Hi! This is a one-page info sheet designed to get you up to speed with what the Packmates Mutual Aid is about and how you can contribute in the context of a fundraiser event. The goal of this document is to get you to a point of understanding and being able to speak confidently on the topic.
The Packmates Mutual Aid is a small-scale mutual aid organization aimed at building a community of people helping one another to meet their needs. Packmates is aimed at especially at doing so within the subculture of furry, which provides a unique basis for shared understanding.
Currently, Packmates is housed on the ‘Friendathans’ discord server while it develops, but will eventually become it’s own free-standing community as soon as it grows large enough. People who would like to join Packmates are welcome to reach out via the Contact Form to request an invite.
You’re probably familiar with what charity is, and fundraising for charity is already pretty common in the furry fandom. However, charity is a top-down approach; generally, the people organizing and donating to a charity don’t have overlap with the recipients of the charity. It tends to focus on symptoms rather than on addressing systemic causes.
Mutual aid is more of a bottom-up approach, with people pulling together and helping one another directly. The people contributing to the mutual aid are also the people receiving aid from it— so they get to decide for themselves how the organization is structured and what it focuses on. It enables a community to build into itself, creating resiliency and mutual support, rather than relying primarily on external contributions.
You can find a couple of videos to further these distinctions here:
We’re All We Got, We’re All We Need: A Mutual Aid Explainer
What is Mutual Aid? (Classroom Version)
Usually mutual aids are focused locally, because people living in the same area tend to have similar unmet needs, and it’s a lot easier to share resources and organize in person. Packmates is online, but is still focused on helping our members with various needs, both financial and non-financial.
Charity isn’t a bad thing, obviously— but it’s different from mutual aid, and these distinctions are important to understand.
Members of the community submit an aid request through this form. Organizer volunteers (people in the community who help run the mutual aid) then look at the submitted requests. Sometimes individual members will just fulfill the request themselves up front. If this doesn’t happen, then active volunteers will discuss the request, based on our evaluation criteria, and will vote on the request. If approved, the person who requested the aid will be connected with a volunteer and/or have aid dispensed directly, depending on the nature of the request.
For larger financial aid requests, or if the Packmates financial aid pool is currently low, then we may need to put on a fundraiser event in order to fulfill the request. In that case, various members of the community will volunteer to stream, take commissions, etc to raise money to meet the need. Donations are sent to the Packmates Mutual Aid’s page on GiveButter, unless the aid recipient has a separate fundraiser page.
In a way, the mutual aid almost acts as a sort of catch-all insurance for our community. If you know you can come here to ask for help when you need it, then maybe your life will have more of a sense of security and less scarcity anxiety!
There are three major ways to help! You can do as many as you want and are able to:
Organizing: Our organization ‘staff’ is entirely based in community volunteers. Some people have one small task (such as making sure there are stream mods present on fundraiser day), other people have larger ongoing tasks, such as reviewing aid requests, maintaining internal documents, and helping to make events happen.
You can volunteer to do this by giving yourself the Aid Volunteer role in the roles channel, and then hopping into the #aid-coordination channel. Then just ask in there to see what needs done!
Fundraising: If you do any sort of streaming on Twitch, you can help out here! We‘ll be posting in #organizing-discussion any time a new event is being planned, so check there to sign up. Whether you’re doing art and taking small commissions, or just playing a game and talking about the mutual aid or the person in need and taking tips, this is a crucial part of the process.
You don’t actually have to stream to do this, either! You’re welcome to take small commissions on social media, donate a portion of sales, etc. Just make sure to keep the fundraising deadline in mind.
Support: The other two contributions won’t get anywhere without the final contribution, support! This refers to both social and fiscal support. If you’ve got disposable income, contribute financially to help out. Help boost the live event (and/or the fundraiser link) on social media. And if you’ve got time, please hang out in the chat on the streams! Keeping the energy going and engaging with the streamers may sound small, but it’s an essential element of the whole thing.
Donations should all be made to the active campaign for the currently ongoing fundraiser, which can be found on the Packmates Mutual Aid page on GiveButter. (In some instances, the fundraiser may instead point towards an aid recipient’s own pre-existing fundraiser instead.)
Once there, click the box below ‘Active Campaigns’ which will take you to the current fundraiser page. It should look something like this:
Once here, click the Fundraise button (right above ‘Team Members’) and sign up! You will get a personalized URL that you can use for your stream to track how much you raise. You don't need to fill out the goal or story, you can leave those blank if you want.
Unfortunately there isn't a native donation bar yet, however we can still add one in OBS: