Al Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to you can happen here exchange today. And I'm joined by Luca and Sailor. They're both from Breadlock, which is a mutual aid group in San Diego. How are you doing today?
We're doing great, great.
How are you wonderful?
Yeah, I'm thriving. I've just received my seventy fifth COVID booster I think, I think, so having a little miserable day, but that's okay, not going to get novel coronavirus, which is always nice. So can you guys start out by maybe explaining, well, what Breadblock does, how long it's done it, and why it does it.
Yeah, So we are a mutual aid group. We mostly provide hot food. That's like the core of our services. We feed about one hundred people like like eighty to one hundred people depending on the day weekly in East Village in San Diego. We also clothing and harm reduction supplies and other things like tampons and plan b when we can get our hands on it, and we try to be we are there like at the same time
every day. I will not say the exact location, but if you are interested in getting involved, you can always reach out and that's like what we're doing right now, and that happens weekly and sale am I missing anything?
Yeah, So this form of what we're doing with bread block in a more organized way has We've only been doing it a few months. However, Initially we started doing it in twenty twenty one when I started getting into harm reduction stuff and I was working at a strange exchange and realized a lot of people would be asking for food and we weren't getting that out there, and
so that's why the initial idea came about. And then we just had enough people who were willing to do it in a weekly so that's how we chose that location and got started doing that. There's just a lot of people down there on those nights, so.
It's time to happen at the same time that a harm reduction services happen the Needle Exchange, So it's at a time when a lot of people are down there and the amount of time are like collective doing this specific thing as exist is. I believe since end of March early April is how long we've been like consistently providing services every week.
Yeah, that's great, that's a long time. So especially through like summer can be a difficult time if you don't have a house in San Diego, Like it gets increasingly, it gets very hot, and particularly the streets themselves get hot, and that becomes dangerous for people.
Yeah, exactly.
So I want to start with like, at some point, right, say that you were doing a syringe exchange and you are like, these people need to be fed. They are hungry, and now we're here and you're feeding them every week, right, But you had to do a whole lot of things in between here and there. And like, I know this because listeners email me all the time. So many people want to do that too, and it might not exist
where they are. They might not know. So, like, can you explain how you went about like seeing a need and then organizing to meet that need?
Yeah, so I guess what came before that was we had already built relationships with each other around our leftist ideals and art and protesting and different stuff.
So we already knew a lot.
Of people who who were interested in mutual aid and that capacity. Yeah, but I will say things like Instagram have helped just meet more people who are looking to get involved in mutual aid.
Yeah.
Yeah, Like Saylah said, we had like had spent some time building community with each other and getting a core group of people that trust each other, that had gone to protests together, that were maybe in like affinity groups already with each other, and then there was just sort of like enough of us that were in community with each other at the time that when Sala was like, the encampment ban is like really making things so much worse for people in communities and we really need to
do something, we were like, all just like it just happened because we were all sitting in a room together one night after a like social event, and Sala was like, we need to talk about this, and we were like, okay, yeah, we like need to do this, and we had enough people where we could pull together a first distro and then a second and then gradually adding like more organizations so that we could continue doing it sustainably over time.
Yeah. Yeah, that's like I want to be opinion the camping ban, because the camping ban is making things worse for people who are already having a hard time just surviving here, and it fucking sucks and it's tog glorious fault. You shouldn't bothe Yeah, let's talk about though, Like I want to get into nuts and bolts, right, feeing one hundred people? Right, you need to and ass pad, you need loads of food, you need a place where you
can cook. How did you identify all those things and how did you get to a place where you could regularly have those things?
So in twenty twenty one, when I had initially started this with kind of a different group of people, but there were definitely over us, we just did it and like used my mom's kitchen and found some big pops and just made it happen. And I feel like, if you have the will to make it happen, you're going to figure it out. And you know, maybe in the beginning it was a lot more chaotic, which you know, we are anarchists, so we're okay.
With the chaos.
But it just after doing it a week after week, it just became more streamlined. And you know, we just buy a lot of essential bulk food and we have a few giant pops.
Yeah, we like to make soup a lot.
