Homelessness is a punishment for being poor. No matter your life decisions, health emergencies, or criminal record, being housed should never be put into question. Our homes are what allow all other aspects of life. Housing is the most basic human need beyond air, water, and food. And yet, this economy has never dared to guarantee housing, food, and clean air and water to all who reside under it. We in Warm Up Boston view this as a serious and violent misarrangement of priorities. “Violent” is not an exaggeration when poverty of both the housed and the unhoused leads to an astonishing rate of early deaths.

We choose to act where we have power. In providing food and water to an encampment and to folks in downtown Boston, we are able to provide basic needs for survival. Both of our distributions were successful this week, thanks to the dedicated work of volunteers both on the ground and behind the scenes.

While this work demands a lot from us every week, we find the strength to carry on in the dream of ending this needless suffering. By turning to one another to carry out necessary tasks when we tire, we preserve our energy and capacity to continue. We are even more relieved when more and more of our neighbors step in to do this work with us.

Lastly, we want to thank the rad community groups @skatehags and @bostonmidweekskate for their donation drives that will keep our homeless neighbors warmer this winter. We thank @BostonAnarchistBookfair for having us and its attendees for bringing canned goods and $1000 in donations! Those funds covered the purchase of 3800 hand warmers. We also thank @bloww_boston for helping us raise another $1000 by hosting us at their most recent show; those funds covered the purchase of 600 hats and 750 pairs of gloves! We have more chances to donate coming up – tomorrow at @night_cap_cafe and Friday at @absolutedisruption organizers will be collecting canned goods!

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a lesson here for Democrats.

“Though the results for workers are a mixed bag, it’s clear that Americans care deeply about the economy and their material conditions and that populist proposals that better people’s working lives can win, even in red states.”

#Politics #USPolitics #Election2024 #Economics #WorkingClassSupport #ProgressivePolitics #ServeThePeople

From: @newrepublic
https://www.threads.net/@newrepublic/post/DCCsRAaoReg

[Original post from 10/10] [All tagged accounts on Instagram] Last weekend on our mobile route we gave out sandwiches, waters, snacks, toiletries, harm reduction supplies, and tons of socks courtesy of @ffcof2020 and @redsgoodvibes. Since it’s getting chilly, our hot drink carafes also made their return, and folks were thrilled to get coffee, tea, and hot chocolate!

At the encampment we gave out a hot meal of chicken and veggie teriyaki with rice, tarps, tents, snacks, canned goods, water, trash bags, clothing, and harm reduction supplies.

We also had a great time hanging out with folks from @smokeworksharmreduction last weekend. Some of our members packaged ~7000 bubble pipes and 500 safer injection kits! Stay tuned for future collaborations and volunteer days.

Fun fact: Warm Up is overseen by a league of feline harm reductionists. Thanks to their devoted efforts, every distro we give out narcan, bubble pipes, straight pipes, chore, and injection kits. Injection kits include needles, tourniquets, alcohol wipes, cookers, cottons, sterile waters, and sometimes bleach. The Warm Up kitties are determined to give people access to new drug use supplies to reduce risk of injury, infection, and infectious diseases. While they lack the opposable thumbs needed to administer Narcan, they’re determined to ensure we always distro so folks can reverse overdoses.

To learn more about harm reduction, check out the great work of folks like @harmreductionboston, @smokeworksharmreduction, @harmreductioncoalition, @materialaidandadvocacyprogram, @pro_lapsed_catholic
@nextdistro

This week we brought a hot meal of chicken, peas, and pasta, canned goods, snacks, water, clothing, blankets, and harm reduction supplies to the encampment. On our mobile distro we brought sandwiches, snacks, wound care kits, waters, socks, toiletries, hot drinks, and harm reduction supplies to folks around downtown, the Common, South Station, and Back Bay.

We build trust with community members we serve by consistently showing up week after week with the same supplies. It is essential to our work that encampment residents know exactly where their dinner will be coming that night and that they’ll each get a case of water every week. We hear frequently from folks on mobile routes that they were waiting for us to come by because they knew we’d be coming by with new needles and sandwiches.

It is always a gift to be trusted by another person, and we do not take it lightly. We’re only able to consistently show up each week because of our incredible volunteers and donors. We are endlessly grateful for our volunteers who spend their free time making sandwiches and meals, tabling at events, and of course, doing distros.

