Tool libraries, mutual aid, and community-led disaster response with Rachel Kinbar, Shelby Treichler, and Ben Wyatt

On October 21, 2025, Shareable and the Tool Library Alliance hosted a crossover event of the Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series and Library of Things Co-Lab for, “Tool Libraries, Mutual Aid & Community-Led Disaster Response.”

A panel of practitioners from tool libraries and mutual aid groups discussed the intersection of resource sharing and mutual aid. This session featured a particular focus on the role tool libraries can play during disasters, like last year’s collaboration between the Asheville Tool Library, WNC Repair Cafe, and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief during the response to Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. Today’s episode is an edited recording of the inspiring event.

About the speakers:

Rachel Kinbar (they/zey/all) is actively engaged in building a new commons while exploring what it means to be human, heal lineage, and honor ancestors. Zey are working for collective liberation as a local community and mutual aid organizer with Central Florida Mutual Aid, Alternative Economy Fellow with the Center for Biological Diversity and Shareable, director of operations for Beautiful Trouble (and until recently as director of operations for the Jews of Color Mishpacha Project). They are also a writer, gardener, artist, half of noise/poetry duo Unfade, and co-editor of Bonk! magazine.

Shelby Treichler is a volunteer with Asheville Tool Library and the Western North Carolina Repair Café.

Ben Wyatt has been a volunteer and organizer with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief since 2017. He was part of the initial crew that set up the MADR Smith Mill Works hub (sharing space with the Asheville Tool Library) immediately after Helene that has been operating ever since to receive and deliver household necessities, building materials, first aid and cleanup supplies to direct distribution sites throughout the region. Ben works full time as the Project Manager for the Asheville Coalition for Home Repair (ARCHR) as an employee of Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity.

Resources

• Video recording of “Mutual Aid 101: Tool Libraries, Mutual Aid & Community-Led Disaster Response” 
• Human-edited Transcript of “Mutual Aid 101: Tool Libraries, Mutual Aid & Community-Led Disaster Response” 
• Next Mutual Aid 101 event, “Navigating Conflict” with Dean Spade on 11/20 at 3:00 PM ET
• Tool Library Alliance Winter Weatherization Session on Wednesday, December 10 at 1:00 PM ET
• Central Florida Mutual Aid
• Central Florida Mutual Aid link tree 
• Central Florida Mutual Aid Tool Library link tree 
• Asheville Tool Library
• WNC Repair Cafe
• Meshtastic.org
• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Smith Millworks Distrobution Hub “Hub Guide” 
• Shareable’s Library of Things Toolkit  
• Shareable’s Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit 
• The Response podcast: Fighting misinformation in the aftermath of the Mexico City earthquake
• Link document shared with participants

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Episode transcript

The transcript follows the video recording (not the edited version for the podcast)

0:00:03.2 Tom Llewellyn: Excellent. Hello everybody. Welcome to this joint session of Mutual Aid 101 and the Tool Library Alliance Co-Lab. We’re so happy to have you here. Today, we’re going to be focusing on Tool Libraries, Mutual Aid, and community led disaster response. We’ve got two case studies that we’re going to be hearing from. The first one is Rachel Kinbar coming from Central Florida Mutual Aid. And then after that we’ll be diving into the joint response to Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina last year with Shelby Treicher… Treichler. Excuse me. And Ben Wyatt from the Asheville Tool Library and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. This is a presentation of Shareable. We are a nonprofit organization that collaborates with organizers and allies to imagine resource network and scale cooperative projects and we’ve been running this Mutual Aid 101 series since the beginning of the year. So again thank you everyone who’s joining us for coming back since the spring and everybody who’s joining us for the first time. 

0:01:10.7 Tom Llewellyn: I mentioned earlier that for those that are just joining us, we are going to be recording the session. We’re going to be posting it on YouTube later. We are going to be collecting all of the links that are shared in the chat and sharing those out as well with all registrants. So you’ll get that at the end. We will also be be doing a human edited transcript of this session so we’ll send that out. So if there’s stuff that you want to go back and find, you’ll be able to search and find that. We do not have a Q&A button so we’re going to be having to pull questions from the chat. We’ve got some folks on the Shareable team that are going to be doing that. To make their life easier, we’d ask that if you have a question for the presenters, you type question, colon before your question so we can differentiate them from general comments that are happening in the chat.

0:01:58.3 Tom Llewellyn: If you need any support. I realized that our Shareable team didn’t add our little emblems before our names so they’re hard for you to see. But we’re going to add some emblems and some pizza slices at the beginning of our name, one of the most Shareable foods. So if you have any tech issues throughout, you can send a direct message to somebody from the Shareable team and they will help you out as best they can. We’ll also be managing… You know, monitoring the chat. So if there’s something major that comes up, go ahead and do that as well.

0:02:33.6 Tom Llewellyn: As I mentioned before, this is part of a series. We have another event coming up on November 20th, I believe, and maybe we’ll get the link in there. We’ve got Dean Spade, who started this series at the beginning of this year, is going to be coming back and doing a special session focused on conflict management within organizing spaces. So I’d invite everybody to join us for that session as well, if you haven’t already registered. And before I get started, I just talked about Shareable a little bit, missed a little bit of our work with Mutual Aid 101. And I’m just going to bring in Leanna, who is with the Tool Library Alliance, just to talk a little bit about that. Oh, did I… There you go.

0:03:19.8 Leanna Frick: Hey, Tom, I’m Leanna Frick. I am the steering committee chair for the Tool Library Alliance, which is a partner and sponsored project of Shareable. We are a collaboration among libraries in the US that are independent nonprofits or soon to be nonprofits that lend tools that have been around for two years plus. So we are the group for established tools… Established libraries of things that lend tools in the US. I’m going to put our URL in the chat. There you can get in touch with us. You can sign up for our Google group if you are with an organization that meets that criteria. You can also add your library of things to our map. If it’s a library of things of any kind, we’d love to know where it is. And you can also find upcoming Co-Labs that we are hosting there. We do a monthly convening, whether that is a sort of unstructured network discussion or a Co-Lab. Our next one… Well, we are taking November off, our next one will be December 10th and that is about winter weather preparedness for community resiliency. Josh, who just entered the chat here, is also on the steering committee with me along with Alison from Shareable. So feel free to message us if you have any questions. Thanks. 

0:04:33.9 Tom Llewellyn: Cool. Thank you, Leanna. All right, well, we’ve got a lot to cover. We’re right on time at this 10 minute mark is when we were hoping we’d be able to jump into the session. It seems like everybody has now gotten in or are having a good, good time getting in. And so I’m going to go ahead and pass it off to Rachel to get us started. I’m going to make sure I’m running the slides. I just remembered that’s my job and I was not doing that, but I’m going to take over the slides and do that now.

0:05:03.8 Rachel Kinbar: Awesome. Thank you, Tom. I can start by introducing myself. I’m Rachel. I’m an organizer with Central Florida Mutual Aid. I’ve been organizing with them since early 2022. And I use all pronouns. I live in Winter Park, Florida, which is on Seminole Timucua land. And a little bit about Central Florida Mutual Aid. We’re a mutually collective. We’re just regular folks who are organizing to meet each other’s basic needs. And we operate primarily in Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties. We kind of have this thing where, like, if you live, work, or play in any of those counties, you can be part of Central Florida Mutual Aid. Because it really is… This is like the Orlando metropolitan area. And it keeps getting bigger and bigger and people keep having to move further and further away from where they work. So we kind of have a very open policy about who can join us and work with us. And that same policy goes for the tool library as well in terms of who can join the tool library. So if you live, work or play in any of those counties, you are welcome to join us. 

0:06:21.7 Rachel Kinbar: If we could go to the first Central Florida Mutual Aid slide or the second. Yeah, that one. So I can also say a little bit about our projects. The tool library is one of our projects. Some other ones, we have a solidarity fund and our trans safety fund. Those are kind of our biggest ongoing things other than the tool library. So through the solidarity fund, we redistribute funds to pretty much anyone needing support, financial support with housing, shelter, food, medication, transportation, those types of things. People can put in requests. And then the trans safety fund is for anyone who lives in the State of Florida and is in some kind of an emergency that affects their safety, which we include those other categories as well. So shelter, food and gender affirming care. And people who are seeking funds to leave the state can also apply to the fund. 

