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Can a group of anarchists succeed where the government failed?
Woodbine is a volunteer-run cultural hub based in Ridgewood, Queens, a predominantly immigrant and working-class neighborhood on the eastern edge of New York City.
Before the pandemic, the space was home to lectures, screenings and poetry readings; was used by organizers and political groups for meetings and assemblies; hosted free weekly meals every Sunday evening; and generally served as a social center for locals and activists.
But at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Woodbine members and volunteers shifted almost all of their efforts toward distributing food to residents, along with clothing and help with housing. This was part of a wave of mutual aid projects that sprouted up all over the world as governments failed to step up. At the peak of the pandemic, Woodbine’s food pantry was distributing food to around 3,000 people every week – and the project is still going strong.
I sat down with Matt Peterson, Woodbine organizer and filmmaker, about where the collective stands today after almost two years of COVID in New York City.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Can you talk about starting the food pantry?
Shortly after Woodbine opened its doors in 2014, we started hosting weekly Sunday dinners that were open to anyone. In our second year, we launched a community garden, as well as a community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscription program, to bring organic produce directly to our neighbors from small independent farms in the region.
These projects helped us build ties in Ridgewood, including with a local homeless outreach and food rescue organization called Hungry Monk. When the pandemic hit New York in March 2020, we partnered with them to collectively distribute free food in Ridgewood five days a week. We’ve kept that up now for almost two years.
The early months of the pandemic were chaotic, what with all the sirens, uncertainties, deaths and the economy and schools shutting down. Still, we managed to insert ourselves into this emergency response network that formed within New York, and we figured out how to become a hub for receiving and distributing food and other supplies to our neighbors.
Describe the conditions in New York that made the pantry so necessary.
As a collective, we have been reflecting broadly on the last 20 years of life in New York City, from 9/11 to the 2008 financial crisis, to Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and then to this pandemic. Because of the size and density of New York, its aging infrastructures and extreme wealth disparities, its global position as a financial, political and cultural hub, when something goes wrong here, it often goes very wrong.
Friends in Europe and even Canada find it hard to imagine how little of a safety net exists in the U.S. This is especially true in a neighborhood like ours, which is made up mostly of working-class immigrants, many of whom have English as their second, or even third or fourth, language, and some of whom are undocumented.
The reality is that food insecurity existed long before this virus arrived, so during the initial weeks of mutual aid groups offering free food, many families stood in line for reasons that had nothing to do with COVID. This emergency just created a new context which made that visible.
As we organized around those needs, we were able to meet a lot more people in Ridgewood than we had when we functioned as a primarily cultural space. These were also different kinds of people: We met the mothers, grandmothers and aunties of the neighborhood, the elderly and disabled. Many of our volunteers only spoke Polish, Arabic, Chinese or Spanish, but we still found ways to run a food pantry together.
How have you kept up momentum and energy during the last two years, as burnout has been such a problem in many of the newly formed mutual aid networks?
Because the community around Woodbine had close to a decade of experience before COVID, we had relationships and ties that weren’t just spontaneous, or online. We had a physical infrastructure and social scaffolding that allowed us to maintain our space and our network of volunteers. The hard part of sustaining any project is building up that critical mass.
We have always tried to experiment with different forms and practices, and to not let our dynamics stagnate. What we do should never feel like obligatory grunt work, but rather something that builds relationships, trust, capacities. In the last two years this has taken the form of outdoor barbecues when that started to feel safe, starting a screening series, organizing a soccer team that plays in a local league, doing karaoke nights at a bar nearby, offering crafts programming for kids, doing podcasts, poetry readings, seed exchanges, building mesh networks, opening a gym and woodshop inside our space.
Our mission was never to be just a disaster relief organization: We are trying to build a communal form of life that feels worth inhabiting, and not just during a pandemic or hurricane or economic downturn.
On that last point, you’ve proposed a political methodology you call “disaster confederalism.”
During the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011-2012, there were many public occupations, spontaneous assemblies and working groups, and demonstrations against the banks and police that were inspired by the Arab Spring and what was happening in Spain and Greece. These seemed to offer templates for how people could come together in shared precarity and isolation, and think about how they would like to reorganize their lives. The mutual aid response to COVID felt similar. New groups were spontaneously popping up everywhere, and people were using social media to organize and help their neighbors survive.
The political question is, how do we make those practices and relationships part of our everyday lives outside of moments of spectacular disaster?
When things settle, we’re so quickly pulled back into the status quo of wage labor and representative governance, of what Abdullah Ocalan calls “capitalist modernity.” For us, the networking of autonomous initiatives and local groups is what we call “disaster confederalism”: it means continuing to develop these forms as our own institutions, building power that is separate from those which cause the crises, isolation and weakness in the first place.
Now that we have a much larger space, we're putting together a gathering around this idea of disaster confederalism in partnership with groups like Symbiosis and the Institute for Social Ecology.
What are future plans for the pantry?
Since we started the food pantry, we’ve expanded our partnerships, including with Fenix, a local taxi stand that turned their storefront into a food pantry; Club A, a group of anarchists who run a food pantry out of a squatted community garden; and with farms in the Hudson Valley who give us free food. Our long-term plans are to keep our food distribution going for as long as we're able to maintain a supply line of food, and as long as our neighbors remain in need.
In some ways our space and organization looks and feels completely different than it did before COVID, but what we’re doing is exactly what we had hoped for when we started the space in the 2014 movement: organizing together for survival, and building a life in common.
— Andreas Petrossiants
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