WEST SEATTLE MUTUAL AID PARTY🎉 UPDATES!
West Seattle Mutual Aid Party🎉, a partner of NW Hospitality, reserves their more detailed, regular updates for their volunteers and supporters. However, here are snippets from their weekly updates from the last few weeks.
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9/13/2023 - With more sweeps planned in our area this month, we can continue to expect additional changes in where our friends in vehicles are, which brings with it all the familiar challenges of locating them, showing up on a block and dealing with upset housed people there, etc. As we strive to maintain contact with the people who get displaced, we now have the additional challenge of trying to maintain a presence at the more static locations where nearby housed people have been meeting us because those burgeoning relationships are just as important to us as any other.
9/18/2023 - Despite running a lean team of five split between three cars and two routes - with a stop between our two southern locations to resupply, since Salvation Army was once again our highest demand location - we ended the day feeling good about how many people we were able to see, with lots of great conversations and reconnections along with meeting some new folks as well. Our group is of a size that some of our members can take needed breaks on weeks like this, and we still have enough folks and vehicles to help meet the goals we have for each week, which is a great feeling! Heading into this coming week we'll be on the ground supporting our neighbors as the city continues its work to displace them, and we'll do our best to stay in touch and keep those connections intact. At the end of the day it's about being there for each other when one of us needs a hand, and we'll keep doing that however we can.
9/28/2023 - One of the recent sweeps that occurred was on Harbor Ave SW which is a location we have visited weekly for over a year. When we first started visiting that stretch, there were a good number of people living in vehicles there. Over the last year there have been a few sweeps (or "remediations" if you want to use the city's parlance) there, each slowly attritioning the overall amount of people at this location as they found their way to other nearby places such as the Myers Way encampment. The last couple of months have had a designated parking enforcement officer coming by Harbor Ave twice a week to make sure vehicles that people were living in moved the legally-required distance to reset the 72 hr clock so the remaining handful of vehicles there were in pretty good shape and doing a good job of keeping things clean. Despite all of this, and at the behest of a small but very vocal group of housed people, the city followed up their most recent sweep there by installing permanent "NO PARKING 11PM-5AM" signs along the entire stretch of Harbor Ave SW. A critical component of this situation is the fact that Harbor Ave SW is one of the few places zoned in such a way that vehicles the size of RVs can legally be parked there overnight for up to 72 hrs. Alas, that critical resource is no longer available to people looking to legally have a safe place to park and it's nothing more than one more monument to the exact kind of "compassionate" atmosphere being cultivated by politicians and some of our neighbors here in Seattle.
The next Mutual Aid Fair is coming up and we're planning to be there! While it'll likely be cold, we'll have hot soup and beverages to share with folks and any other extra supplies that we'll have on hand as well as our "business" cards and hopefully a sign! Come by if you're in the area and say hi!
10/6/2023 - We had a small number of folks for distro so just did two south stops all together, but still saw 27 people. Unfortunately, one person took all of the batteries we had in the first five minutes, leaving everyone else disappointed. We've slowly been increasing the number of batteries we have on hand at every distro and team, and they are always gone by the end of distro. It's one of the few commodities that we try to hold back on and limit folks on. For the most part, people take what they need and are conscious that their stop might not be the only one that we make. We recognize that a scarcity mentality is tough and we want to be able to provide basic support for as many people that visit us as possible. It's still hard to toe that line between giving people the autonomy and freedom to take what they want, and also keep our eye on our constraints and having enough supplies for the other folks that haven't gotten a chance yet.
You can follow West Seattle Mutual Aid Party🎉 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MutualAidParty
And you can support them through NWH here or through their Patreon here.