By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese
May 11, 2020

In the face of the twin crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic collapse, people are organizing mutual aid networks to provide food, medicines and other basics to those in need. This is done in the spirit of solidarity, not charity, a non-hierarchical empowering approach versus a hierarchical exploitative approach.

We speak with Eleanor Goldfield, an activist in Washington, DC who is active in her local mutual aid network and has written about it, about how they are organizing, the response from the community and government and how this fits into the bigger picture of resistance and building alternative systems to meet human needs. Some resources that Eleanor suggests are MutualAidDisasterRelief.org, ItsGoingDown.org and her website, ArtKillingApathy.com.

Eleanor Goldfield is the founder and host of the show, Act Out! which aired on Free Speech TV as well as in podcast form. (The podcast is still going and will pick up again April 17, 2020)! She also co-hosts the podcast Common Censored along with Lee Camp.

Her current work focuses on more long-form and in-depth pieces, the first iteration of these being a film on West Virginia’s coal and fracking country, as well as their radical past that folks are working to uncover – so that it might inform a radical present and radically just future.

As a journalist, her articles and photographs cover people and topics which are censored or misrepresented.

Artistically, she works in a variety of mediums and her performances blend music, spoken word and visual projections.