Summary
The story of shipping a zine about community-led disaster response.
Back when I was mildly pregnant in 2021, I figured I would need something to work on while I was on parental leave. While I’ve transitioned my career (and am currently looking for work again), I never really reached resolution about all I had learned in crisis response that hadn’t yet been applied across the field. It’s arguably part of why I left — the field had stagnated and wasn’t adapting to new technologies and practices, and one can only bash their head against that wall for so long. But I knew I had things to teach, and that there are still folks who wanted to learn about it. So I decided to use whatever time I had to put together some guidance, to wrap things up. Did I want to finish the mixed-mode system paper I’d worked on back in my academic days? No, that would be too cumbersome to get published now that I don’t have any affiliations.
After discussing with some stakeholders about the current state of the field, I arrived at a pamphlet for the formal sector about how the informal/network groups operate, and how to work with them. The reasoning was this: ephemeral groups are impossible to know about in advance, so you can’t find them to increase their capacity. But you DO know who the formal groups are going to be. Great! I started working with a coauthor on moving it forward, but while I absolutely adore her, she’s also got a life that requires a lot of attention and a severe case of ADHD. We didn’t ship by the time my parental leave was done. Things sort of took a back seat to parenting and floundering on my own (I’m good at a first draft and final copy editing, but I really need a partner for the middle iterations).
That’s ok, it was still important. I found another coauthor (John Crowley), and we started churning out a lot of work in 2023. He struggles with scope creep (this should be a training! We should offer events and consulting!), but we kept things in check. We did expand in one specific way — in addition to the pamphlet for the formal sector, we’d also have a zine for the formal actors to hand to informal groups when they start emerging, to help them be more effective and collaborative more quickly. Great, we can do that. For my 40th birthday party in 2024, I hosted a tiny workshop to move the pamphlet and the zine forward. It was wonderful! We were making such good progress.
And then the election happened, and we had to rethink everything. Similar to an academic study I was a part of back during Occupy and the Arab Spring, we decided making the illegible legible in this case was no longer the responsible thing to do. We scrapped the pamphlet and shifted the zine from being one that a formal audience would be comfortable handing out, to one that actively warns against fascism and how to model trust between organizations.
I teamed up with another old compatriot, Drew Hornbein, who I met during Occupy Sandy response and who is now a maker of zines! We found a bunch of coauthors to finish out pieces for a diverse collection of articles. Drew helped us get a website up and get the print laid out as well. We lost the thread for a bit for the finishing touches, but finally got it all wrapped up this month! And one of my favorite parts is that, although our kickstarter didn’t succeed, I was able to use excess capital from my job in software and some outside donations to pay folks for their contributions. So not only did this get finished, it also fought capitalism in some small way.
Check it out. Print it out (or contact Drew for him to send you a copy for a small fee), sell it at book fairs, and save it on a bookshelf in a plastic bag so it survives whatever disaster happens next. It focuses mostly on operations and coalition building, with some things thrown in about security, safety, radios, etc.