoned buildings, and organizes70 In earlier disasters, including Hurricane Katrina and the Camp Fire, other grassroots natural disaster relief efforts arose, including the previously mentioned Common Ground Collective in Hurricane Katrina. All of these groups represent only a small sample among seemingly endless care network-like, mutual aid-informed disaster relief organizations that operate deliberately and successfully beyond the state in natural disasters. While Occupy Sandy and numerous other grassroots-led and anti-state environmental and climate disaster response movements were largely successful in the delivery of the power-conscious relief that centers marginalized and vulnerable communities, there still remain ways in which these organizations’ activist modalities could be advanced further in their focus on delivering justice-oriented natural disaster relief beyond state institutions. As discussed previously, these organizations could look towards critical trans studies to understand the limitations of the state and its legal systems in movement building, disability justice scholars’ notion of care webs and reimagined care ethics, and abolitionist scholars’ critical attention to the ways in which justice movements aim to
70. La Olla Común, “Centro de Apoyo Mutuo - La Olla Común, Río Piedras,” RAMPR, accessed May 10, 2020, https://redapoyomutuo.com/la-olla-comun. For additional information related to the fourteen different Centros de Apoyo Mutuo that came from Hurricane Maria, see RAMPR, “Proyectos,” RAMPR, Accessed May 11, 2020, redapoyomutuo.com/proyectos1menu.
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