0:07:27.3 Rachel Kinbar: We have a monthly sustainability gathering. And the tool library works on that a lot as well. So that involves a garden brigade because a lot of hands make light work and a skillshare. And we actually have one coming up this Saturday, which is a Chainsaw 101 workshop. And we’re going to have chainsaws, we’re going to have pole saws, we’re going to have electric loppers, we’re going to have some hedge trimmers because those are good to know how to use too. Little intimidating at first. So that’s part of the sustainability gathering. We’re working on a food buying club. We offer workshops on financial topics to help us collectively create more financial security. We’re working on creating a mesh network and then other long term efforts. So we have a lot going on and I’m excited to talk today about the tool library. That specific project which is like near and dear to my heart. I care about it a lot. And yeah, we can move to the next slide. 

0:08:33.8 Rachel Kinbar: So I mentioned I started in early 2022 with Central Florida Mutual Aid. We started with a pet food pantry because a number of people couldn’t access the local pet food pantries, which just had really strict requirements. And so we created this pet food pantry. Like anyone could ask for food and we would either ship it or deliver it or they could pick up if they… If we were doing like a pop up thing somewhere. So that’s… That was our first project. And then Hurricane Ian hit in September, late September 2022. And we immediately pivoted to doing recovery work. After that we were doing mucking and gutting. And this is one of the neighborhoods that we worked in in Orlo Vista, which is in West Orlando. It says… You could see here, it says, thanks Orange County. Like they spray painted that on their own house. Because these floods that have been happening after hurricanes have been a recurring issue. 

0:09:31.2 Rachel Kinbar: So this is systemic infrastructure issues that are happening repeatedly. Even if we don’t get hit by a hurricane directly, there’s always flooding here. So that’s something that… I don’t know how clearly you can see the water line in that image, but there is a water line there. It’s several feet high. And you can definitely see it in the one on the left with the house there. You could see how high the dirt goes up. So initially we were just getting everything out of the houses because everything was still there and totally washed out. Everything was destroyed. And we just needed to clear out the houses in order to try to get the walls dry to see how much we could salvage from the walls and the floors. Unfortunately, all these houses, it was really… Just really terrible damage. I think the flooding in most of them was like four feet at least. We can go to the next slide. 

0:10:29.3 Rachel Kinbar: And so, yeah, you could see some of the stuff that we took out of the house. All of the houses had big piles like this in front of it. If you’ve ever experienced a hurricane and seen neighborhoods that were really hit very hard by flooding, this is a normal site. Unfortunately, these piles stayed there for months because the county was not really sending enough trucks to come and pick up everything. And when they did come, they would only take a portion of it. So these piles got bigger and bigger and it was a pretty bad safety hazard, too. But every house had this in front of it. So this is just all the stuff that had to be… Had to be trashed. And we actually ended up taking a lot of bags to the dump ourselves. You could see that in that bottom middle picture there. So we were just taking stuff and getting rid of it ourselves so that it wouldn’t keep piling up so much. 

0:11:22.6 Rachel Kinbar: In addition to the mucking and gutting, which was just trying to get out the drywall, whatever couldn’t be salvaged so that the repair work could be done. Yeah, restoration of the homes. We also were bringing food every day for the neighborhood and for the volunteers. A lot of people lost all of their clothing, so we were bringing clothing so people could come and just take what they needed. We also did… There were some people who really wanted to try to save their clothes. And so we also worked with a local laundromat and paid for as many cycles as were needed by these families in order to wash and dry their clothing. We can go to the next slide. 

0:12:09.2 Rachel Kinbar: And in spite of our best efforts, you know, we… We are not professionals. A lot of us did not know what we were doing. But, yeah, so there was definitely mold that happened there. And you can see that on the walls. Once we got some of the drywall out, we could see just how high the damage went. And then we just could remove the bottom portion of the drywall instead of the entire wall. And so, yeah, we spent almost every day mucking and gutting until people started going back to work. And then we were just having a few weekend crews going out working on a number of different houses.

0:12:46.5 Rachel Kinbar: And then in that bottom right image there, I will mention that a number of people from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief came out and supported Central Florida Mutual Aid during this process. We had… I think the person on the left there is from MADR. And then that industrial dehumidifier was one that MADR purchased for us to use. And so we were able to take it, and it definitely improved the situation in the houses. We were able to bring from house to house, and it made a huge difference. And then when a subsequent hurricane came and had hit a different part of Florida, it ended up being taken to, I think Perry, and I don’t know where it is now, but I’m sure it’s doing good work somewhere. Go to the next slide. 

0:13:39.8 Rachel Kinbar: So at the end of Hurricane Ian and doing this recovery work, we were left with a lot of tools. People had donated so many tools, we don’t even know where most of them came, came from, they kind of just appeared. I’m sure a lot of them came from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. But we ended up with a ridiculous number of hammers, a lot of shovels and a lot of other miscellaneous tools that we were keeping in a storage unit. And members were accessing and using those tools as needed. But we didn’t really have a formal system. When new people joined, they didn’t even know about this. So over time, we realized like, we should really do something with this. We have a decent collection, a small collection, but a decent collection of tools and we should do something more with it. 

0:14:26.1 Rachel Kinbar: And then last year Shareable gave a very generous grant and we were able to actually turn that unofficial informal tool library into a public tool library. We grew the collection quite extensively. We have over 200 tools at this point, so it’s still a baby tool library, but doing pretty well. And I think the selection that we have is really, really great. We also have a book library. So in the same facility there are a lot of books that we cannot get here in the public library. And so we try to have a good selection of books. We have close to 200 books and we use myTurn to manage the inventory and it works really well for us. I think the link was dropped in the chat, so folks are welcome to like browse through the inventory. There are also things that are not added there and it’s definitely a work in process in terms of like how to categorize things But we are pretty proud of what we have there. And yeah, I think I mentioned we have over 200 tools. We can go to the next slide. 

0:15:37.5 Rachel Kinbar: This is it. We’re in a little storage facility. We are hoping by the end of the year to have a more permanent home. So we are looking for a partner. There are a number of issues which… With having these things in a storage facility. For example, if a hurricane did hit, we wouldn’t be able to get these things out, so that would be a problem. But it’s maybe 15 by 20 foot space. We have things pretty nicely organized. We have the categories. We have definitely a lot of tools for hurricane prep and recovery, which is similar to like lawn maintenance, yard maintenance, home maintenance tools. We have a full line of Milwaukee lithium battery powered tools. We have recreational items, so arts and crafts, we have camping stuff. We have various games. We have health care equipment, medical equipment. So if someone has a broken leg, we have crutches, we have a scooter. We have like a rolling walker now as well. 

0:16:41.0 Rachel Kinbar: We have as well air movers and fans. We have solar powered battery things. We have power banks. We have a pretty nice solar power generator. We have a portable washing machine. We have all kinds of little things. And yeah, we’re pretty proud of our collection and we’re going to be ready to hit the ground if we do have another hurricane come through soon. And I think I can stop there. Maybe one thing I want to just touch back on is the… I mentioned that after hurricanes, even if we don’t get hit directly, we always have flooding. So this one neighborhood where we worked, there’s a retention pond there. It is decades behind where it needs to be. And so every time there’s like a bad storm, it floods, the pumps break down, it’s not deep enough. 

0:17:37.9 Rachel Kinbar: There was supposed to be a project to renovate that and improve it and the funding was cut by the state, so that’s not happening. But we always know where it’s going to hit so we can actually be prepared in that sense because we always know where the flooding is going to happen because it’s the same infrastructure issues. And so as our… You know, as our states and our countries are investing more and more in the police and in the military and less and less in improving and repairing infrastructure, we’re going to be seeing more and more of this stuff. And so having tool libraries and having groups who can do things like responding with mucking and gutting is super, super important. We do… I mentioned we have workshops. So that’s another thing that we’ve been doing a lot of. And one of our members is also finally starting a Repair Cafe. So Orlando is finally going to have a regular Repair Cafe. I’m pretty excited about that too. All right, I’ll take a breath now.