Yeah.
Currently our kitchen is like like our cooking equipment includes two large pots and a rice cooker that someone recently donated to us. And then we needed a fridge, so we got a free fridge off offer up and cleaned it up and put some cool stickers on it and then plugged it into a garage. Currently, the kitchen that we use is like a couple of us just like live together, and so we use our kitchen and we have access to our garage and we just stored the
supplies in the garage. We stored the fridge in the garage, and we make it work through donations we get on Instagram. So we knew some comrades that work with the community fridges. There's like some community fridges in San Diego, and so they already had a relationship with a grocery store and so we were able to hop in on that and we get some donations from that. We get some donations from What's sale the group.
Oh Orchporchlight.
Yeah, and there's so much food waste that I feel like if we were to find the right people, we could be fully self supporting on just things that would be thrown away alone.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, we just have to meet the right people in order to do that. But we're getting there. Yeah, And I do want to say the kitchen is a small slash regular sized kitchen, so you don't have to have some big, crazy warehouse typed kitchen to make this happen.
Yeah, and then you're feeding people right likeuman you're doing it like in the afternoon or evening. Have you found there are things that you said you like soup, but I know, like we fed a lot of people at the border last winter, right, and we found out that like certain things work, certain things didn't work, and we always tried to keep it vegan because of people's religious needs preferences. Right, is there anything like that that you found that works or doesn't work.
We have done a lot of chili with our squad, and I know that Luca has done a lot of curry. So there are certain things and they can both be easily made vegan. Initially, a lot of people when we would have vegan stuff would ask for me alternatives, to which I understand people, you know, they don't always have access to protein, So we tried out both options when we can.
Nice.
Yeah, it varies what we have because our group kind of functions with for like autonomous squads, like well semi autonomous that take turns doing the distress so that you're only really responsible for it once a month, which helps reduce burnout.
Yeah, definitely, how does that work? Explain how you came up with that and how it's organized.
Yeah, So this was kind of like something we've been
talking about for a while. Some of us are like more into the theory than others, but we're just kind of talking about, like, oh, well, like how do we get more people involved, because I think what happens oftentimes with these mutual aid groups is there's like a lot of people sitting in a group chat and there's like a small core of people who do end up doing the majority of the labor, and that often results in burnout for those people and building a resentment between like
the people who are doing a lot and the other people because I think also like sometimes people feel left out and they don't feel like they can get involved, and then they feel like the people who are doing the core of the labor are like in charge and they have to defer to them, which creates a lot of problems, which I'm not saying like we don't have any of those problems, Like we're still trying to work out the kinks, but the squads sort of like dynamic
makes it so that groups of about like five to ten because a distro you need about like six people to make it happen, so about five to ten people take turns, so you just rotate, so you know when your day is. It's once a month that you are responsible for the distro and you are responsible for choosing the food that you're cooking, making sure it gets cooked, organizing with your other comrades, getting the donations, all of that stuff. But you can always ask the larger group
for help or extra hands if you need it. Yeah, But it sort of shares that like responsibility because I think the most stressful part oftentimes is like, oh, the distro happening tonight is on me and I and if I don't do it, it's not going to happen. Yeah, And so it sort of spreads like that sort of labor. But we have members who like show up to every single distro because they want to, and that's totally fine, even if they're in like whatever designated squad they're in, right.
Yeah, or some people who shall like once every few months because they have other stuff going on, you know.
So it's very open and you don't have to be in a squad.
You could just to join whenever you have the time, with whoever week it is. So it's pretty loose, yeah, I would sell, but it does give a good sense of structure.
Yeah, that helps a lot. I remember one day last year, that's winter, and I was out building shelters with an Uzbek guy and a few Kurdish guys, and we built these shelters and we built three of them. And afterwards, so sitting down with some of my friends who are also there as volunteers, and they're all anarchists too, we each trust each other what we did. And then one of them said, so what do we all learn? What did you learn when you did that today?
Right?
I think that's a really valuable question that we should be asking ourselves in our organizing spaces. So like from your first distrow to now, I want to ask what did you learn?
