What Old-School Grassroots Organizing Can Teach Us Right Now

When people get together to help each other, it works

Volunteers at the Grace Food Pantry hand out cheese, meats, pastries, vegetables and other goods to over a thousand people who line up and wait their turn to get food during the Covid-19 crisis in Everett, Massachusetts on March 20, 2020. Photo: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images

Today, as the Covid-19 crisis ramps up, communities are mobilizing to serve and support one another. This is good news, because when people get together at the grassroots level, it works. It works because it’s intended to work. Generally, collective action is motivated not by ulterior political motives, but by the simple desire to persist against the odds.

Case in point: The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami devastated most of Southeast Asia. In the disaster’s wake, communities’ rates of recovery revealed a surprising trend. Fishing hamlets and small coastal populations that were, by and large, initially left to fend for themselves, tended to bounce back quicker than their larger, more urban counterparts, which relied on NGOs and government assistance for relief.

In some fishing villages in Tamil Nadu, India, for instance, hamlet councils took it upon themselves to organize mutual aid networks within their respective communities well before outside aid could arrive. By banding together, these communities were able to accomplish more — and faster. And in so doing, they reaffirmed their own resilience and power in the face of institutional failings.