0:18:48.3 Tom Llewellyn: All right. Thank you for that. So I do want to encourage folks to drop some questions in the chat. I see a couple of them already there. Remember to write question before your question. I’ve got some as well, but let’s jump to that. I saw there was a question about how big the storage unit, which was already answered there, 15 by 20. Have you had to deal with anyone taking tools and reselling them?

0:19:13.7 Rachel Kinbar: We have not. I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I mean, our policy is generally… I mean, we’re an abolitionist group. We’re not going to involve the police and things. So if something like that happens… I mean, we have… We have a number of things in place so that there’s really a lot of… Hasn’t happened. And I don’t know exactly what we’ll do if it does, but it’s sort of, if someone does that, they’re desperate and they probably needed it. It’s not a good way to be in community with people. And so we hope they don’t. But yeah.

0:20:05.0 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah. Well, maybe we’ll hear from Shelby about how they’ve dealt with this in Asheville. But I will say that I was a co-founder of the Asheville Tool Library. And before that… Before starting that, you know, now about a decade ago, went around and interviewed a lot of other tool libraries and that was a hot question. And talked to the… One that always stands out in my mind was the Oakland Tool Library, which is part of the public library system. And so it’s open to anybody in the City of Oakland with a library card. They have a lot of tools and they have a lot of usage. And they said they averaged about $4,000 a year in broken and unreturned tools, but they got about $12,000 a year in late fees. And so not all tool libraries charge late fees, but just the little bit of loss was overwhelmingly covered by the other income that they made. And it wasn’t something that was… Significantly impacted their ability to run the library. 

0:21:06.6 Tom Llewellyn: So there was another question here about access. So you know, are you recording everything? Is everything communicated? Is there just kind of general open access? I know you mentioned using myTurn, but can you explain kind of how that back end system works real quick?

0:21:28.0 Rachel Kinbar: Yeah, we have… In terms of the tool library, we have limited access. I mean part of it is it’s in a locked storage facility. So that makes that a little difficult. So we have very limited open hours each month, basically twice a month, 12:00 to 2:00, first and third Sundays of the month and also by appointment. So… And we also try to have at least two volunteers there, never a someone solo. So that’s a kind of a safety protocol we have in place. So there’s always multiple people there. They have to text in order to even get into the facility because it’s locked. So access in terms of that. We do have the staff. And by staff I mean volunteers. It’s just Central Florida Mutual Aid folks who are running this at this point. There’s like a.. Like any library we have a check in checkout system and so and also like terms depending on when we’re next open. Like if we’re open two weeks from that date, then it’s two week checkout point. If it’s three weeks, then it’s three weeks. But that’s kind of how it works at the moment. 

0:22:39.5 Tom Llewellyn: Got it. And how are you… You know, you mentioned that you did get a grant from us at Shareable to kick the thing off, but there’s a question about just kind of overall maintaining of the system. And, you know, on your… On your slide with the information from the… For registration, you mentioned there’s about a… You know, you’re asking members $20. A $20 donation to be a member. Are you finding that you’ve been able to get enough members to be able to cover those kind of basic costs of the storage facility and just kind of ongoing operating costs?

0:23:20.8 Rachel Kinbar: I will say not yet because we’ve only been open for a few months, so we’re not at the number that we want to be at. We are going to raise the amount. That’s kind of our initial amount that we came up with that is going to be a little bit higher than that. We are going to make our Fair Orlando in a few weeks and they get 5,000 people coming through there. So we’re expecting to get a few new members from that. But yeah, so we’re definitely… We’re not at the number we want to be at just yet, but we’re working towards it. So we have… We have the membership donations and some other grants as well. So we definitely need to keep going for grants in order to have more financial stability. But we also do a sliding scale for workshops, so we have a little bit of money coming in through that as well.

0:24:12.5 Tom Llewellyn: Got it. Any last questions for Rachel? And, you know, at the end we’ll have another Q&A and Rachel might pull you back in for some final questions. If not, I think we might transition over to Shelby and Ben. 

0:24:32.6 Ben Wyatt: Tom, we had a quick one other question that came in. Rachel, do you have a specific response plan in place for how to use the tool library if they’re during another disaster or hurricane like Hurricane Ian? 

0:24:59.7 Tom Llewellyn: Oh, Rachel, did you hear that question? I think you froze for a second.

0:25:02.8 Rachel Kinbar: Oh. Yeah, sorry. Am I back?

0:25:04.6 Tom Llewellyn: Yep, you’re back. Yeah. Can you re-answer the…

0:25:06.9 Rachel Kinbar: No. I heard that. I heard the question. 

0:25:08.3 Tom Llewellyn: You did? Okay. Excellent.

0:25:09.1 Rachel Kinbar: I heard the question. Yes.

0:25:09.6 Tom Llewellyn: Great.

0:25:10.3 Rachel Kinbar: So we don’t have something written down yet. We have talked about what we would do and I think it would be similar to what happened before. Is that if we’re doing brigades, most tools would be relegated for that or for communities. So it could actually be moved from house to house and used that way.

0:25:36.2 Tom Llewellyn: Awesome. Okay. Well, like I said, we’ll have some… We’re going to dive into a lot more tool library details with Shelby and Ben come right Up. Okay. Well, let’s transition over. Where’d they go? Here we go. And I think maybe just before we get started… Now I’m having a hard time finding where Ben went.

0:26:09.7 Ben Wyatt: I’m right here.

0:26:10.9 Tom Llewellyn: Oh, there you are. Thank you. Perfect. I’m going to hand it off to the two of you all. If you want to just go ahead and introduce yourselves first and then I’ll start sharing the slides again.

0:26:23.8 Shelby Treichler: Awesome. Yeah. Hi y’all. My name is Shelby Treichler. She/they pronouns. I’m located in Marshall, North Carolina, which is about 40 minutes north. But I’m here representing not only the Asheville Tool Library, but also the WNC Repair Cafe.

0:26:43.6 Ben Wyatt: And I’m Ben Wyatt. I live in Asheville, North Carolina. I’m from Hendersonville, just south of here. And I’m here with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, and go back a long way with the tool library in town.

0:27:01.1 Shelby Treichler: Yeah. So if you want to go ahead and pull up the first slide there, Tom, I’ll get us started. So just a little bit about our organizations. The Asheville Tool Library was originally conceptualized in 2013 and gathered community support until its initial founding in 2016. Since then, we’ve grown. We are in our third location now and rapidly outgrowing that as well. But we have over 1300 members and over 3000 tools now. We have hired our first part time staff person in 2021 and our second part time staff person earlier this year. Everything else is just powered by volunteers. We have between 15 and 20 what we call active volunteers, which means they’re committing to about 15 hours a quarter. And with that, the two part time staff and all of our volunteers, we are open four days a week for reservations to serve our community. 

0:28:01.3 Shelby Treichler: We also have an entirely volunteer powered maintenance department, so we service all of our own tools under the guidance of our… One of our part time staff. We have a new community art space that focuses on textiles and prints art and they’re hosting skillshares and workshops and open craft nights. They also are going to be just having days where people can come in and use some of the bigger machines. We also have a Seeds of Solidarity group that’s working on a community garden and seed library. We host our own workshop and skillshare programs and we’re launching our new community firewood program where we will be processing firewood and dropping them off at hubs around town so people can use it to heat their homes this winter. 

0:28:52.0 Shelby Treichler: And then on the other side, another group I’m volunteering with is the WNC Repair Cafe. WNC Repair Cafe was founded in 2018 and began hosting repair events. It’s also grown. This year alone we did around 25 events spanning three counties. So how those work is we set up kind of like a mobile repair space out of the tool library part of the time, but also sometimes in public libraries or community colleges. We bring repairs together with the skills and we invite anybody to bring anything that’s broken and we try to fix it to various success. But we do pull down some pretty good stats and a lot of our repairers just like the challenge. So we encourage people to bring us some of the weirder stuff too.