I would say, we've really learned how to trust each other. We're working on, you know, how to get consensus models, how to split the labor between different people, how to work with different people, and also, yeah, like I said in the beginning, how to really how to trust each other, which you know, we all want to see the revolution happen at some point and so I feel like one of the most important and valuable things we can be doing is building relationships and communities with each other where
we can actually rely on each other. And so having a mutual task really helps with that.
Yeah.
Yeah, And I think for me, like we've like tried to do stuff in the past, like the and I think the issue we've always run into was that, like sometimes there's like a tendency to want too much structure right away and be like, oh, if we don't have everything planned down, we don't know how everything's going to work, then we can't do it, and we need to figure everything out beforehand. And we learned a lot like doing it, and even like we didn't have everything figured out, like
we're still working on like our consensus structure. We're still working on like how we're going to make like big decisions as a group and like when the squads can make their own decisions and when the group can make their own decisions, and like we don't have everything figured out, like it's very like loose, but we didn't need that, and we're we've been able to do a distro for
like months and we don't have everything figured out. We have something we had enough to get us started, and we're like working on like slowly adding things as we need to, without like overburdening ourselves because I think sometimes like lots of layers and lots of company exodies can really make it difficult to organize and adapt to what's happening on the ground.
Definitely, I think, yeah, we can overcomplicate it and like be too anxious. Talking of anxious, I'm anxious. So we have yet to pivot to advertisements. So let's do that and then we'll come back and we're back. Okay. So you spoke about like a lot about the logistics of cooking, which is great, but I know from experience of feeding hungry people can be a challenge, right, and it's none one's fault, especially when people are hungry, Like we're not
our ourselves. It's a whole advertising campaign built around that. So how do you organize your distroage such should everybody feels that they're being taken care of, Everybody feels safe and knows that they're going to get enough to eat.
Yeah, Well, that also goes back to something more we.
Learned is we try to have enough people at the distro so we can have different people doing different things, and sometimes that means one person is just walking around talking to people, de escalating a situation if needs be. And then we also figured out that at the end when we run out of food in order, but people who have been waiting in line don't get mad, which it's understandable, you know, they've been waiting in line and there's no more food than they're hungry.
Yeah.
Of course, we try to have like different snacks and like muffins or granola bars and water just to hand out at the end for those people who still need something. And so sometimes we have music and we all just try to bring a good energy and so far nothing that we haven't been able to handle.
How to happen.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, I know. We we found the music was really helpful and we were disributing food when really big groups at the border like play some music or have a friend who plays music plays some music, and then we'd always ask folks from the group who we were feeding to volunteer to help us in that. Oh, it helped us so become language barriers and stuff.
That's happened a couple of times as well, where people have just stepped up and wanted to help, which has been great.
Yeah, it's nice and it gives us all. Like part of what we're doing with mutual Aid isn't just meeting material needs. It's also like the difference between solidarity and charity, right, Like we're there because we care about you as people, not just as like hunger mouths that we can take off a spreadsheet like and working together is an integral part of that. It's what distinguishes us from charity model.
And thankfully most of the time we have enough people that if somebody needs to step aside and have a one on one conversation with somebody because that's what they need in that moment, and we can do that.
Yeah, having floaters is really important.
Like we always have like two people at least two people serving food, and then we have like a snack table, water table usually, and then we have a section for harm reduction that usually gets served on like another table, and then we have like a section for clothes depending on what we have, and people sort of like go down the assembly line kind of like going down grabbing their different things, and we give people like plastic bags that we get from grocery stores so they can get
their things, but we also have like floaters usually so that like if someone's like having like a medical issue, or someone's like upset or whatever is going on, someone can like step aside and spend some time with them. Like the other day, we had a woman who was not feeling well because of the heat, and she had been out and she needed to sit down, so we like grabbed one of our chairs and we sat her down and got her some water and just like talked
to her. And we had a couple people who could step aside and do that, and then everyone else just could keep like feeding people without it kind of stopping things. But she still got what she needed.
And during that heat waves at one of the distros, I remember you ran across and thought somebody gating because they really were needed electrolyte. So we're lucky that we have enough people that we get to be able.
