(Image: A Will and A Way)
(Image: A Will and A Way)
Seattle’s homelessness crisis continues and government efforts come and go — here is one very small example of a different approach that moves outside City Hall’s response to the crisis. Forming in small community efforts nationwide during Black Lives Matter and anti-police protests of recent years, mutual aid organizations use donations to provide marginalized groups with resources such as food and medical care. One busy here is A Will and A Way, a Capitol Hill-based organization that seeks to uplift and support the local unhoused community.
A Will and A Way formed from a group of local protest medics who provided care to participants in a number of local demonstrations, that has since branched out and began to offer support services over the year and a half it has been on the Hill, a member of A Will and A Way tells CHS.
“We started to see how much the police brutality was also affecting the unhoused community, and so as the protests started to die down, we shifted into providing medical aid to the unhoused community,” the member said.
The member CHS spoke with chose to remain anonymous in order to avoid putting themselves in the spotlight above other members in the group — reflecting the horizontal organization of A Will and A Way.
The group considers harm reduction to be its chief priority, achieved through means such as educating members of the community on using Narcan as well as by providing clean needles. Some other volunteer tasks include providing people with hot meals and informing the public about the unique ways in which they can uplift their unhoused neighbors.
A Will and A Way volunteers perform a number of different tasks across the organization. The ingredients for hot meals, for example, are collected by some volunteers, and are then cooked and prepared by volunteers with food handling certifications, and then distributed by members of the group.
In the weeks and months that followed the police raid and clearance of CHOP and Cal Anderson Park, the city fostered discussions about how best to “memorialize” the energy and effort behind the unrest including how to support and fund mutual aid efforts like A Will and A Way. Most of that focus has since shifted to planning resources for Cal Anderson around public safety — not funding for mutual aid. Meanwhile, Mayor Bruce Harrell has championed philanthropy and charitable giving from the region’s wealthiest residents and companies to help with the ongoing crisis. Early this year, the Partnership for Zero launched to coordinate some $10 million in funding from “major businesses and philanthropies in King County that have formed the We Are In homelessness charity effort led by the Ballmer Group to power “peer navigators, flexible funding, a command center and data” in an effort to to “dramatically reduce unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle.”
Meanwhile, groups like A Will and A Way’s volunteers aim to provide the unhoused community with basic human necessities and sustenance while building trust with them and being sensitive to their trauma. This takes a large amount of emotional labor, which members of the group must also consider and actively manage, A Will and A Way tells CHS.
A Will and a Way took part in a mutual aid spring fair at Cal Anderson earlier this year
“It takes a lot of work to coordinate everything, because we all are doing it for free, we aren’t paid. So we set really healthy boundaries around the work we can and can’t do,” the member said.
The group also said that communication from the city about encampment sweeps needs improvement. A Will and A Way hopes for members of the community to communicate with the city themselves.
“We really want to encourage people with the education privilege to start attending city council meetings, and talk about why we need more resources allocated to the unhoused community and not to the police budget,” the member said.
As the organization continues to grow, A Will and A Way invites new volunteers to reach them at [email protected]. The group has a vetting process in place to ensure a safe space is maintained for both its volunteers as well as the unhoused neighbors it serves.
Weekly meetings are hosted Wednesdays in Cal Anderson Park, though the group prefers that new members consult the group by email before attending. Clothing and donation drives are also held in the park on a monthly basis.
Updates on A Will and A Way can be found by following their Twitter and Instagram pages, and donations are accepted through their Venmo @AWillAndAwayMA.
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