0:29:39.9 Shelby Treichler: Some of those events are also just sewing and mending events and so you can bring stuff and we have a whole crew of people who come in with their own sewing machines and we’ll help you fix your clothing. A big thing about the Repair Cafe is it’s not just about providing a service, although sometimes people do just want to come in, try to get something fixed and leave. But we really want to focus on the educational aspect and sort of demystifying the process of repair. So we really encourage the people who bring the stuff to hang out with us, get excited about opening things up that they may be a little intimidated to open up and leave with maybe a little more confidence in trying to do DIY repair for themselves in the future. 

0:30:18.6 Shelby Treichler: So both of these organizations were very founded in the community when Hurricane Helene hit. Just in case you all may not have heard about Hurricane Helene, it hit in September of last year and was what people are calling a once in a thousand year storm. So unlike some climate disasters that communities experience, this is not something that we were prepared for at all and probably, hopefully something we will never have to be prepared for on this magnitude again. But of course, now we’re all thinking about it every time it rains. We saw about 15 inches of rain dumped in our mountains which trickled down through creating kind of catastrophic landslides, flooding along all the rivers and resulted unfortunately in a lot of fatality infrastructure damage and property damage. 

0:31:14.1 Shelby Treichler: So when that storm hit, it’s not an understatement to say we were not prepared for it. We had no sort of disaster relief response in mind, either of these organizations. And one of the first things we realized is how crucial communication is at a time like this when all known methods of communication are down. There was no Internet, there was no electricity, and the roads for most of our communities were entirely impassable. So it wasn’t even a do you know where to go? Which most people didn’t know where to go. And a situation like this, it’s how do you even get there when your one road in and out of your community is completely cut off. I was pretty fortunate with my spacing. I was able to get to the tool library pretty much the day after. I wanted to go in because I knew that we had a solar setup that was pretty powerful. It was one of the Goal Zero Yetis. 

0:32:10.4 Shelby Treichler: And my first thought was I could take this out into the community and start providing power. Not at the time that we thought cell phones were that handy because nobody could get service. But if you want to go ahead to the next next slide, Tom. That picture there on the left is me sitting on the back of my pickup truck the first day afterwards with our Goal Zero set up. And it was the one spot in town that we were finding service. There was one tower still holding on. And I sat there for six hours providing power to people and just trying to talk to people to see if anybody knew what was going on. And the first thing that I heard was that they were going to be community meetings and at Firestorm, which is an anarchist bookstore here in Asheville, and community center. And I was like, all right, I’m taking the solar panel there tomorrow, and I’ll be at this community meeting. What we quickly learned is that people who had experience organizing were able to respond a little quicker. And so this group of people had already created a system of pages with different categories, so medical, food, water, transportation and needs and offers.

0:33:18.9 Shelby Treichler: And people were just taking markers and writing down things that they could offer the community, if they had diapers, if they had water, anything. And also things that were desperately needed. And you also just had to put down where you would be and how long you’d be there, and if someone could respond within that time frame, that was the only way they’d get that information out there. So in that first meeting, we were starting to see kind of the scale of what was happening and also starting to hear the initial rumors that we were cut off. Most major interstates in and out of the region were closed off. And it quickly became apparent, which is kind of a motto out here in Appalachia, that we were here to save ourselves. 

0:33:56.8 Shelby Treichler: So Dan had contacted me. I was able to get a little bit of cell service. And Dan, who is the leader and the founder of the repair cafe, had messaged me and said that he might be able to get a few people together with small engine experience and asked if I thought that we could get a repair cafe going, because we were seeing immediately generators and chainsaws, doing life saving work, clearing roads, getting trees off houses, bringing access to people. And I was like, yeah, I know the exact place to do it. Firestorm’s already organizing. So we brought our first cafe right there. You can see the pictures of it. And we didn’t know if anybody would hear about it. I wrote it down on that piece of paper. Someone from the radio was there and funneling things back from this community event to the radio, which the radio, everyone was turning their cars on at specific times because you’d get public downloads our government was coming on. 

0:34:50.3 Shelby Treichler: We’d all crowd around one car to try to conserve gas and listen to the radio to try to get these downloads of what was going on. And they started advertising our events. As we’re hearing stories about the communities being hit, we decide that we need to take our repair events to these communities. So we had about four or five of our repairs that would come with us. We went to 11 different spaces over a month. And in that month we worked on over 600 chainsaws and generators with a repair rate about 90%. People were bringing in chainsaws that were in pretty rough condition. I think the craziest one I saw was I worked on one that said that it had been made in West Germany and they were asking these tools to do work now that was essential. So we were able to pivot pretty quickly with repair cafe because we already knew repairs in our network that had small engine experience. If you want to go ahead to the next slide, Tom. 

0:35:55.7 Shelby Treichler: And we also quickly learned that it wasn’t just about having people with skills like working on chainsaws. We need people who knew how to organize and handle admin work because we had a lot of energy coming in with volunteers, people wanting to help. And if you don’t have that person who can kind of make their energy go to something productive, there was a lot of kind of emotional spin out in those days. And that’s something that Dan and I talk about a lot, is if we can just let people kind of know what our experience was. If they can just have a little bit of an idea of what their plan would be if something like this happened. One point person to start organizing, one place to go meet, a brick and mortar somewhere to go meet in the community. If you can have like a text chain or an email chain, it would save us. 

0:36:41.2 Shelby Treichler: It took us three or four days to get organized. How much work could we have done in those three or four days if we were able to respond a little quicker and the little less of that emotional… Like feeling like you’re not doing enough that burden that you’re not doing enough in those times. So being prepared is the best way to kind of combat that a little bit. So I was in charge of keeping track of everything. You can see those tags on the left was how we would keep things right. Sometimes we’d have around 120 chainsaws dropped off in a day. We’d start around 10 AM and just work until they were gone. People were dropping them and then leaving. And so we would try to take phone numbers, even though we couldn’t always get phone numbers to work. But just in case we had to leave an event with someone’s chainsaw because they didn’t get back in time to pick it up, they could find us later. 

0:37:27.5 Shelby Treichler: And then on the other side, we had the tool library surprise, which the tool library was in a new place because it was a brick and mortar and energy was coming into us. So where the repair cafe became mobile and was able to go out into these communities, the tool library became a hub at the Smith Mill Works. If you want to go to the next one, Tom. So here at the Smith Mill Works, we had people coming to us because they knew that we were the tool library and they wanted to bring us tools, they wanted to bring us things. We were a very small crew, an even smaller crew at this time because everybody was kind of pulled in different directions. So we really relied on other organizations to bring in kind of their expertise, their lane, and we just wanted to support it. 

0:38:07.6 Shelby Treichler: So one of the groups that came out, Skills Academy for Women, they had been doing chainsaw classes. They had some arborists who could come in and teach chainsaw safety courses. And we did four in the month and we had over 250 participants come and learn some very basic chainsaw safety because we were seeing a spike in chainsaw related injuries at the hospitals. So people trying to do the work and then almost creating more of a burden on the system by not having the skills to do it properly. So we’re trying to get the education out as well as the tools as well as the resources. And then one more slide from us, Tom. 

0:38:43.5 Shelby Treichler: That kind of also brings us into what we were so grateful that MADR was able to come in because we were getting a lot of of things and we didn’t have the power to get it out and we didn’t really have the knowledge of how to respond to a crisis like this. So people were bringing us gasoline. Oregon Tools was donating PPE and then people were also sometimes bringing us just like food and water type stuff. And we had no idea what to do with us, but they would drop it. So Ben can tell a little bit about how our organizations already had gone back, but we were able to get unified really quickly in that.