To do stuff like that when we need to, right and I imagine that regularity is really important, Like people know that you will be there and that they can come and you will feed them. Like that builds trust, right like, and everyone I think benefits from mittal structure and being unhealthed. It can be really fucking hard to find structure.
Yes, exactly, and it's very hard to get like home cooked food.
Yeah, this is something I've encountered living in my cart, Like it's hard to get healthy food. The food you buy is shit. It's more expensive and it's less good for you. And like these things compound over time to have health and psychological consequences.
Yeah, everything we cook we eat as well.
And you know, if we're cooking or we're helping out with sister, of course it's that's.
A mutual and mutual aid. We can also eat it.
Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely something else we learned at the border was like, especially if we're looking something that's maybe not a cultural cuisine because we're meeting people from all over the world. A lot of times, it's like, like you were saying, chili and courage, it's like hot wet food, right, Like you know that big semi liquid pan of chili or whatever that we would cook and spaghetti and like folks being like what's that, We're like, oh, do I'm going to eat some? Do you want some?
Yeah?
And like I honestly had some of the happiest moments of last year, just like I remember one day. I've been building yurts all day with an osbat guy, and then we sat down and had our beans and just like talked about our lives and it was really sweet.
Yeah.
I think that that is a moment of solidarity that you don't get when you're you know, I've seen NGOs and the US military tossing MRIs or refugees, and I think the same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, No, there shouldn't be like a line between like you and the people that you're providing mutual aid to. I mean, like it should You should never give someone food that you're not willing to eat yourself. And like if someone's hungry while we're cooking, like they can totally eat the food that we're making too.
It's not like cordoned off.
Yeah.
Like, of course, we like, you know, we wear our ppe and we like you know, aren't getting our hands or whatever. But I mean because a lot of the people who are like who do provide mutual aid and work in mutual aid groups like, are also people who may face houselessness or have trouble paying for groceries or something.
Yeah, yeah, for sure, Yeah, there's no separation you know between us and them at the end.
Of the day.
Yeah, I think that's super important. So I want to talk about the camping ban. Maybe let's take another rab break. We'll talk about the camping them when we come back. We are back. We are now discussing the topic which I love to talk about, which is evil things that Todd Gloria has done. Today. It could be the whole podcast every day of the week for years, but we're
going to talk about this camping ban. For folks who didn't listen to a camping ban episode, can you give me like a sixty second synopsis on the camping ban and then we can dive into what it's done.
Yeah.
So basically, earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned of basically an ordinance that you don't have the ability to cite or arrest somebody if there's not shelter available. But they overturn that, so now they can, and Gavin Newsom issue the Sleeping Order that the agencies have to clear encampment and ordered that cities and counties do the same. So now there's fourteen plus the cities in California that do have a camping ban in place. So that's criminalizing living outside yea.
The existence of unhoused people is now a crime. Yeah, so what have you seen post enforcement?
Yeah?
So I so like work in the field of harm reduction, So you know, I do this in my free time because I want to do it, but I also do it for work, which there's definitely sometimes I feel weird about, like working for an organization and wish that I didn't have to.
But it's just one of those things. And I've seen.
It's really hard and really sad because when people are in encampment, a lot of times they build a sort of community and family and they learn how to take care of each other, and constantly being split up is destroying these communities. And then they just have to travel further and further away so that they're disconnected from not only their community but also resources that they do have, and so it's just really hard, and sometimes we lose connections with people.
We don't know where they went, you know, or they end up in jail or it's been really.
Horrible, and we're just talking about how it just seems like people don't really care and it's crazy that this is happening in our communities and people aren't talking about it and aren't outraged by it.
Yeah.
Yeah, these bands also have like a really nasty ripple effect because when these people got pushed out of San Diego, then they go to other cities that don't have an encampment band, like Cheu La Vista National City, and now Cheu La Vista National City and other cities are advancing their own camping bands and citing an influx from San Diego. Right, so it's like creating this really awful, like just progressive expansion of these bands.
Yeah.
