Communities of care: civic response, mutual aid, and the COVID-19 pandemic
Creators: name: Landau, Laura Frances
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: The COVID-19 pandemic’s overlapping timeline with extreme climate events and socio-political crises signaled an inescapable era of compounding disasters that characterized a new global feeling of precarity. While the United States government stepped up in some equally unprecedented ways, these efforts did little to quell the impact for the most marginalized. Local civic groups and networks scrambled to address these concerns and provide direct and ongoing support in ways the government did not. This dissertation looks at the civic responses to COVID-19 in New York City, with an emphasis on understanding how existing environmental stewardship groups and emergent mutual aid groups organized to respond to the social vulnerabilities highlighted by the pandemic. It takes a temporal approach in examining the changes in group efforts over the nearly four years since the beginning of the pandemic. Additionally, this work uses a multi-scalar perspective, collecting data on the regional and citywide scale as well as the neighborhood scale to capture hyperlocal dynamics that are absent in many studies. This body of work answers the overarching question: How are civic groups and networks created through, mobilized by, and challenged during crises? In particular, this dissertation looks at the various connections between civic groups and the state, the range of impacts civic and emergent groups have on their communities from incremental to transformational, and the characteristics that support adaptive capacity and sustainability in civic groups, networks, and movement building.Data for this analysis were collected through a research survey of emergent COVID-19 response groups, multiple phases of in-depth, semi-structured, interviews with members of stewardship groups, mutual aid groups, and community based organizations, and in-person fieldwork with a local mutual aid network. This dissertation comprises four individual papers that together uncover a broad picture of the civic organizing landscape in New York City following the COVID-19 pandemic. The first paper reviews the ways mutual aid responses have shown up in New York City following both Superstorm Sandy and COVID-19, and inquires about the implications of this practice. The second paper studies existing environmental stewardship groups in the context of COVID-19, the past crisis of Superstorm Sandy, and the ongoing crises of systemic racism, to identify some of the tactics and traits that allow existing civic groups to adapt to change and respond to crises. The third paper provides a high-level overview of the landscape of mutual aid groups in post-pandemic New York City, focusing on the ways in which political values guide the groups’ organization and action. The last paper dives deeper into the neighborhood context to understand how one mutual aid group, Crown Heights Mutual Aid, exercises mutual aid praxis, and how this work fits into the wider local civic network. Taken as a whole, this work addresses the need for understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped the shifting landscape of post-disaster civic organizing; how compounding crises impact response networks, what happens as crises evolve, and how new groups interact with and change existing civic networks.Findings from this research illustrate the wide scope of responses in relation to state entities, from public-private partnerships, to mutual aid groups working “outside of the state”, to networks of civic, private, and public actors. They show how some groups transitioned from rapid pandemic response to prioritizing ongoing issues such as housing injustice and carceral state violence, working toward transformative change. Finally, they indicate that groups learn important lessons in disaster organizing, which they continue to draw from as they face new crises. This dissertation exposes the various civic response networks that emerged following the COVID-19 pandemic; in looking at the efforts of existing civic groups, the emerging grassroots organizing, and the ways these two forms of civic networks intersect, it highlights the power of crisis events to not only galvanize short term altruism, but to create lasting infrastructures for future change.