Your ability to comfortably and confidently describe our values will make it as easy as possible to get people interested. You should be able to summarize these ideas. The headers on this page will outline questions you should be able to answer:
We are a small-scale mutual aid based in furry, working to help cover one another’s unmet needs as they arise, be it a need for funding or for other general aid.
See the ‘About’ subpage for more info.
This website has some good resources to familiarize yourself:
Every furry and furry con knows what charity is. How succinctly can you explain how mutual aid is different? We don’t need to poo-poo the idea of charity or dismiss it’s contributions, but to clarify that charity is not a system aimed at being self-sustaining for the people it helps.
In contrast, mutual aid intends to enable people in the mutual aid to uplift one another as a group. Ideally, we want to help people make tangible improvements in their lives, so that they can help others to do the same.
When a mutual aid organization is at it’s most effective and robust, it makes a manifest difference in a community’s ability to care for itself, without relying on the random generosity of strangers as it would with a charity. It addresses people’s material needs at a base level, rather than playing whack-a-mole with the crises of their lives.
You can further familiarize yourself with the Aid Request process, with General Aid Examples and with Evaluation Criteria if you need a more robust understanding of the basic aid request processes.
Aid is given freely; these are not loans. However, the whole thing only works because people show up and put in their time and energy to help structure the mutual aid, so people are encouraged to volunteer as they are able to do so.
If we can deprogram from our individualist-focused lives, and build trust with our fellow humans, we can do so much great in the world. We want a model of remote-to-in-person community building (it may start online but affects our local actions). One day, we want to share an optimized, tried and true method of community building with the furry public at large, so that they can do the same thing we’re doing here in their own spaces. We want this level of care to become the standard in furry. We want furries to understand this: the line between “I wish I could do something” and “I’m a fixture of this community” is razor thin.
We want everyone who joins us to feel stronger, more capable, more connected, and more ready for the world’s problems than ever before.
We are all at different levels on our journey to being active participants in the world around us. We don’t all need to think the same, but we also need a baseline of shared values to keep our membership safe.
This starts with accepting that politics is not a battle of opinions, but an acceptance of action and consequence. We do not want to win arguments. We want actions that speak for themselves.