bless this mess

So I just found https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/resources/ And it is AMAZING.

I could share it as a link but many of you won’t click it and realize the abundance of things behind it that might be relevant to you right now. So Instead I’m gonna copy-paste the lot so you can all share in its glory. No part of this list was my work, I take no credit, I’m just the copy-paster.

The hotlines and specific services are US centric. If people wanna add less US-centric sources, please do.

Disaster Response

A Window Propped Open A Window Propped Open Issue 2: Lessons Learned Organizing After Hurricane Harvey A Love Letter to the Future Mutual Fire Brigade Basic Rescue Skills Trauma and Therapeutic Art: Information for Children, Families and Volunteers Transition is Inevitable; Justice is Not: A Critical Framework for Just Recovery Staying Above Water: Global Migration in the Face of the Climate Crisis Mutual Aid Disaster Relief: Navigating Trauma Citizen’s Guide for Readiness for Climate Extremes in the Desert Southwest Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy Solidarity for Survival: A Graphic Illustration The Resilience We Want – A Guide to Making Your Community Space into a Hub for Resilience and Mutual Aid When We Got Handed Gatorade We Danced in the Street: A Survivor’s Survival Guide Prisoners in Disaster: The Legacy of Abuse, Exploitation and Endangerment of Prisoners in Disaster A People’s Framework for Disaster Response: Rewriting the Rules of Recovery after Climate Disasters

Disaster Disability Hotline

The Partnership For Inclusive Disaster Strategy’s Disaster Disability Hotline provides information, referrals, guidance, technical assistance and resources to people with disabilities, their families, allies, organizations assisting disaster impacted individuals with disabilities and others seeking assistance with immediate and urgent disaster-related needs.

The Disaster Hotline is always available for intake calls, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year at (800) 626-4959 and [email protected]. They will have their knowledgeable team respond to your call as soon as possible, often immediately, and intend to respond to all callers within 24 hours.

Safety and DIY Cleanup

Repairing Your Flooded Home  EPA Flood Cleanup Booklet DIY Field Guide For Clean-up Of Flooded Homes Safety Notice For Unskilled Or Nontrade Volunteers House Gutting Manual  Muckout Safety Guidelines Toxic Chemicals and Staying Safe Mold Cleaning and Prevention Mold Cleaning and Prevention (Spanish) Black Mold Flyer

Wellness/Community Care

An Activists Guide to Basic First Aid Peer Counseling and Active Listening Alternatives to EMS Home Remedies for Common Maladies Traveling Companions  Information on Heat and Related Illnesses  Hypothermia Responding to Critical Incident Stress Class Struggle and Mental Health Zine Madness and Oppression Guide A Call for Prefigurative Mental Health Support and Communal Care for Radical Orgs

Emergency Prescription Assistance Program

The Emergency Prescription Assistance Program, or EPAP, was created to help people in a disaster who don’t have health insurance so they have access to: prescription medicine, medical equipment, medical supplies, and vaccinations. Hotline: 1-855-793-7470.

Trauma and Burnout

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief: Navigating Trauma Trauma_Overview Preventing Burnout Understanding and Coping with Traumatic Stress Understanding and Addressing Vicarious Trauma Grounding and Centering for Activists Rising Up Without Burning Out Sustainable Activism and Avoiding Burnout Psychological First Aid Activist Trauma and Recovery Trauma and Therapeutic Art: Information for Children, Families and Volunteers Community Trauma Toolkit Coping With_Climate_Change_Distress

Disaster Distress Helpline

The Disaster Distress Helpline, 1-800-985-5990, is a 24/7, 365-day-a–year, national hotline dedicated to providing immediate crisis counseling for people who are experiencing emotional distress related to any natural or human-caused disaster. This toll-free, multilingual, and confidential crisis support service is available to all residents in the United States and its territories. Stress, anxiety, and other depression-like symptoms are common reactions after a disaster.

Call 1-800-985-5990 or text TalkWithUs to 66746 to connect with a trained crisis counselor.

Legal/Security

Security Culture – A Handbook For Activists  Ruckus Security Culture For Activists Know Your Rights: Immigration and Disaster Relief Council on American Islamic Relations Know Your Rights Guide National Lawyers Guild Know Your Rights Guide Why Misogynists Make Great Informants

Disaster Legal Hotlines

Legal Aid of North Carolina: 1 866 219 5262 Florida Legal Services’ Disaster Recovery: 888 780 0443 State Bar of Texas Disaster Hotline: 800 504 7030 California Disaster Legal Services For More Legal Aid Disaster Hotlines go to: American Bar Association