0:39:19.8 Ben Wyatt: Yeah, I can… I can hop in. So did I turn my microphone? Yeah. So, yeah, right as the storm hit, we were kind of in a pretty weirdly fortunate situation. My spouse and I and several folks in town have been organizing the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief for years and years. We got involved back in 2017 and just the April before the storm. So April of ’24, I think I just found that we had started renting a shipping container as a kind of hub distribution point for other responses, usually further south in Louisiana and Florida. So when the storm hit, we had a space already established on site directly beside the tool library. And at the time we had been sharing it with other organizations, community organizations. So the week of the storm, our first effort going out was, I think if you switch over to the next slide. You might have to skip one to get to the picture. One more maybe. Nope, I think my picture didn’t upload. So you can go back. The shipping container right beside the tool library. We just opened it up and spray painted a number on each door and knew that in these sorts of situations there’s a tendency to get very overwhelmed and also bombarded with a lot of supplies and a lot of things come in as soon as people are able to.

0:41:18.8 Ben Wyatt: And the number one thing that we have learned from past responses is it is really quick to get completely overwhelmed by all of the outpouring of donations, supplies, people’s energy coming in. They like want to help, but they don’t know where to help. And so what we kind of did in that space was to try and set up a sort of system for moving supplies to where they need to go and trying to work out what exactly was needed. For our particular physical location, we were kind of just a little bit out of town, not too close to some of the harder hit areas up in Madison County and Haywood County where the roads were completely washed away. But we were opened up quick enough to where we could get trucks of things in. So we fairly quickly swapped our initial idea of like, okay, we’re going to be going out and doing supplies and going out and repairing wells and trying to get generators hooked up to wells to get water out. That kind of fairly probably in the first week, week and a half, we switched over and realized that what we could do best in that situation was be the kind of Amazon fulfillment center of the disaster.

0:42:49.1 Ben Wyatt: And so we could have a physical space. People can throw all the stuff towards us and we’re going to get it out to the people that need it. And we’re going to spend most of our organizing efforts reaching out to other, more centralized in town in a community, direct distribution spots, and then making sure they had exactly what they needed and not a truck full of size three diapers when what they need are size six diapers. That was a… That was a big thing about it. First off, there was a whole kind of community organized effort of these chainsaw crews that were coming in, like Shelby was mentioning, around the having to get the houses accessible and trees off of houses, going out doing medic checks to these different places. 

0:43:47.0 Ben Wyatt: And so one of the things that we realized as soon as we were able to get messages out were y’all need to send us chaps and get as many chaps into the warehouse as possible. And the fact that we were directly behind the tool library and repair cafe were operating out of the tool library. It made this like, really beautiful synergy of we were able to pull in PPE and get it to the folks that were going out in the chainsaw crews. And they were heading out up into the hollers to clear the mountain passes so folks could actually get the medication that they need and get the food and water that they needed. If you can switch over to the first slide. I think some of the biggest things that we kind of learned on it was that, like, we went in there, we were like, Okay. We’re going to be a supply help. We’re going to be a distribution point. We’re going to let people come in and get what they needed. 

0:44:46.9 Ben Wyatt: And fairly quickly we realized that that was untenable with the amount of folks that we had there. And it was not going to be really what was being asked of us, even though that was what we were familiar with in our usual responses and when we’ve gone off to other places. So switching over to a kind of centralized receiving and distribution spot wound up being the best thing we could do at the time. And none of us really knew how to do that, so we had to figure it out on the fly. One thing that I think I might have left off this slide was similar to how Shelby was talking about. They were sending out those Firestorm meetings and the repair cafes stuff on the radio. Once we got our, like, intake form and our phone number out and printed off a whole bunch of flyers that say, hey, if you need something, let us know and we’ll try and find where you can go to get it. 

0:45:49.6 Ben Wyatt: We wound up getting called by much, much larger non profits. And much like the City of Asheville and the county government was linking back to our little ragtag group of punks in the parking lot, moving around boxes. You can go over to the next one just to see some pictures. So one of the big things that we focused on fairly early on, as we were all getting way overwhelmed, was to try and… Well, we realized we couldn’t do this by putting in all the effort that we wanted to. And we couldn’t just like, bear down and like, tough it out because it was way too much work to do. And so we spent some time trying to establish clear roles and responsibilities in the response and in the operation itself and then made a game out of it.

0:46:54.3 Ben Wyatt: So we had a little, I think we called them… Well, I do know… I know exactly what we call them. We call them talismans that had different kind of role responsibilities. And we put out and printed this off that we just made in the back of the tool library. And it’s just got all of our different types of roles and what we’re doing and how to do it. And so by spending a little bit of time that we could have been running around in circles trying to get everything sorted, we stepped aside for a second, built out a hopefully reproducible system that folks could use to actually come in and not have to learn all the different aspects of the process, whether it be bringing in all the requests, the needs requests, and coordinating all the drivers. As we were building out these systems, we’ve made a really big effort to try and build out a infrastructure and a framework that we could then pass to other people and walk away for a minute so we could get a full night’s sleep and wash the dishes that were piled up in the sink because we hadn’t had water for two months.

0:48:08.6 Ben Wyatt: And so I think partially because of that, we were able to keep going for a lot longer than… Well, that I had been able to in previous, like, deployments responses. And we keep going now in a slightly different capacity. But like, I think one of the things that we had talked about yesterday was the communications problem. I got maybe the worst feeling of, I saw this coming. I took steps to actually mitigate it, and then it all fell apart. I had… When I was in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, we realized there was this huge problem with communication breakdown. The grid totally failed. And no cell phone service, no way to talk to people on either side of even the small little island of Vieques where we were working with some friends. 

0:49:14.8 Ben Wyatt: And so when I got back to town, a bunch of us all got together and started building out these mesh tastic nodes. And I put a whole lot of work into it, put a whole lot of effort into it, built out all these little devices, sent them out to everybody and then stopped using them. And in between the times that we built out this little infrastructure and then the storm hit, some over-the-air-update came through and made it to where none of the apps that we had working on our phones were able to actually communicate. So the first day after the storm, I was sitting on my porch with five to ten different radio nodes trying to get any of them to connect to my phone that I couldn’t get a… Had no service on, but did have a charge on, trying to be able to even broadcast out to… Out to Marshall and out to other places in town to get a hold of folks. 

0:50:10.9 Ben Wyatt: And I don’t know what the entire point of that story was, besides saying if you build out a system and you have your equipment, please make sure that you test it and use it. Yeah. Beyond all of that because we kind of weren’t able to get regular communications out and where folks were able to get signal and were able to get connections made, what wound up happening locally and kind of regionally was everyone reinvented their own system of how to talk to each other and how to receive donations and how to distribute stuff. And so the… As soon as we were finally able to get wider communication out, what we had were multiple incompatible systems that were all spun up last week that we’re all trying to work together and we would get a lot of repeated and reduplicated efforts.

0:51:19.9 Ben Wyatt: And so actually a tool library volunteer turned staff member helped devise this wide network of communications and resource allocation and supplies tracking between all the different community hubs that it set up that we called the WNC Mutual Aid Switchboard. Well, they called it that. I didn’t do that. But once we were able to spin up this like kind of centralized intake and get one spot where we could give people a link, give people a number, get a paper form out that greatly reduced the duplication of effort and all of the running around and got… Well, I had some stats, but I think my computer went to sleep while I was blabbering. 

0:52:21.2 Ben Wyatt: We wound up… From the times that we started actually using the network or the switchboard and what we have records of, we wound up supplying at least 350 households with necessary medicine and sending crews out to do chainsaw work and home repair work, supplying food, water, shelter, all those lower tier of the hierarchy of needs. And we’re able to kind of build out this system where we would get an entire warehouse full of materials or full of donations on the day, send it out to 10 different hubs, and then come back with an empty truck, only to refill our entire stock again the next day. And I think it was a herculean effort from a lot of the folks that were doing that all day, every day. And yeah, it… I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope I never see anything like it again. But it was one of those moments where the efforts and the organizing kind of capacity of people working together to do the thing that needs to be done. 

