When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, groups of neighbors across the country organized to help one another in a moment of crisis. Mutual aid efforts that emerged postpandemic got a lot of attention for their ambitious goals of addressing needs in a markedly different way from government and nonprofit models, but they also faced criticism from scholars and activists who saw these efforts as perpetuating existing problematic dynamics of charity. Understanding the nuance of postpandemic mutual aid organizing requires in-depth, temporal, and place-based research. This study uses Crown Heights Mutual Aid in Brooklyn as a case study to explore the dynamics of radical organizing in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. It focuses on the role of social infrastructure in building networks of care and proposes the term transformative infrastructure to capture the ways in which radical organizing in Crown Heights after COVID-19 shifted from direct crisis response toward the creation of lasting networks supporting relationship building, housing justice, and abolition.
Laura Landau (Wed,) studied this question.