This past month, from the hurricanes that swept through the Southeast to the BioLab fire in Conyers, Georgia, has been disastrous for far too many Southerners. Homes and infrastructure have been devastated, and thousands remain without water or power as temperatures plummet in some of the hardest-hit areas of Western North Carolina. These escalating disasters result from an economic system willing to destroy the earth to pursue seemingly endless profit and greed. This is the same system that funds bombs but not schools, locks up our kin, and keeps them in cages while storms rage. The same system that offers a list of options for expressing our power that starts and ends at the ballot box; if they don’t purge us from the rolls. The same system that proves again and again that it is up to us to take care of each other and demand systems that can and will do the same. 

To different extents, we are all living through disaster every day—the disaster of colonialism, borders, economic inequality, anti-blackness, ecocide. But there is something about acute, unexpected moments of crisis that sharpens our visions for another world. Something about how we come together when the lights are out makes it possible for us to discover what liberation in our lifetime could look like. We feed our neighbors, grieve together, pass messages from holler to holler, drive supplies for hours, hike in insulin when the roads are gone, silly dance with other people’s children, and open our homes to strangers. Where we go, love follows. The walls between us come down. We find each other and ourselves.

As the power returns, out too come those seeking to exploit these disasters, criminalizing those most impacted by them, charging rent on leaky roofs, and gobbling up land. And so we must harness our vision of liberation, harness that feeling of caring for each other, and share it with our kin. We must organize to build networked, resourced, and resilient communities prepared to not only meet the escalating disasters of the climate and the everyday, but also to liberate ourselves and our people. 

In the wake of the latest hurricane devastation, SONG has:

• Dispersed $1.45M through the Southern Power Fund to 55 organizations doing rapid response work on the ground. 
• Made hundreds of wellness calls to anyone who has ever been a SONG member who was in the path of the storms, assessing the conditions and their needs, and supporting people in connecting to resources.  
• Created Rapid Response Guides for both Hurricane Helene and Milton. 
• Identified SONG members willing to offer shelter to hurricane evacuees and connected them with people needing places to evacuate to. 
• Begun planning recovery work parties. 
• Sent 7+ carloads of requested supplies to Firestorm Books, our kindred organizations Aflorar and Poder Emma in Asheville, and to community members in Southeast Georgia.

Check out our Rapid Response Guides below for places to donate to support mutual aid and a more just recovery for our people. 

SONG Hurricane Helene Mutual Aid + Rapid Response Resource Guide

SONG Hurricane Milton Mutual Aid + Rapid Response Resource Guide