Hello All,
My name is Vannay and I am an organizer with Petersburg Mutual Aid, a collective dedicated to community based problem-solving. We wish to reach out to the Intentional Communities in the state of Virginia and, perhaps, the surrounding states, in order to present you with a plan.
Petersburg Mutual Aid wishes to start engaging with the city’s homeless population more within a month or so. Yet, instead of just doing the regular clothing/food/resources drives that we already do, we wish to create an overarching project that will need multiple autonomous partners to achieve. Thus, we are reaching out to already existing communities to see if they would be willing to house some of these individuals for a time (the number and conditions are obviously up to you). Once housed, Petersburg Mutual Aid, with other partners, will provide these individuals with training in a trade that will definitely add value to the community where they are placed. Once trained, it will be up to the discretion of both the individual and the community on whether or not to continue their relationship. If not, Petersburg Mutual Aid will help the individual get employment and housing elsewhere.
While the desire to eliminate homelessness is clear, the overall goal of this project would be to create a force of independent and skilled labor who will be able to recreate autonomous, non-hierarchical intentional communities elsewhere –including and especially in Petersburg itself. Certainly, this will not be the case with most, or even the majority, of individuals who participate in the program but if even one or two find this experience meaningful enough to propagate, it would have been a success.
Please tell us your thoughts on this. You can find out more about Petersburg Mutual Aid at the following link: linktr.ee/petersburgmutualaid . You can email us at petersburgmutualaid@protonmail.com .
Thank you for your time.