And one more thing I'll add is that some people are like, oh, well, that's just going to you know, be good, because these people are going to get into shelters, find alternative ways of getting help. But that's not what's happening because we have not had any more shelters. It's really hard to get into a shelter actually, And you know, since Newsom has been governor, we've had apparently so many billions of dollars twenty four billions spent tackling.
Homelessness, and it's like, what is there to shell for it?
Right?
People still don't have a place to go, and even if they do get into a shelter, a lot of times there's so many rules and regulations that if somebody has a high level of mental health needs and they're not going to be able to stay there and there's just no solutions.
Yeah, it's giving the appearance of doing something to make homeowners right, people who they think matter happy. It's really bleak. Yeah, let's discuss a little bit then, like this camping band, as you say, it's forced people to other cities, Like what do you think it does to the unhoused community? Like you talked a little bit about breaking up encampments, Like where do people end up right when their encampments get broken up in the community, and like where do
they end up? And how can people because this is this is nationwide, right, Yeah, Gavin Newson is being a particularly odious turd about it, but like other people other states are doing it too. It's something of ni San Diego, for instance, people ending up in a riverbed. So can you talk about like the risks there and then like, yeah, the needs that it creates and how we can meet them.
So you're right, some of them are ending up in river beds.
There's also like what they refer to as an island kind of close to Old Town where a lot of people have been going, but you know, you have to get a rash to go there, and it's not easy to get there.
They don't have a lot of resources there. There's a lot of.
Crime that happens, and it's not the best scenario. And other than that, they're making these safe sleeping sites which are not actually safe, and they're kind of like concentration camps and they're from people I've talked to actually live in them.
They're not good places to be yet at all.
And it's just kind of like pushing the problem out of you without actually doing anything or providing anything meaningful to people.
Yeah, which is the goal. I think it is to make poverty invisible.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And the other thing that happens is like I live in an area where there are a lot of encampments and there probably would be permanent encampments if it weren't for the band, And personally I would prefer that, because like what happens is these people get like moved like there, their encampment will like crop up, It'll be there for like maybe a week, and then like it'll disappear, and like I'll wake up one morning and they're gone, and
all of their stuff often gets thrown away. They lose access to their things if they're not there to take it. They basically can take only what they can carry on their backs if they're lucky. If they happen to be there when their stuff is being thrown away, they're sighted, they could be arrested. And then usually I see sometimes the same people come back, but they just had to
like go find somewhere else. So they're basically being forced to be like migratory rather than like staying in one place, which means that it also makes like the people who live in neighborhoods like because I can't form relationships with
these people as much as I could before. Like I can't know my neighbors as much because my neighbors are constantly getting moved around, So like I'll like former relationship with someone and I'll be like, you know, like I'll be like their beer guy, and I like, you know, like there's people that I'll know that I'll like go buy a beer for, go get water for if I
see them and I know their name and that. But then when with the encamp ban, they might just disappear one day and I don't know if they got arrested. I don't know if they've just been displaced, and that's like not great for me, not great for them, not great for literally anyone around, because it's like people are safer if they're able to have like a stable place to be, Like everyone is safer.
Yeah.
Yeah, if as stated goal is getting people off the streets, like chasing them around the streets, isn't doing that? They can get hot for people to find stability.
Yeah, And you know, I've talked to people also about the reason sometimes I don't like the term homeless is because they're like, yes, we may not have a house, but we make our homes, we make a community, we make a home, and losing that sense of security, any little bit of security they have, constantly having to move, not ever feeling comfortable or safe.
You know, that's traumatizing, taking a bad situation and making it worse, just what the state likes to do. I wonder like, before we finish up, a lot of people, like I said, want to start a mutual aid thing, do you have any advice for them? Things that you would do if you were starting over, things that you felt like you did well, if you wanted to start bread buck now how would you go about it?
Start a group chat, maybe make an Instagram where you can post about it and find people who are also interested in that.
Go to a local event.
