Coordinating During a Time of Crisis

Hi Friends!

So many changes in a week! I hope you’re all healthy and hanging in there on sanity (especially if you have young kiddos at home!). Please remember self-care and don’t underestimate its importance.

Our group has a particularly important role during this time — to advocate for and amplify the voices and needs of those most vulnerable in this crisis. This group has been working on educating ourselves about systemic racism and how dangerous bias can be. We have empowered ourselves to speak up. More and more people are waking up to systemic inequities in our community and we need to be calm, encouraging voices to push efforts to address these needs in the short term and also to push for systemic change in the long term.

I have been working on a couple of things this week:
- focusing on creating a structure at home so my household doesn’t go nuts and so I can keep doing my work effectively; and,
- focusing on collecting and learning about community-wide efforts to help everyone through this.

Related to the second one, some of you may have heard about this already, but there’s a neighborhood coordination effort taking shape in Arlington and I want to make sure you know about it. They’re trying to create a network of neighborhood captains to make sure no one slips through the cracks who needs help during this extended crisis. Feel free to reach out and get connected if you’re interested.

If you’re not interested in being a (co-)captain of a neighborhood, that’s fine. You can also get involved with volunteer efforts to help your neighbors as this gets rolled out. In the meantime, there’s also a FB group called Arlington Neighbors Helping Each Other Through COVID-19.

Everything is evolving so quickly and it looks like these efforts are doing a great job of coordinating with APS, County, and community organizations to pull everything together and create a really useful network that volunteers can tap into to get information and share information with each other, as well as taking safe actions to help each other. I’m also working on building a page on my blog to gather some of the resources most relevant to our group. Please feel free to share any you have come across with me.

Please reach out if you have any questions — it’s going to take a village to get through this! And if you’re interested in having a video call or texting with someone when things are challenging, please reach out!

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow.