On a recent Tuesday night in downtown Reno, Bahar Jazani was laying out hygiene items and other essentials for the Family Soup Mutual Aid distribution event.
“People really could use hand warmers, especially when the weather gets super cold,” she explained. “We have feminine hygiene products, pads, tampons. People can always use those.”
Family Soup Mutual Aid is an all-volunteer group that gives out free meals and other support once a week at the Believe Plaza. Jazani started showing up to help in December 2022.
“Everyone here really feels like family. On both sides of the line,” she said.
Mutual aid efforts like Family Soup exploded in popularity during the pandemic. But according to Jazani and other mutual aid organizers, the number of people looking for food and other support has continued to increase. Meanwhile, people are forming new groups to address different needs in the community.
“We’ve had a consistent growth of people coming,” she said.
Mutual aid groups are different from traditional nonprofits. For one thing, they’re often leaderless. Instead, mutual aid relies on people working cooperatively to help their neighbors.
Meghan Archambault of the Reno/Sparks Mutual Aid Facebook Group said the whole point is to keep things simple.
“There’s no requirements to benefit,” Archambault explained. “There’s no prerequisite that you have money, or you don’t have money, or you be in desperate circumstances. It’s just that you say, ‘I need help,’ and we say, ‘Okay.’ ”
Archambault, who uses they/them pronouns, started the Reno/Sparks Mutual Aid group in the early days of the pandemic. At first, it was a way to help people find essentials like diapers and toilet paper.
“I said to myself, ‘Man, it would be pretty sweet if there was a central hub for all this,’ ” they said.
The Facebook group continued to expand. Now, Reno/Sparks Mutual Aid is a community forum with nearly 8,000 registered members where people can ask for help with food, housing assistance, legal advice and more.
While groups like Reno/Sparks Mutual Aid and Family Soup are often focused on addressing the consequences of social ills, a new coalition is looking at one of its root causes.
“[We’re] trying to figure out, how do we prevent people from living on the street?” explained Holly Brown of the Reno Sparks Tenants Union. “How do we stop that situation from even happening?”
Brown and her co-organizers hosted the union’s first meeting in July. They hope that collective action can lead to reforms that will help people stay in their homes.
“We need to start building tenant power, because I don’t think the rents are going to go down unless people legitimately start to push back, unfortunately,” she said.
While the tenants’ union is just getting off the ground, Griffin Peralta with Food Not Bombs Reno has been on the scene for years.
“I met a bunch of these guys during Occupy Wall Street,” he said. “This chapter in particular started as an Occupy Wall Street potluck. So when that kind of dissolved, we kept going.”
Food Not Bombs is a global mutual aid network that began during the early 1980’s. Here in the Truckee Meadows, there are two local chapters.
Just like Family Soup Mutual Aid, Peralta’s group hands out hot meals, packaged food and other necessities every Monday on the border between Reno and Sparks. He’s seen the level of interest in mutual aid continue to grow since he first started making meals for protesters more than a decade ago.
“I think we see more and more involvement, year over year,” he said. “Because people kind of generationally are more aware. More resentful of the government.”
The national economy is in much better shape than it was during the depths of the pandemic. Unemployment is down, consumer spending is up, and inflation has been shrinking. But Meghan Archambault with Reno/Sparks Mutual Aid said the level of need in the community remains high.
“In an ideal society, there’d probably be days where our queue is completely empty. If I looked right now, I can tell you we have over 200 requests to join. And we have at least 50 posts in our queue, I bet,” they said.
No matter what the economy looks like, Archambault said, there will always be a need for community members to help each other out.