0:53:50.6 Ben Wyatt: There was a thing I was saying a whole lot right after the storm, which is that in every disaster it feels like some of the artifice of what we have to deal with all the time breaks down. And you get to see people acting with each other for each other to meet each other’s needs in a way that we don’t really get to a whole lot because the rent’s due and the power bill’s due. And every time we’re able to keep that going for longer and longer, we get to kind of hold open the window of what is possible and what a community-supported organism… Well, community supported community looks like. And that was a phenomenal experience and a terrible experience. And I work all… Like full time doing home repair for free. So it’s still going and will be for a while. And I’m going to stop talking for a minute.

0:54:58.5 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, thanks Ben, for that. So thank you for everybody who’s putting questions in, please continue to add questions. They’re getting grabbed and I’ll start asking them in a second. You know, there’s the classic saying, you know, if you build it, they will come. And as you were talking about, you know, the City of Asheville and large non profits and everybody, you know, showing up, you know, and directing people towards the work that you were doing as a small ragtag group of punks in the parking lot. Love that. It made me think a lot of, you know, there’s been many examples of disasters where that exact same thing has happened. 

0:55:38.5 Tom Llewellyn: And the one that came up for me is we’ve done an audio documentary on the response podcast of which I didn’t mention in the beginning, but the recording of this session today. Not only will we be releasing the video and the transcript, but we’ll also be putting the audio, an edited version of the audio, out on the response podcast. And we did a documentary almost maybe about five years ago now about the 2017 Puebla earthquake in Mexico City. And there was this amazing response called Verificado19s where there was a bunch of organizers who had been primarily part of student uprisings fighting against austerity measures. And when the earthquake hit, there was just so much misinformation on the ground. People didn’t know where buildings… Where people were actually trapped or what materials were needed. 

0:56:24.2 Tom Llewellyn: You know, like you were saying earlier, you know, do you need a size 3 diaper or a size 6 diaper? Do you need a bulldozer or do you need a hand crew, right? And this group of organizers with WhatsApp groups and Google spreadsheets, organized this amazing response that would send out at least two people to any place that was responded that there was people that were trapped, make sure there was… That the needs were verified, what they were sent back to that central dispatch, and then they would send out crews. And it was so effective that the Mexican government started contacting them and saying, hey, you know, where should we send our official disaster response crews? 

0:57:03.9 Tom Llewellyn: Because the… Just the basic system that they created as a citizenry was so much more effective than anything that the government was able to manage. And it’s just this amazing reminder that the systems that we see in place are a lot more tenuous than they seem. And just the work that we do as organizers on our ground building relationships ahead of time, can be far more effective than any governmental response. So that was all just to take a moment before sharing that and maybe we’ll drop the link. Oh, it already dropped in the link. If you want to find that audio documentary, there’s a link in the chat. Thank you, Paige, for that. 

0:57:51.3 Tom Llewellyn: Want to just stick with some questions related to Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, because we’re just there. And then I’m going to bounce back to some of the tool library questions that were coming up. And this actually is a question for both of you all, but wondering how did you make all these decisions as a small group dealing with so much in that peak moment? The idea to make the game happen and create the manual system, how did you actually make the decision to do that. Very quickly, what went into that?

0:58:32.7 Ben Wyatt: So there’s a little bit of a story. I won’t take too long on it. But the whole system of the critters and the icons and everything actually came about totally naturally. Where we were right in the middle of a day, which was all day, every day of receiving trucks and receive… Trying to send stuff out. We’d be in the back trying to make phone calls to all the other hubs. And one thing that always happens, at least in my experience, is you get a lot of volunteers that want to be helpful and have a lot of chaotic energy, but don’t necessarily want to, or maybe they don’t fully appreciate that this is a thing that has been going on for weeks or months at a time at this point. And so on one of the trucks full of donations, there was a Pikachu hat. And one of the long kind of all day volunteers that had been out there with us since just about the very beginning grabbed the Pikachu hat, put the Pikachu hat on, and was out in the yard moving stuff around, getting donations packed, getting all of the staging set up for the next truck coming in.

0:59:50.7 Ben Wyatt: And we, in a moment of exasperation, we’re like, “Hey, I can’t fucking deal with it. Can you go talk to Pikachu? ” And realize that, like, oh, yeah. Having a clear definition of who’s doing what right now, because we’re trying to focus on this other project, this other aspect of it. If we can send folks and be able to say, hey, go talk to Pikachu, we’re not doing that. We’re doing this other thing. That was the entire basis of, well, okay. If we have Pikachu, what else do we need? How can we say that if a volunteer comes up and wants to… Doesn’t want to be driving stuff around, but does want to be able to like, build shelves, and we have carpenters coming in, that’s where we kind of built out the like, fixer role. Because we had folks that showed up that were like, “Don’t really want to move around, don’t really want to talk on the phone. I can build shelves.” We were like, “Awesome.” You got a whole… We need shelves. You’re on it. And so each one kind of came about from, like, seeing those patterns of ways that people can help that aren’t always everybody trying to do everything. Yeah.

1:01:08.2 Shelby Treichler: Yeah.

1:01:08.1 Shelby Treichler: And I also will add, again, systems like this are so good knowing who to ask a question instead of just spraying your question around and therefore creating more kind of organizational chaos by asking people and pausing people in the middle of their task. But also in an event like this where a lot of us are in survival mode, a lot of us don’t know how to turn off. Because the second you step away, you start to think about what you should be doing or what you want to be doing. Have a very clear visual delineation of when you’re on and when you’re off. Because we would step away, we would go up to this one room. We dubbed it the crying room. But it was just the one little spot where we could like close the door and have a minute. And if you were in the client crying room, don’t go ask him a question. Like it doesn’t matter. Take the break. So having these very clear things of, yeah, that may be the point person 99% of the time, but if they’re not in and on at that moment, give them the time to step away or find someone else to ask. Yeah, it just became really crucial to have these kind of backup redundant systems of where information flowed as well as everything else.

1:02:23.7 Tom Llewellyn: Love the crying room. You got to have a place to pause.

1:02:26.2 Ben Wyatt: We still have it. 

1:02:27.7 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah.

1:02:28.3 Ben Wyatt: It’s so good to have.

1:02:31.8 Tom Llewellyn: So there’s a number of questions in the chat just about that system. And you mentioned that part of the intention of creating the different critters and the manual was to be able to share it with others, to be able to hopefully quick start that process. Is that available online somewhere or is that something that people can access?

1:02:52.9 Ben Wyatt: Just a second. I’m plugging my phone in because… Yes, I don’t know if it ever actually got posted onto the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief website, but we can share in the links… 

1:03:11.1 Tom Llewellyn: If you find that just… Yeah.

1:03:13.0 Ben Wyatt: In the links afterwards. I’ll make sure that’s available for folks.

1:03:16.1 Tom Llewellyn: Awesome. Thank you. So there was actually just stick… While we’re sticking on that, can you maybe lift it back up and decode the symbols in the system and just let people know what the different roles were, what that meant?

1:03:40.2 Ben Wyatt: Yeah, that was actually right before the call. That’s what I was trying to get into the slides and it was a PDF and getting that into Google Slides was more than I could figure out in the time. So our main roles that we had were, fulfillment folk they were kind of the packers. So they would catch the needs requests and then build them out onto pallets of the same colors and put them onto the… Fill up the order as best we could and then call a runner to… Drivers to come and get them. We had the comms octopus. The comms octopus was mostly stuck behind a desk all day and we used octopus as the mascot for that because they had hands in all the different chaos threads and everything. 

1:04:32.2 Ben Wyatt: Fixers were trying to fix our equipment when it broke down. Most of that we just asked the repair cafe to do. But when it did wind up in house, it was usually our pallet jacks or something that we broke on the time or on the day. The bay bees were named after one of our friends B and they just went around did receipt and organizing of donations as they came in. We had the hedgehog. Hedgehog wound up being the evolution of Pikachu of where you send volunteers to go talk to somebody and get them a task to do. And then we had had medics on staff here and there… Or not on staff. On site here and there, all volunteers. But when we had a medic there, they were able to kind of handle larger kind of higher level medical needs and make sure that got back to the medic collective that was out doing all that. 

