I started the Street Corps Working Group shortly after I joined Twin Cities DSA back in 2021 in response to the collapse of the previous Mutual Aid and Solidarity Economy (MASE) Working Group. Besides filling in the important organizing around mutual aid and dual power that I believed this chapter should be doing, I wanted to take a new approach to mutual aid and combine it with a focus on community defense and constant visible organizing and agitation of our neighbors. I believed too often our approach (and the approach of the wider left) toward organizing outside of city hall and the union sphere took the form of either a constant cycle of protests and rallies or of charity work, both which, while admirable, do not build power or make concrete gains toward organizing our community. It is with these goals and context in mind I had set about launching Street Corps.
Much like many organizing efforts Street Corps has had its ups and downs and was plagued both by capacity as well as strategic clarity. There is so much to be done in the community and so many avenues to approach things. We attempted a protest in 2022 outside a pro-life fundraiser in partnership with our Socialist Feminist Branch. We attempted several times to get a chapter Marshaling group established, each attempt going nowhere. We did several Brake Light Clinics, which while helping out a number of community members and giving us good experience with event planning, failed to sustain longer term interactions with the community essential for organizing. We also did a number of snow shoveling efforts around encampment areas in order to keep them accessible. Our most successful project over the past few years has been support of the Gertrude Brown Community Land Trust (GBCLT), a radical land trust effort to secure land and homes for our houseless neighbors, though even this has often been very siloed away from much of the chapter and has flown largely under the radar, even of our own Working Group. Throughout it all we have had a revolving door of participating volunteers and leaders, never being able to sustain an active core beyond a handful of comrades.
That is until this year, and past few months in particular, where a combination of factors have completely shifted the organizing situation for Street Corps:
- The establishing of our first large chapter office gave us a concrete base area
- An organized cadre of YDSA comrades interested in mutual aid and mass work bolstered our Working Groups active core
- A huge influx of volunteers following the election looking for straightforward and concrete ways to organize joined us en masse
Following these developments, Street Corps has grown into a sizable and organized chapter force, which while still learning and developing, is now capable of carrying out numerous efforts simultaneously. It remains to be seen how we sustain this influx of members but we are not remaining idle or taking this influx for granted.
After holding a large and successful organizing retreat in November, Street Corps is charting a new course grounded in a combination of mutual aid, mass work & mass line, and neighborhood organizing that I like to dub as a general strategy of “Socialism Block by Block”. These have come together into a program popularly called “Solidarity Sundays”, where we set up outside of our St Paul chapter office and distributed aid to our neighbors while having check-ins and organizing conversations simultaneously. A quick overview of these elements:
1. Mutual Aid
When we say Mutual Aid, we are trying to be intentional about doing actual Mutual Aid rather than charity work. Mutual Aid is defined by a reciprocal relationship and empowerment of both parties. Charity is a one way relationship that reinforces a dynamic of “savior” and “saved” roles. We want to be able to help give our poor and dispossessed neighbors what they need to survive while nurturing relationships and trust that will allow these folks to join into our efforts themselves, and begin organizing alongside us to truly help each other build a movement for liberation.
2. Mass Work & Mass Line
Mass Work is a commitment to work by community members themselves organized en masse to tear down those issues or structures of oppression and in their place build solutions and new structures powered by the people themselves. We do not believe that true solutions can come forward simply by small cadres of activists nor from state bureaucrats separated from the people, but only from the people themselves working toward a common democratic socialist future together. We must embed ourselves among our poor and dispossessed neighbors routinely in order to help agitate them to take on the fight themselves. While we do this, we orient ourselves around what is called the “Mass Line” which is our strategic stance drawn from what we have learned from the experiences and needs of our community members and put into practice. This is an ongoing practice that can be summed up in the cycle of “To the masses, from the masses, to the masses.”
3. Neighborhood Organizing
Lastly, we are grounding ourselves around specific neighborhood areas to help divide up our work and to put focus on areas of the community struggling the most. This will allow us to sustainably expand our efforts, delegate work and leadership, and maintain routine contact in select community areas. We do not just focus on encampments in these areas, but work to have conversations with local residents and housed neighbors either passing by or who also live in the area. These efforts will not just support our immediate focus on the unhoused but also allow for tactical and strategic flexibility with other organizing opportunities that may appear in these community areas. So far we have three Cells in operation, each led by a Cell Captain. Those Cells are Hamline/Midway, Marcy/Como, and Longfellow.
We have much to do, and building a mass movement of the poor and dispossessed in the cities to bring about our collective Socialist future needs YOU. To get involved, connect with us on the #Street-Corps-Working-Group Slack Channel or reach out to either Shane M or Elijah G.
By Shane M.