What else Luca having like a place where people can like congregate with each other, like having a regular like community event to meet people and get to know each other and trust each other. I really wish that we had started like sooner, because I think we had the
capacity to start sooner, like way beforehand. And I think it was like the incamment ban and like Salah being like we need to do this, like happening it Like it just takes like one person being excited enough about something and then like their comrades being like, yeah, no,
you're right, like we do need to do something. And I think people are really afraid to be that person to like push for something, to try to like wake other people up or like convince other people that you have to capacity to because I think the state can be really disempowering and they make you think that you need like a budget and you need like all of these things to like be able to provide people like aid or or like like mutually to provide people anything.
And like we did it with like literally just like a couple of our members just like gave some money that we had and that we had, like you know, like we had like a couple hundred dollars that we got from people, and then that was enough to start and like you could literally start with like fifty bucks and figure it out.
Yeah.
Yeah, we did not come from a place of any of us having a lot of money, so we've basically just had to figure it out. And anybody can figure it out, you know. I feel like our culture is so individualized, but we do have the capacity to come together and yeah, just take somebody being like all right, let's do this, and you'll meet enough people who are also interested in that, because people do want community at the end of the day, and people do want.
To help people.
Yeah. Is there anything else you guys want to mention before we go?
Yeah, the only last thing I wanted to mention is that we do have a lot of future goals of expanding and doing more street medicine as well and expanding to different areas.
We're also having mobile teams where we.
Can go out and leach people who aren't in one location or who maybe have certain disabilities and can't walk and get there. So we have a lot of ideas for that, and that just takes meeting more people who are into this and getting more funds and yes.
Yeah, so hopefully that's something we can do.
And I just wanted to briefly mention one of our men first did some really great research on the way the Hillcrest Business Association is using the Encampment band to further harm and using they're actually using like private security to push people out so people can enjoy their night life without having to deal with an objectionable minority that wants to live however.
It pleases.
For fuck's sake, the quote from mister Ben Nicholas, oh god of the Hillcrist Business Association. So they have a initiative called Hillcrest Clean and Safe Program where they displace people from Hillcrest for the benefit of the businesses.
And they have like if you go on.
A Voice of San Die you can hear some like just the way they talk about these people is really insane and really dehumanizing, and it kind of notes how business is, how like capitalism in the state are working together hand in hand to displace our community members. So the business associations and the businesses themselves are being empowered by these encampment bands to further repetuate violence on people jeces.
Yet, Yeah, and on that topic, the way that people actually are dressing it here is making it so much worse. Like San Diego has a hot team which is part of the police department.
It's called the Homeless Outreach Team.
And they're supposedly supposed to help get people into shelters and stuff like that. But anybody I've talked to who have tried to reach out for them and ask, you know, okay, if you're going to move me, like I need to
get into a shelter. One of them who I was talking to about this was in his seventies and very medically vulnerable, and instead of helping them find somewhere to go, they just put his car which he was sleeping in because it was unregistered, and so they're not actually helping at all.
It's just a cop.
And that's why, you know, just us regular people have to do something because the state's not going to.
Yeah, I think that's a great thing. That's the fucking doc about I hip GRASPAS is association for people who aren't familiar with San Diego San Diego is like lgbt q A. A neighborhood is called Hillcrest. One in three of our trandth youth are run housed and like I guess they don't manage to the Hillcrest Business Association. Not surprising
but just fucked up. Where can people if they want to support you, they want to follow you, if they want to come out and do food distro, where can they find you on the internet?
Yeah, they can find us on Instagram. Our instagram is bread Block Underscore Distro if you want to provide like direct funds. Bread Underscore Block is our Venmo.
Block with a CE not o k b l o c oh.
Yeah yeah b l oc like block.
Yeah. We are anarchists, so yeah.
And I also wanted to mention a couple of comrades of ours are facing housessness themselves and there's a mutual aid post on our Instagram and you can also find them at ruster dot music that's our u s t Er music or their Venmo is also in a post on our page. They could really use some help because they are really big individuals who like show up all the time and help us cook and our a big part of our group and you know also could use some mutual aid, yeah.
People to help them. Thank you so much for your time, guys. Thank you for doing all that important work, and thank you for sharing it with us. If people have questions, they can reach out to you, right, Yes.
Yes, of course. Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, thank you so much. It's much appreciated.
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