1:05:30.4 Ben Wyatt: And yeah, I’ll make sure this does get out to folks. But we had a little kind of what you’re supposed to do, like what is being asked of you in each of these roles. And so mostly we were trying… Like this was I think the fourth or fifth revision of it because we would start putting too much on one person or one role job description effectively and then move it on to another one. So as you can see later on in the… As we added a few more, they got considerably more complicated where we have probably a little bit too much on one person at a time. And so we tried to split it out into more have multiple octopuses or multiple hedgehogs going at a time. And like, yeah, it’s also just a lot more fun to say go find the hedgehog or go talk to the octopus instead of can you find the coordinator? Or logistics and receiving. And we needed a little fun.

1:06:45.1 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, definitely. You got to have some levity in those moments, especially when it’s an ongoing response. You know, it’s not just a couple hours or one day. Once you’re going for a while, you gotta have those moments of silliness or it’s much more likely you’re gonna break down and everybody’s gonna end up in the crying room. And nobody’s gonna be the octopus taking all the calls. So I’ve just got a question, you know, to go back to the tool library wondering especially with, you know, online systems going down, everything else. How did you manage the inventory going out? Were you able to continue using myTurn? I don’t know if you mentioned that, but I know that Asheville Tool Library also uses myTurn to manage the inventory and members. What systems did you have to put in place or have you put in place moving forward?

1:07:43.0 Shelby Treichler: Yeah, I was very early to the tool library, but someone beat me there and there was already a post-it note with we have just numbers physically written on all of our tools that refer to the item in our myTurn inventory. So the very first system, while people were kind of just coming and going rather quickly, was just writing down your name and what you were taking from the space. Luckily, at the time it was only volunteers who were coming into the space. We just have a code on the front door and if you’re an active volunteer, you get the code to the door and so you can go in. So we weren’t super worried about like members taking stuff, but we just kind of used that system until we had one of our volunteer/board members who started taking all of those post-it notes and doing like… They had in wireless Internet back at their place. 

1:08:38.2 Shelby Treichler: So they would come in, collect all of those notes and then go home and just manually enter it. And then we got to the space where we weren’t sending out as many of our tools because we had so many donations coming in and we didn’t track those. We weren’t planning on trying to get those back. We wanted those out into the community. So that became us just tagging the MADR system of just being like, hey, someone just came by and dropped off, you know, 20 pairs of chaps. Send them out where you need. We would keep one or two for our inventory for like people who want to check them out and then bring them back. But most of it we were just trying to funnel out as quickly as we could.

1:09:14.0 Tom Llewellyn: Got it. And has anything changed? Have you put in specific protocols for future disasters from lessons learned from this or anything else?

1:09:25.9 Shelby Treichler: Yeah, not at the tool library. Again, we… What we were able to do like as a tool library was we just kind of created space for all these other orgs. We haven’t talked about it yet, but the space we were at Smith Mill Works is such an open space and it was quickly able to swell with a couple another group called Be Well. They were building IBC tote stands and getting water out really quickly and bringing water drops into these neighborhoods because the City of Asheville was out of water for a month and other places that relied on well water didn’t have electricity for 14 days. And so we were just kind of… At the tool library most of our volunteers already were kind of double dipping with other orgs. So the tool library hasn’t really done much, but with the repair cafe, one of the first things we did was we partnered with Footprint Solar Project and we built out a trailer that pretty much… One of the hardest things was getting replacement parts. 

1:10:28.2 Shelby Treichler: Stores weren’t open. Some stores started opening occasionally, but it was just cash, which a lot of people hadn’t taken out cash. So we now have a built out, I think it’s like a 6 by 12 enclosed trailer, solar on the top. It’s a complete mobile workspace. We bring that to all of our repair events now. But the idea is where before we were just kind of every repairer was bringing in their own stuff, working out of their own back of the trucks in these parking lots. Now we are more contained. So if that was ever a hurdle of someone being like, well I don’t have the tools to do that. Well, we have the tools now just come help us use them.

1:11:07.9 Tom Llewellyn: Got it. Thank you. And you know, so I’m wondering also, you know, one of the things that we brought folks together and Rachel, I’m probably going to bring you back in here in a minute, so just be ready for that. There are a number of Mutual Aid organizers on here that have not been involved in tool libraries at all. And so the two threads that we were hoping to pull in this session was… Well, three. One, is like looking at what does response look like, what does partnership look like between organizations like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief and Asheville Tool Library, but also Firestorm, which you talked a lot about, which was great. I’m glad you brought that in because that was, I know, a really important partner, you know, Western North Carolina Repair Cafe as well. 

1:12:00.6 Tom Llewellyn: So what does that look like for established Mutual Aid organizations to be able to partner with existing tool libraries. And then the other thread is around, you know, for existing Mutual Aid groups that want to start their own tool libraries, kind of what is that kind of key advice just to get started. And so I think, I’ll… Going to start with Shelby and Ben here. Just advice you have… And maybe this starts with Ben as a Mutual Aid organizer for building those partnerships with existing community social infrastructure like a tool library beforehand so that you’re ready to roll when something like this happens.

1:12:52.4 Ben Wyatt: Yeah, I mean I think you are as prepared as you are connected with the resources in your area. Right? And if you have a fantastic resource like a tool library or going to start a tool library, the like power multiplication of what you’re able to accomplish in particularly a disaster response like is massive. We’ve been in pretty close connection with the Asheville Tool Library for a while. I actually didn’t know that you were one of the founders of that, but I catered your grand opening in 2016. It’s Food Not Bombs. But we have been in and out of all those spaces a whole lot. Like the Asheville Tool Library has lent us tools as we’ve gotten groups together to go out to Louisiana in the past. And so I think whatever we can do to connect these worlds is… I’ve only had fantastic experience and like, just… I don’t know if I actually answered your question. 

1:14:09.5 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah. No it’s all right. And Shelley, you know, from your perspective.

1:14:14.5 Shelby Treichler: Yeah. I think you kind of summed it up as. It’s a little cliché, but it’s like if you build it, they will come. We call them libraries, for lack of a better term. It’s sharing. It’s sharing with your community. And you know, libraries can be books, it can be tools. We have a new clothing library that started up in Asheville where you can check out clothes. The idea is you trust your neighbor enough to share something with them. And we’ve had nothing but just the best experience with it too. Like Ben says, it is… The good so far outweighs the bad, where we don’t have any requirements for membership and we just give away no cost memberships, no proof of income requirement, no geographical thing. Like we just trust people to be part of this thing and it can only grow with energy. And so why would we want to restrict who gets access to and contributes to that energy? 

1:15:12.8 Shelby Treichler: So I think the… When the worst happens to a community, when it stretches at its seams, if you’re not already building those bridges with these other groups, that’s where you see the cracks. But because the tool library does work with all these other groups because the members of the tool library are in all these communities. We had people up in Marshall working with Roar. We had people down in Sylva working with them. And so we were just a hub and the connections happen within the hub. So just trust your neighbors and putting some energy in and let it reflect what your community needs. 

1:15:49.5 Shelby Treichler: There’s a new tool library starting up in Yancey County. It’s also just starting in a little shed where people just come and check things out. And it’s mostly about like food resiliency because it’s a farmer community up there. And so they’re buying apple pickers together and they’re buying what they need. And so it doesn’t always have to just be like what people are thinking of as a tool library. It can just be like, hey, our community wants to go in and buy a carpet washer, or we want to have a pressure washer. And then a lot of things like what we saw afterwards just for the tools. People not only can’t buy the tools because they’re expensive, they’re not buying nice tools, which are harder to maintain.

1:16:28.6 Tom Llewellyn: Yes.

