Hosted By The Impact Collective
Buildings keep getting better at protecting the people inside them: tighter envelopes, backup power, cooling, filtration for smoke season. What a building cannot do is notice that no one has seen the person in 3B for two days. During a Portland ice storm a few winters ago, the neighbor directly across the hall from Sarah Holdeman died in a fire started by the candles she was using for light and warmth. Sarah had flashlights and blankets, as did half a dozen others on the floor. She didn't know anyone well enough to ask, and they didn't know her well enough to offer. The building performed exactly as designed. Past a certain point, resilience stops being a property-level question and becomes a question of whether the people inside know each other's names.This panel looks at hyper local mutual aid as the layer of resilience infrastructure that no design decision can deliver. Three panelists who came at it from different directions, one through a household built as an experiment in belonging, one through years of fostering and moving money toward communities, and one through a flyer taped up in an elevator this year, will get into what it actually takes to start something, what makes these networks fall apart, and what makes them last through the boring years between emergencies. Everyone leaves with a tool matched to their own situation, whether that's a flyer template for people starting from zero, ways to strengthen a network that exists but wobbles, or new ideas for one that's been running for years. Whether you're here as a professional thinking about the buildings you work on or as someone who would just like to know their neighbors, both are good reasons to come.