We wanted to take another moment to highlight our gratitude for our volunteers and community members who helped us expand our outreach this summer through tabling. We’re endlessly grateful for all the amazing orgs that invited us to table with them and for our volunteers who are often running from distros straight to set up the table at events. As a fully volunteer run group, we rely immensely on community support, and the Boston community has really come through for us as we continue to build solidarity with our unhoused comrades and keep on with our material aid distributions.

Tabling allows us to sell merch (thanks to Speakeasy Printshop!) and collect donations of material aid to support our community members, meet insanely cool people, and distribute harm reduction supplies and info. When we table, we often bring narcan, safer sex supplies, fentanyl test strips, and some incredible zines from Content Brakes and Next Distro. Most importantly, tabling gives us the opportunity to spread the word to our housed comrades about some of the challenges that unhoused community members have shared with us, like the violence from Boston’s camping ban, increased policing, lack of access to affordable housing, difficulties accessing services, overdoses, and more.

Thank you so much to everyone who has invited us to your events!

Every summer we get a big dip in the amount of donations that come in. In order to keep up with the assortment of supplies we offer our unhoused neighbors for their survival (ESPECIALLY through this brutal heat wave), our friends at #SpeakeasyPrintshop have yet again come through for us to offer this print-to-order fundraiser which we will use the funds from to make sure folks are hydrated, kept cool, and have protection from the elements for the summer months. We also want to give a HUGE thank you to all our new donors in the last few days, because of your generosity we will be able to buy 4 new tents for the encampment residents and were able to increase our ice budget.

These t-shirts were made with union labor and the design was created in-house by one of our incredible volunteers. This colorway will be a ONE TIME PRINT and this presale will only be up for the next TWO WEEKS.

Sweeps are violence! During the latest sweep at the encampment earlier this week, residents were given no notice, forced to move in the extreme heat, and lost a lot of what they use for shelter. If a volunteer had not just happened to be driving by at the right time, we would not have even been able to assist and witness.

Get your “Sweeps are Violence” t-shirt now to show your solidarity with the unhoused community in the Boston area. Link to purchase on our Linktree in our bio.

https://www.speakeasyprintshop.com/warm-up-boston/sweepsareviolence

Cruelty is the point: while the rest of Boston hunkers down in air conditioning, residents of the encampment are settling back in after another sweep early this week.

Residents were told by DCR that a sweep was impending on Tuesday, and we were prepared to assist with helping them Tuesday morning. However, on Monday morning, a volunteer spotted the sweep already in action a full day before the residents were told to expect and prepare for it.

We quickly mobilized and had a team of volunteers on site within an hour to help with the logistics and labor of moving. However, many belongings were still destroyed by DCR, and many residents have been awake for days on end, making them even more susceptible to this week’s heat emergency.

We’ve followed up each day since—some of the hottest this year—with aftercare for the residents, including ice, extra harm reduction supplies, extra water, breakfast sandwiches, PBJs, electrolyte tablets, liquid IV, and a birthday surprise for a resident.

Our focus is, as always, keeping our unhoused neighbors as safe and healthy as possible in a system designed to abuse them.

What’s the point of the sweeps, if not cruel punishment for the crime of being unhoused? As one resident put it: “They just don’t want us getting comfortable.”

With these punitive practices and inhumane treatment, DCR and the City of Boston make it clear that they do not see the unhoused as human beings, deserving of respect and compassion, rather they see them as an inconvenience to be swept aside at a moments notice.

Every summer we get a big dip in the amount of donations that come in. In order to keep up with the assortment of supplies we offer our unhoused neighbors for their survival (ESPECIALLY through this brutal heat wave), our friends at @speakeasy_printshop have yet again come through for us to offer this print-to-order fundraiser which we will use the funds from to make sure folks are hydrated, kept cool, and have protection from the elements for the summer months. We also want to give a HUGE thank you to all our new donors in the last few days, because of your generosity we will be able to buy 4 new tents for the encampment residents and were able to increase our ice budget.

These t-shirts were made with union labor and the design was created in-house by one of our incredible volunteers. This colorway will be a ONE TIME PRINT and this presale will only be up for the next TWO WEEKS.

