Uptown/Buena Park COVID-19 Response

(Beautiful artwork done by Katie Green of Uptown)

UPDATE October 13, 2020: Big thanks to everyone who has donated so far! When we ramped up our efforts in the spring, we didn’t know how long the pandemic would last. Here we are, 7 months later, still invested in our Uptown and Buena Park community. We plan to continue our work, as it’s clear the pandemic isn’t ending soon, and neither are the underlying structures that create poverty and food insecurity in our community. Thank you for supporting us to continue this work.


At this time, UBPSN has used $7,400 of the donated funds. With that money, We have:

Made over 700 food deliveries. We used the funds to supplement our donated food supply with grocery and household items to meet religious, dietary, and personal needs. We are proud to do that last-mile delivery for folks who cannot leave their homes (most local food pantries do not deliver)
  - Supplied houseless encampments with two battery packs and a wet vac
  - Chipped in to help neighbors with expenses including: access to safe housing (travel expenses and one-night hotel stay), vision care, clean water, and a haircut for a job interview
  - Provided dozens of 1-Day transit passes to help neighbors access services and get to appointments
  - Redistributed funds to mutual aid efforts on the west side, where there is even greater disparity and need
  - Making and distributing over 200 masks (in collaboration with Edgewater Mutual Aid Network)

Additionally, our members do a lot without money. We also pitch in our time and energy to make a difference in our community, including but not limited to:

  - Helping neighbors sign up for SNAP, unemployment, and stimulus benefits.
  - Connecting neighbors to rental assistance resources and tenant advocacy groups
  - Collecting supplies and pack 64 sanitation kits
  - Making check-in calls to elderly neighbors
  - Supplementing food distribution from community gardens
  - Advocating to defund CPD
  - Connecting community members with technology
  - Hosting workshops on mental health and de-escalation topics

As individuals struggle to respond to the public health crisis of COVID-19, we now more than ever must love and protect each other. In the Uptown and Buena Park neighborhoods, we need to come together as one community and do everything we can on the ground to supplement, support and reduce risk to every community member, especially since there is a glaring absence of federal, state or city governments enacting the sweeping structural changes and safety nets that we critically need.

We are creating a Uptown/Buena Park Solidarity Network and a COVID19 Mutual Aid response comprised of different grassroots organizations, movements and organizers, who are committed to organizing material support in the community. We are immediately providing grocery and supply deliveries, and are preparing to expand this to other community support services like pharmacy pickups, running errands, dog walking, childcare, caregiving, and mental health support for those impacted by the pandemic.

If you are reading this, we implore you to donate today, sign up to volunteer, or sign up to receive assistance:

Request Support (English): https://bit.ly/2WD5bL4

Request Support (Spanish): https://bit.ly/3dfTtvX

Volunteer to help(English, Spanish coming soon): https://bit.ly/2WrR77k

We have an incredible opportunity to crack open our culture of silence and offer our community love, support, and aid. 

The most freeing and radically kind thing we can do right now, to fight the system and protest the lack of care for all those struggling, is to come together and support each other.

This is a community network of solidarity. We hope it will grow in terms of groups and individuals joining the network, as well as broadening the support from delivery supply and in-home services to the growing network coming together to protect workers, demand paid time off, quarantine pay, eviction moratoriums, and other human rights that will need to be met in this crisis. We have a lot of communities in our city who are extremely vulnerable-- the undocumented, disabled, elderly, houseless, housing insecure, sex workers, healthcare workers, and more. We also know that in our current housing crisis, homelessness crisis, and at the larger intersection of class struggle, systemic poverty affects every single community and will be compounded by this pandemic.

We need your support more than ever.


Where will the money go?

This money will be handled by a fiscal sponsor, the Lucy Parsons Labs non-profit organization. All funds will be transparently spent on the following:

Groceries, sanitation kits, supplies, direct-aid to keep people in their homes


Who are we?

The Uptown/Buena Park Solidarity Network is a new collective seeking to do mutual aid for all residents of the Uptown and Buena Park neighborhoods in this time of great crisis.

Lucy Parsons Labs, the fiscal sponsor, is a collaboration between data scientists, transparency activists, artists, & technologists that operates in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. We work at the intersection of digital rights and on-the-streets issues. Our main lines of work include providing digital security trainings, pursuing police accountability, researching the use of civil asset forfeiture, and filing public records requests.

Every single dollar will go to direct mutual aid support.
Your donation is tax-deductible, the EIN is 81-3046769.

(Credit to LA GoFundMe for language of solidarity)