Who We Are
Our Mission
To establish meaningful and informed relationships with unhoused neighbors throughout our communities.
To alleviate the difficulties and frustration around access to the most basic needs for this population, by distributing quality essential supplies, water, and food.
To organize and plan with these communities to increase visibility and assist with access to outside resources, especially those involving financial, medical, and housing security.
To accumulate and distributing our learned knowledge from this work, so that other communities may feel empowered to help those in their own neighborhoods.
From Street Medics to Community Advocates.
The organizers of NeighborAid first met in May of 2020 as founding members of an Oakland-based street medic collective, originally called to serve the imminent need of the Black Lives Matter movement in our hometown.
We invested hundreds of hours engaging in street medic first-aid training and CPR certification, listening to our community members to understand where our efforts were needed, providing on-ground support and transportation, as well as onboarding new members who wanted to offer their own resources.
Within a month, we had quickly scaled and trained to serve the needs of multiple, intertwined social justice movements across the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
It was in this effort that we deepened our knowledge of how to work with our community to affect great change. We were inspired to see our community come together time and time again to provide support to organizers, make critical demands of change-makers, sharing their own resources - and through the processes, we all grew to realize the power of the people when we work together in building a better community for us all.
As many protests began to quiet, we knew the movement was not over and continued to look for ways to serve our community. It started with visits to our curbside community members’ homes to provide basic first aid, and a mass distribution effort to hand out N95 masks to protect those living outdoors from smoke inhalation during the height of fire season.
By fall 2020, we started to hand out dozens of tents and sleeping bags, at the request of houseless folks who were facing the start of colder weather. Due to global warming, we do not anticipate these needs to become lighter, it is our goal to aid in education and resource development to share with others to implement within their community.
Downtown Oakland being impacted by Fire Season 2020. This photo was taken by Ryan Boswell at noon.
After several months of piloting our work as distributors of goods and resources, we’ve now formally launched NeighborAid, a mutual aid group dedicated to ensuring the most marginalized members of our community have access to food, warmth, first aid, and sanitation. We are a team of five dedicated individuals, and so far this entire operation has been funded by our team. Any donation, financial or otherwise, would be incredibly appreciated and ensures our continuation towards our goals.
More than halfway through 2021, we have found our rhythm for best practices, both in preparation and execution. We are learning how to become wholesale buyers to receive the best value from our donations and share that with other mutual-aid organizations that could also benefit. We are learning that each individual has their own set of needs specific to them, and we are striving to meet them. We are learning how to work with the local government to pass legislation providing sanctuary for those without a home and ensure unlawful sweeps of homes do not occur by OPD. We are eagerly awaiting and absorbing all that we can and share all that we learn. We hope that folks will take advantage of our learned processes and implement them within their own community. We are here to help you, let us know how we can do that.