Sweeps are violence! During the latest sweep at the encampment earlier this week, residents were given no notice, forced to move in the extreme heat, and lost a lot of what they use for shelter. If a volunteer had not just happened to be driving by at the right time, we would not have even been able to assist and witness.

Get your “Sweeps are Violence” t-shirt now to show your solidarity with the unhoused community in the Boston area. Link to purchase on our Linktree in our bio.

Our comrades this week returned to the encampment to distribute necessary supplies for survival. This included a hot meal, 7 cases of water, snacks, fruit, croissants, as well as requested items such as clothing, cleaning supplies, and harm reduction supplies.

We do this work not as an act of charity, but as an act of solidarity with our neighbors that our healthcare system and housing market fails. The cities, state, non-profits, and other agencies all agree on a housing first model. Yet they actively under fund and under serve as they over promise. They consistently side with the landlords, insurance companies, land owners, and bosses when they allow thousands to suffer a daily crisis. Through this work we aim to create an alliance between housed and unhoused folks to build a strong community ready to fight for the basic protections we owe to each other on a human level. That's why we say strong communities begin with warm meals!

Thank you to all our online donors, you are driving this organization to accompmish so much! We have multiple ways for you to donate in our bio in our linktree. We also thank all of our comrades on the ground, we need both to make this happen. If you are looking to take part in distributions and gain experience organizing, please dm us on here and we'll get you started! #WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #EncampmentSupport #SolidarityNotCharity #MutualAid

This past Sunday we conducted our weekly mobile distro. Despite the busy streets and crowds of green hindering our ability to get to some of the places we typically serve, we still found folks in the hiding places they told us about. We are thankful that the community trusts us with their hideaways; we can do our job better that way.

Since this distro happened on a day when many people were celebrating their Irish heritage, we wanted to highlight the struggles the Irish people went through and explain how the famine and mass displacement suffered by the people of Ireland, and the famine and mass displacement currently happening in Gaza are connected. They are connected because of a root cause: colonialism.

British colonialists and landlords in 19th century Ireland displayed genocidal intent as they exported millions of pounds of food to other countries while the Irish people were starving to death, and landlords destroyed their properties and evicted tenants just to get out of paying “famine relief” taxes. The genocidal intent of the IOF has never been more clearly articulated than today, in bombing and starving millions of Palestinians; but the roots of this famine and displacement go much deeper, starting with stripping the native populations of their food sovereignty through settler colonialism.

Our struggles here with food insecurity might not be at the same proportion as the examples above, but they too are connected. When food and housing are not viewed as necessary to life, but rather a means to produce profit for the ruling class, the system by design creates great inequality and suffering. The ruling class and the billionaires who control them have all the money and the power to end war, to end genocide, to end famine, to end homelessness, but they don’t. They will always prioritize profits over people. From Boston to Ireland to Palestine, the struggles of the oppressed are one struggle. #WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #MutualAid #HarmReduction #MobileOutreach #EncampmentSupport #StPatricksDay #StPatricksDayBoston #Ireland #Palestine

Earlier this week, a few Warm Up organizers met with some senior-year high school students of New Mission High who were awesome enough to spend their lunch break with us. We taught them about mutual aid, why it’s necessary, who and what influenced us to do this work, and how our work differs from state programs or church organizations. We were thrilled to answer their thought-provoking questions and were exceptionally thrilled about their desire to help participate in our cause. We look forward to seeing what these students come up with and working together with them in the coming weeks.
#WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #MutualAid #HarmReduction #MobileOutreach #EncampmentSupport #WUBIsForTheChildren

At this week’s encampment distro, we delivered hot meals, cookies, canned food, snacks, fruit, 5 cases of water bottles, means to keep warm, batteries, superglue, blankets/sleeping bags, and assorted clothing, including some that had been requested, to the residents. We’re grateful to consistently be seeing high numbers of volunteers at each of our distros, to the point where we’ve had to cap attendance some weeks. As we’ve noted, we are turning our eye towards expansion and adding new volunteer opportunities to channel the rising energy we’re seeing in our dedicated volunteer base.

