West Seattle Mutual Aid Party🎉 Updates!
West Seattle Mutual Aid Party🎉, a partner of NW Hospitality, reserves their more detailed, regular updates for their volunteers and supporters. However, here are snippets from their weekly updates from the last few weeks.
Interested in volunteering with WSMAP? Contact WSMAP Here!
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7/14/2023 - The overarching theme of this week's distro seems to have been "affirmations" and they came in many forms. From the aforementioned conversations over delicious food, to having a neighbor who recently got in touch with us come out on our distro route for their first time, to having a new friend who we met write us this beautiful note (see below) once they approached our table and saw what our group was about, to having somebody pull up to our table in the middle of distro to donate more stuff to be distributed which resulted in them taking our card to connect with us further; we got a lot of reminders that what we're building together is important and it sure was a really great day to be a neighbor out and about in our neck of the woods!
Note reads: I am just hoping you all know what a difference this makes to me. A smiling face & help w/ the basics means so much. So THANK YOU. Look forward to seeing you all next week. 🖤 (Name Redacted)
7/16/2023 - Maybe it's not something that we offer often enough and folks forget that disposal of used sharps is something we're willing to help with! There's only one location in West Seattle that takes used sharps, and it's an unmanned sharps container in a bathroom at Roxhill Park. There's often so much to keep track of during distro or things we're trying to remember to ask or bring up with folks that more often than not, we leave a spot and then remember, whoops, we forgot to bring something up with so-and-so! We try to write down any special requests that we've received or notes in our Signal thread, but it's an imperfect science. All things considered, we still need to remind ourselves that we're doing the best we can without becoming crispy and that's better for everyone in the long run.
7/24/2023 - Fresh baked bread was back this week, which everyone was super excited about! We also had some delicious tamales to hand out thanks to a connection from one of our newer members. Our group has been growing and it’s wonderful to connect with more and more people in West Seattle who want to help us build this community. Many in our group have been dealing with illness and stress and taking much needed breaks. We stress that this “work” should be fun and sustainable and it’s so great that we have enough hands to make distro relaxed with members away.
8/1/2023 - During the last Saturday distro, we handed out supplies to 41 people and were also able to use some of our funds to help pay for tabs for a friend's vehicle, so that they can legally move around ahead of yet another upcoming sweep. There was soup and the weather was as gorgeous as it can only be in Seattle.
You can follow West Seattle Mutual Aid Party🎉 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MutualAidParty
And you can support them through NWH here or through their Patreon here.