Anti Oppression

Accomplices Not Allies Why Misogynists Make Great Informants Who Is Oakland: Anti Oppression Activism, The Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation Anti-Oppression Reader With Allies Like These  Challenging Capitalism And Patriarchy  Confronting Classism  Contextualizing Katrina and Confronting Racism  Guidelines For Being A Strong White Ally  Overcoming Discrimination  Patterns of Patriarchy Commonly Observed within Social Justice Movements  Readings on Racism and Resistance for Solidarity Activists  Ten Things To Remember – AntiRacist Strategies For White Student Radicals  The Revolution Starts At Home – Confronting Partner Abuse In Radical Communities Towards A Perspective On Unlearning Racism

Kitchen and Food Handling

Food Safety First Manual

Popular Education and Direct Action

You Have Skills: Evaluating What Skills You Can Bring to Radical Organizing From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns  Handbook For Direct Action Affinity Groups  Affinity Groups 2 On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict  Participating In Direct Actions -A Guide For Transgender People  Planning An Action Rising Tide Climate Change Popular Education Ruckus Action Planning Manual  Ruckus Action Strategy Guide Ruckus Scouting Manual For Activists Social Change Vision Questions Core Curriculum – A Guide To Effective Nonviolent Struggle What Do We Mean by Mutual Aid? Metodo de Trabajo y Organizacion Popular Manual de Planificación Para Organizaciones Sociales

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

No More Deaths – Compost Toilet User Guide Sanitizing Water (Spanish) – Saneamiento del agua (español)

Also consider Mikinakoos' as they're extending support beyond their traditional service areas due to the scale of this emergency!

Donations for Namaygoosisagagun First Nation:

Donations for Whitesand First Nation:

Thought Project: Relapse [pt 1] [pt 2] [pt 3] [pt 4] [pt 5]

Buy Ly Ri a Coffee. ko-fi.com/lyriordan

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Different article that I think is unpaywalled! Important except imo:

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that contaminated lettuce imported from Mexico was served at Taco Bell locations in five states: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.

[...]

"The substances behind the slimy strings from okra and the gel from fenugreek seeds could trap microplastics better than a commonly used synthetic polymer.

Texas researchers proposed in 2022 using these sticky natural polymers to clean up water. Now, they’ve found that okra and/or fenugreek extracts attracted and removed up to 90% of microplastics from ocean water, freshwater, and groundwater.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Rajani Srinivasan and colleagues at Tarleton State University found that the plant-based polymers from okra, fenugreek, and tamarind stick to microplastics, clumping together and sinking for easy separation from water.

In this next stage of the research, they have optimized the process for okra and fenugreek extracts and tested results in a variety of types of water.

To extract the sticky plant polymers, the team soaked sliced okra pods and blended fenugreek seeds in separate containers of water overnight. Then, researchers removed the dissolved extracts from each solution and dried them into powders.

Analyses published in the American Chemical Society journal showed that the powdered extracts contained polysaccharides, which are natural polymers. Initial tests in pure water spiked with microplastics showed that:

One gram of either powder in a quart (one liter) of water trapped microplastics the most effectively.

Dried okra and fenugreek extracts removed 67% and 93%, respectively, of the plastic in an hour.

A mixture of equal parts okra and fenugreek powder reached maximum removal efficiency (70%) within 30 minutes.

The natural polymers performed significantly better than the synthetic, commercially available polyacrylamide polymer used in wastewater treatment.

Then the researchers tested the plant extracts on real microplastic-polluted water. They collected samples from waterbodies around Texas and brought them to the lab. The plant extract removal efficiency changed depending on the original water source.

Okra worked best in ocean water (80%), fenugreek in groundwater (80-90%), and the 1:1 combination of okra and fenugreek in freshwater (77%).

The researchers hypothesize that the natural polymers had different efficiencies because each water sample had different types, sizes and shapes of microplastics.

Polyacrylamide, which is currently used to remove contaminants during wastewater treatment, has low toxicity, but its precursor acrylamide is considered toxic. Okra and fenugreek extracts could serve as biodegradable and nontoxic alternatives.

“Utilizing these plant-based extracts in water treatment will remove microplastics and other pollutants without introducing additional toxic substances to the treated water,” said Srinivasan in a media release, “thus reducing long-term health risks to the population.”

She had previously studied the use of food-grade plant extracts as non-toxic flocculants to remove textile-based pollutants from wastewater and thought, ‘Why not try microplastics?’"

Just swapped out the filters on our 1st Corsi-Rosenthal cube, and what a difference! Dusty old filter above, minty fresh one below.

This particular filter box spent 10+ months on low inside our house, catching tons of wildfire smoke, PM2.5, and COVID-19 aerosols, as well as pollen, dust, and mold. Glad all that's on THERE and not in our lungs!

I highly recommend building your own CR box for your home, school, work, mutual aid meet ups, etc. All you need is 4 MERV-13 filters (sold at most hardware stores), a 20" box fan, scissors, cardboard, and duct tape.

A new one costs about $75-100 - much cheaper and performs a lot better than a lot of fancy air purifiers. Building it with 2 people takes about an hour (mostly to measure and cut out the weird shroud thing), and swapping in new filters is much faster.

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food