The residents we serve have been consistently shunted from place to place over the last few months. This week, we learned they’ve once again been told to move, though they’ve been given inconsistent timeframes and instructions that seem intentionally vague and difficult to follow. As though it’s not enough to be unsheltered with the weather still getting so cold, they’re given increasingly opaque directions that seem to have an end goal of them disappearing into thin air. We are keeping an open line of communication and preparing to assist in whatever comes next for them. If you’d like to be a part of that effort, please reach out. #WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #EncampmentSupport #MutualAid

Does WarmUp know how to cross the street…?
Yes! We do!

We were very happy to be out and about yesterday, bringing our unhoused community members food, water, gloves, beanies, hot hands, and harm reduction supplies. Our favorite part of the mobile distro is getting to talk to everyone and building relationships with folks who we see regularly. People’s needs will start to change as the weather does and we are still in the process of expanding our outreach, so if you are interested in volunteering or contributing to this work, DM us!

(Patch on the last 2 slides by #SamPao !!)
#ServeThePeople #SolidarityNotCharity #MaterialAid #MutualAid #SurvivalProgram #WarmUpBoston

The role of harm reduction is essential to all we do as an organization. After our last few mobile distros, our resident harm reductionist provided intro harm reduction education and orienting to our newer volunteers. This went beyond just talking about practical tools for interfacing with people who use drugs and folks experiencing homelessness.

Though the ultimate harm reduction will come from eventually destroying these systems of oppression, in the meantime we are doing what we can as housed activists to work in solidarity with our unhoused neighbors. We do our best to center the needs, asks, and material realities of the people we serve, over what we, as housed activists, think they need. One of the most important things is that we provide material aid with NO conditions. We believe that people should not have to fulfill some sort of requirement in order to have access to basic necessities such as food, water, clothing, medical services, housing, and the like. On this past weekend’s mobile distro, we handed out hand warmers, beanies, socks, gloves, harm reduction supplies, toiletries, ~ 50 sandwiches (various meats and pb&js), ~250 snacks, and again were able to bring along carafes of hot water for hot chocolate, coffee, soup, and tea.

*SWIPE TO THE LAST PHOTO* to see one of our regulars, Ray “The Bird Man” and his pigeon friends. We find him in the same spot every week hanging with his fellow unhoused veterans and feeding the birds. Chatting with him is one of the highlights of the mobile distros, and though we are sad that he won’t be around as much anymore, we are thrilled that he has been placed into housing. He signed his new lease yesterday! (Photo taken and posted with Ray’s consent).

Last night, Warm Up had our first reading group in a long time. We had a very productive discussion of Mass Work by the CPP at @lucyparsonscent. We’d like to give a shout out to @germinalbooks for making beautiful copies of this text for us. #WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #MutualAid #ReadingGroup #Study #PoliticalEducation

We had a great turnout at last week’s distro, including a few new volunteers. We delivered hot meals (buffalo mac and cheese), 4 cases of water bottles, snacks and canned soup, means to keep warm, requested clothes and socks, hygiene and wound care supplies, and trash bags. We are thrilled to be reaching such a large volume of people who are ready and willing to come out with us in cold, rain, or snow, ready to do the work providing aid for vulnerable members of our communities. If that sounds like you, don’t hesitate to reach out for more information. #WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #EncampmentSupport #MutualAid

This past Sunday we distributed essential survival supplies to the unhoused downtown. This included over 60 sandwiches and waters to go with as well as hot hands, hats, gloves, and hygiene products.

The more we're able to directly provide the means of survival to our neighbors who have been violently pushed out of the housing market, the more we prove there is an abundance of resources for everyone here. Fascists will say there isn't enough for everyone. Liberals will help so little as to never solve the problem. We say the problem is by design and is inseparable from the profit of the landlord class.

Thank you to all of you who have donated, you have allowed us to do so much recently. Check our bio if you would like to donate. We are always looking for new volunteers, any and all help is appreciated. If you're interested in joining, message us directly on here and we'll get you set up.
#WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #MutualAid #HarmReduction

Fun fact about Warm Up: We’ve never, not even once, done the lord’s work. #WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #MutualAid #SolidarityNotCharity #NotTheChurch

Fun fact about Warm Up: We’ve never, not even once, done the lord’s work. #WarmUpBoston #ServeThePeople #SurvivalProgram #MutualAid #SolidarityNotCharity #NotTheChurch