1:16:28.7 Shelby Treichler: These tools that build… That break more frequently, which is where repair cafe comes in, and they’re not maintaining them. A lot of the tools that were brought to us right after the storm, there was nothing wrong with them. They just been stored with fuel in them because people didn’t think to clear out their fuel lines before storing them. So if you have one community hub that takes responsibility to maintain a community’s tools, they’ll be ready to go in a second. Whereas if everybody has to become their own repair person and their own maintainer, that’s a lot of pressure to put on every individual member of a community. So the idea is, like, when we share our energy and we share our resources, it makes us all have a little more space in our lives. So that, to me, is worth the trust that it takes to just be like, I’m going to trust my neighbors to return the tools, and if they don’t, we’ll figure it out.

1:17:14.6 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah. Hear, hear to that. Thank you. And I want to do that flip side of that conversation a little bit and hand it over. Rachel, for other groups, for other existing Mutual Aid groups that are interested in potentially starting their own tool libraries, do you have just a few words of sage advice?

1:17:43.6 Rachel Kinbar: Yeah. Starting small is fine. Starting just for your group is fine. In fact, I think that’s the best way to go. And then scaling up over time, seeing what you have collectively, instead of seeking outside donations, just initially see what you have together. Everyone has stuff sitting around that they don’t use that they can contribute. And we’re finding that people are just donating, like, really great things that are really useful. And they’re like, this has just been sitting around because I only use it once a year, so why do I keep it in my garage? So just starting, starting small. And I think for us in this area, what’s been really tricky is it’s just so spread out. It’s just a huge area because we really do. We cover three counties. So figuring out, like, having hubs of some sort, I think are a good way to start. Just members who have space in their garage or a carport or something like that, who can store things and yeah. And I’ll put another plug in for Shareable’s toolkit, which has just really, really good, solid advice.

1:18:54.5 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, thank you. And I just want to point to the chat. Paige just posted a link to the Library of Things toolkit, which we spent last year working with members of the National Tool Library Alliance to… You know, we ran a whole many month long Co-Lab, pulled together a lot of those best practices and sample guides and everything, you know, back end paperwork, membership agreements, what have you, and pull that all into the toolkit to hopefully quick start other groups that want to do that. Likewise, from the previous sessions of The Mutual Aid 101 series that we did earlier this spring for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, we pulled a lot of the same stuff into the Mutual Aid toolkit, which Paige has also just posted in the chat. 

1:19:49.8 Tom Llewellyn: As a last question. And then we’re going to do a little wrap up. And this is for all of y’all. You know, oftentimes during, you know, these peak moments, there are relationships that are created and strengthened, you know, both between organizations, but sometimes unlikely friendships. You know, we did an audio documentary about Hurricane Sandy where, you know, this Mutual Aid disaster response punk ended up befriending a retired cop, and never would have built a friendship with these two people together. Amazing saying from that was the, the cop said, you know, after they worked together for a little while in this disaster, you know, “A month ago I wouldn’t have given you directions to the train if I saw you on the street. And today I’ve given you the keys to my home.” And so from that perspective, I’m wondering if there, yeah. Any relationships or, or just things that came up for you during those moments that you’re carrying forward.

1:20:53.4 Shelby Treichler: I’ll start. I like to say when you… When you live and love in the rural south, intersectionality with people you fundamentally disagree on is just kind of of par for the course. You kind of have to learn how to coexist and work together because we’re all in the same community and we’re… A lot of us are facing the same challenges. We agree differently on how to face those challenges. But I remember just pretty quickly, it was one of those first days at Firestorm. Outside farmers who didn’t have a way to store their produce were bringing in truckloads of produce. They were just picking and bringing in and giving away because they didn’t have a way to store it. And so they were bringing it to the food hub there. And someone with a truck pulled up that had a few choice words and a lot of Trump stickers. And just not someone you would normally see participating in something put on by Firestorm or and perhaps Mutual Aid. 

1:21:47.8 Shelby Treichler: And I commented on it, they’re like, yeah, that’s one of our neighbors who calls police on us quite a bit if we park in the wrong place or if we have events or anything like that. Then on the flip side, I was going out and doing some drop off in some of the rural areas and churches were… Are some of the only brick and mortars in some of these rural communities. And the way they were able to organize and dedicate all their time and space and energy, you were seeing both sides of the coin. When you’re in survival mode, a lot of things get pushed to the side. I can just only hope that like the people who maybe rubbed elbows with a group they wouldn’t normally rub elbows with, like, take away a little bit of humanity from that.

1:22:33.5 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, Ben.

1:22:42.5 Ben Wyatt: Yeah, I mean I feel like that’s most of my interaction like just around is like bumping up against folks that might have not too savory feelings about how I move and who I am and my friends and family. But like, I think especially like Shelby was saying, like in those survival mode times, it’s real easy to get on the same page and to find common ground when the common ground is, I need a bottle of water. And I think it does kind of happen on the other end too, where like, just one thing to say, like, oh, we’re so… I mean, I’m talking about myself here, but like, I might pat myself on the back for like, yeah, I was working and I helped these people that might otherwise hate me. But it also like, is a big thing on the other end where folks that don’t know who the hell we are might even be afraid of the scary anarchists are, like you said, bringing folks in and giving them the key to your house. Like, I’ve had more fantastic experiences and terrible times than just at parties and going trying to hang out in fine times. And there’s nothing like it.

1:24:19.0 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And same question to you, Rachel.

1:24:24.6 Rachel Kinbar: Yeah, I was thinking of the two people we were working very closely with. One person, we ended up using her house as basically our headquarters or her front yard, I should say, as our headquarters during that community recovery work that we were doing. And she was a friend of a member, but not someone anyone else had met. And she has since been running for public office because of… After her experience in seeing how grassroots groups versus the government groups responded to the hurricane, like some switch got flipped for her. And so she’s just become more like very politically active. And before she really wasn’t at all. And the same thing for her neighbor across the street who was a Cuban immigrant. Just seeing her also her political development and her awareness of how things work behind the scenes because she was just very much gung ho America. And then after all of her experience she was like, oh, okay. 

1:25:32.3 Rachel Kinbar: And so there was just… It’s been interesting to see over time how their experiences have impacted them. And then one other thing is that most of the people living in this neighborhood were Haitian and we have the second largest Haitian community here in Orlando in the country. And so just seeing how they… Like many of them have experiences with hurricanes anyway from back home. Like they’re very well aware of how to… How to respond to hurricanes. But getting to know them, like for me just understanding some of their cultural experience and also… Because we often had to work through translators, it’s always an interesting thing. But we had translators in our community who could get on the phone and help with that. 

1:26:20.5 Rachel Kinbar: But just also seeing how much they distrust any official anything. And so we were really the only people, even though often they still never gave us their names even after months of working with them. But they would let us in their homes and they would let us bring them stuff and they would work with us as well. And so just seeing that develop an understanding where those fears are coming from, very justified fears, really was very enlightening for a lot of us.

1:26:51.6 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, well, I think we’re going to wrap there. We’re just over time and want to thank Shelby, Ben and Rachel again for coming and sharing your stories from Orlando and also in Asheville, Western North Carolina. And thank everybody for coming. I’ve post in the chat right now. There is a link to our next event on November 20th. Paige, I also dropped in the chat. That’s for our next Mutual Aid 101 session. Then coming up in December we have the next Tool Library Alliance meetup discussion which is going to be on December 10th and focused on winter weatherization. And you know, this is something that is going to be relevant for tool libraries but I think also a lot of other kind of just resource sharing project Mutual Aid groups might want to attend that as well. And it’d be a great intro if you want to learn more about the National Tool Library Alliance. So encourage people to show up to that. 

1:27:53.0 Tom Llewellyn: And as we mentioned, we’re going to be sharing out this recording. We’ll send an email to everybody that registered with the link to YouTube and a transcription of this as well. And we’ll also be grabbing all of the links from the chat and a link to the pictogram and description guide for organizing a disaster, what those different roles are we’ll make sure to share that out as well. So look for that later next week. And in the meantime, you can go back and find all of our previous recordings of these sessions in the Mutual Aid 101 toolkit, which was shared, and by checking out the Response podcast, where you can find six years of conversations, live events like this, and audio documentaries. And with that, thank you so much for showing up to another one of these Shareable sessions. And we look forward to seeing you again real soon.