Organizing thoughts on #CommunityPantryPH, a thread. A semi-deep dive into our increasingly remote yet still recent past. We have to go back to a dozen years of mutual aid in times of emergency: the intersection of local need community response and social media: Ondoy...
Back then it was a crash course in applying modern methods (from communications to data-gathering/sharing/logistics) to source donations and distribute them as well as communal kitchens to provide hot meals. This has been increasingly refined and government even became reliant...
if one recalls the persistent call on volunteer labor to pack relief goods until the last government invested in equipment to pack relief en masse. Fast forward to the pandemic where again old ingrained instincts of mutual aid and assistance combined with online culture. Again,
old and new combined. Consider the explosion of barter trade as income-deprived people took to exchanging goods to survive, an economy beyond the oversight of the authorities plus the ever-present grey economy too. Add to this the different layers of giving ranging from large...
corporations and civic organizations to varying levels of affluent neighborhoods adopting neighboring communities in need: this almost-singlehandedly provided relief to some of the hardest-hit. All the more as government was slow and unwieldy as LGUs were distrusted by Pres...
The urgency of the situation was demonstrated by some official attempts at providing mobile kitchens such as the armed forces; but there were the instances where private group community kitchens were shut down by the authorities. At the same time tons of vegetables rotted as...
supply chains broke down. Again the response remarkably stepped in on a small scale but multiplied many times: coordinating between farmers and consumers, achieving something miraculous because it removed a fact of life since precolonial times: the extortion of middlemen...
or the authorities. While in many ways on the boutique level it showed it could be done not to mention other farmers who donated their produce to the public rather than let it go utterly to waste (or found conduits to do so). Again these were all ad hoc solutions made possible...
by traditional values and present needs being aided by modern communications and logistical methods. Note also the constant evolution as continuing needs evolved to bypass the mutating official response (or lack of it). With the suppression of community kitchens by the...
authorities it was only a matter of time before community pantries became an obvious solution not least because whether the Thai or American examples (and similar stories for masks and other items for protesters in HK) we became exposed to this response to the shortcomings of...
the present system. Even at a time when people may have less to give it also enables keeping on giving even on a reduced scale yet when demand is every bit as wide and deep. The official response has been identical in 2020 or 2021: outright hostility from the police suspicion...
by cruder local officials praise by national officials and hostility fanned by the same officials among their faithful. What makes this particularly formidable is that it has a name it has a slogan it has a track record and it is so easily approachable (and reproducable) that...
many people can approach anf embrace it from their particular ideological or comfort zones, from Catholic to atheist to liberal democratic to national democratic, all can be accomodated in a big tent idea for a population too used to small tribe squabbling for so long. But at...
heart of it is an indictment of so many particulars but one overwhelming generality: which is people want to help, people need to be helped, and people will help if only there is a way.
Make no mistake after a year of a population sustained by a mixture of plutocratic philanthropy, middle class volunteerism, organized giving, barter, and infusions of stimulus-derived income from Filipinos abroad, coffers are emptying and community pantries are a micro-heroic...
response on the part of a public that has increasingly less to give but still has the compulsion to give: which is why the parable of the Widow’s mite is what seems to me the best expression of what’s going on.
https://twitter.com/mlq3/status/1383958786826661890
It is though potentially a warning that society is relying on its last line of social solidarity or defense: it is giving society a second morale-boosting wind but that only underscores how this is a last-ditch response from a society increasingly lacking the means to help...
Itself—and where it is all the more glaring that the official response —already always so modest— is much more condemnable because what public funds are there are being hoarded for patronage through public works. It seems to me that as always public generosity will tide our...
society over just enough that. This calculated gamble by our officials will pay off for them: they will have warchests for 2022 and victory will erase all memory of what we have gone through. /end
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