Last Monday morning, as the effects of the flooding from Tropical Storm Chantal were fully revealed, Triangle Mutual Aid immediately got to work. As both the local Indyweek and the national The New Yorker (!) have pointed out, they have been able to work very, very fast and help a lot of people in our community.
I – along with many others in Carrboro and Chapel Hill – have been out working with them over the past week – mucking out houses and helping people connect to resources that will help them get back on their feet. Much of this work is neighbor-to-neighbor, getting donations from people to people who need everything from food to cleaning supplies quickly.
While Triangle Mutual Aid works fast, the pace of other interventions is much slower. The State of North Carolina only made their disaster declaration today, 10 days after Chantel dumped upwards of 10 inches of rain on our community. In the meantime, Triangle Mutual Aid has distributed over $20,000 in direct aid to impacted residents, in addition to their work cleaning up houses, distributing supplies and directing operations.
But they’ve run into a snag. The payment processor Venmo has placed what Triangle Mutual Aid calls “arbitrary transaction caps” on their funding, and will not release any more funds for TMA to distribute. In other words, TMA has more funds to distribute but can’t because Venmo appears to have locked up a big chunk of their donations.
Volunteers from TMA have spent days on the phone with Venmo’s customer service and the funds are still being held up.
At it’s core, Mutual Aid is a way of living. We are replacing “rugged individualism”, isolatation and fear with meaningful community and collaborative resilience.
Our growing core collective gets together regularly to share food and conversation. We check in on each other in our group chat. We give each other rides, show up for each other when there is a need.
Even as we learn to deepen our trust in each other and reliance on community, we work to expand our connections amongst the people we live and work around, across all artificial barriers such as gender, race, sexuality, or immigration status. “Our people” are those who put life above profit, for whom security is increased through expanded generosity and reciprocity.
Triangle Mutual Aid is asking everyone to get the word out about this, because they want to continue distributing funding to people quickly — and this barrier is preventing that.
What you can do:
- If you want to give , you can send money using Cashapp if you use it
- You can join others on socials tagging Venmo and demanding they unlock the funds and suggest future ways to make this work better
- Are you knowledgeable in payment systems? Have ideas for alternatives TMA can use to avoid these snags, lets us know
