By Stephanie Rearick
Mutual Aid Network

You’ve likely been hearing a lot about mutual aid networks lately. They’re springing up like wildflowers to provide crisis relief during COVID-19.

But did you know Madison has had its own Mutual Aid Network (we call it MAN for short — the Madison MAN Cooperative) for nearly five years, and the Northside Planning Council (NPC) and Northside News helped its inception?

The Madison MAN Cooperative was born from the Dane County TimeBank (DCTB), which started in 2005 on the Northside in cooperation with NPC. The DCTB, where we exchange time instead of money, is still going strong. 

The Madison MAN Cooperative — DCTB is a core member, among other organizations and individuals — is a way to connect us in a type of cooperative where we each own and govern it and use time exchange plus sharing, pooling money for lending and giving, and other forms of cooperative effort in order to build new ways of work and reward that can give us more enjoyable and sustainable lives, doing what we like to do. All the things that make us human, including care, community work, creativity and civic engagement. Mutual aid networks from around the world then connect in a global cooperative network to share learning, support and more.

The aim is to redesign the economy by redesigning our own work lives, and those of people in our networks, to make real networks of real trust that connect with other communities in networks of real trust, weaving into a neighborly global economy that can replenish the health of the planet, our communities and ourselves.

Right now we’re using that framework to realize a really cool, collaborative gardening project called Everywhere Gardens. You can join. We’re matching untended or under-tended land (your yard? part of it? the median strip on your street? the patch of weeds down the block?) and gardeners of all stripes. No experience is needed, but if you have experience, you’re welcome to share it with others. 

We’re taking care to stay socially distanced and to share learning via online platforms in addition to making more low-tech ways to communicate with our neighbors who don’t use (or want to use) computers. 

There’s a role for everyone to play. If you don’t like to garden, you don’t have to. That’s the point: matching people with what they really want to do. A lot of different work goes into it, including building, art, coordinating, communications, etc. – a place for everyone to shine.

Want to learn more? Join? Invite your neighbors? Let us know.

There’s never been a better time to have food and medicine growing all around us, and to share it with our neighbors.

Fill out this online survey (https://forms.gle/bjh8T7jYtnyZEfET8) or print paper copies to help recruit friends and neighbors, email info@mutualaidnetwork.org, or call 608-443-8229 for more information.

We have meetups on Zoom every Sunday, 2‒4 pm and Tuesday at 6 pm. Join us. Find it all at mutualaidnetwork.org/calendar.