Cooperation Long Island is a collective of individuals and organizations empowered to provide mutual aid.
“Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.”
- Dean Spade, Big Door Brigade
Amid this unprecedented public health crisis, mutual aid networks are sprouting up across the world, and Long Island in an effort to help those who continue to be left behind by traditional political institutions.
Cooperation LI brings together community-based organizations, base-building groups, service non-profits, jail advocates, immigrant rights groups, reproductive healthcare providers, faith organizations, and other community leaders to identify and support the diverse needs of the Long Island community, while centering the needs of traditionally marginalized communities.
As a founding member of Cooperation LI, I volunteered to lead the development of our technical infrastructure for the coordination of mutual aid across many groups, networks, and individuals on Long Island. The process included:
-wire-framing of the UI/UX and getting feedback from various stakeholders
-developing an information architecture for sharing data across groups
-website design/development for our needs and requests matching system
-brand development of Cooperation LI as an independent organization part of a broader network on Long Island
-setting up information systems and workflow automations to facilitate the sending information from forms (such as volunteer or mutual aid requests) to backend database, and then trigger notifications in our slack channel to allow for community driven approval process.
