28 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
reciprocity as the best and fully ade-
quate society.” She cites the daughter
of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder
Lane, who helped her mother craft clas-
sic narratives of neighborly kindness
and became a libertarian who opposed
the New Deal and viewed Social Secu-
rity as a Ponzi scheme.
I called Rosenblum to ask what she
made of the current wave of ungoverned
reciprocity. Disasters like this one, she
said, have less to teach us about solidar-
ity among neighbors than about our “need
for a kind of nationwide solidarity—in
other words, a social safety net.” She went
on, “If you look at these really big, all-
enveloping things—climate change, a
pandemic—and think they will be solved
by citizen mobilization, it may be nec-
essary to consider the possibility that
these problems are actually going to be
solved technocratically and politically,
from the top down, that what you need
are experts in government who are going
to say, ‘You just have to do this.’ My own
opinion is that you need both top-down
and bottom-up.” She continued, “But,
still, the idea that what we need most,
or only, is social solidarity, civic mobili-
zation, neighborly virtue—it’s not so.”
Rosenblum, though, told me that she
had noticed a difference between the
mutual-aid groups that were forming
in the wake of the coronavirus and the
sorts of disaster-relief work that she had
studied in the past. Because it had been
clear from the beginning that the pan-
demic would last indefinitely, many
groups had immediately begun think-
ing about long-term self-management,
building volunteer infrastructures in
order to get ahead of the worst of the
crisis, and thinking about what could
work for months rather than for days.
“That’s interesting,” she said. “And I
think it’s new.”
O
n Day Twelve of my self-isolation,
I checked in with the Minnesota
CovidSitters. The governor there, Tim
Walz, a Democrat, had mandated that
health-care workers have access to free
child care at school facilities, and I
wanted to see how the government’s
efforts were changing the group’s work.
The CovidSitters, like Bed-Stuy Strong,
had been careful to coördinate with
more established organizations, hoping
to reduce redundancy and share re-
sources. The group had funnelled do-
nations—many from health-care work-
ers who wanted to pay their volunteer
babysitters—toward homeless shelters
and food banks.
There were some things that the
group could do more easily than the
state. Families “need a child-care center
that operates in traditional M-F fash-
ion, like school would,” Londyn Robin-
son, one of the group’s organizers, told
me in an e-mail, “and they also need a
CovidSitter-like option to fill in the
cracks.” I had heard as much from Emily
Fitzgerald, a nurse-midwife in Minne-
sota who, when the coronavirus first hit
the region, had been frantically running
child-care calculations, anticipating her
team’s change from twelve-hour shifts
to twenty-four-hour shifts. When she
learned about CovidSitters, she told me,
she became emotional. “You’re just not
expecting to be taken care of in that
way,” she said. The Sitters were seeking
at least three hundred and fifty new vol-
unteers to support nearly a hundred un-
matched families. At the end of March,
the group became a nonprofit corpora-
tion, so that it could apply for state grants.
The Sitters had also shared their blue-
print with more than a hundred and
thirty other med schools, thirty of which
had set up operational sister groups.
Invisible Hands had also registered
as a nonprofit, Liam Elkind told me
when we spoke again, in mid-April.
Lawyers helped the group establish by-
laws, official titles, and oversight prac-
tices. The group had signed up twelve
thousand volunteers and taken about
four thousand requests. It had also raised
fifty-seven thousand dollars for a sub-
sidy program—whereby needy house-
holds could receive free weekly food
baskets with staples such as milk, bread,
and eggs—but it had suspended the
program after demand increased, mak-
ing it unsustainable. Money in reserve
is going to administrative costs, such as
software, insurance, and legal fees. El-
kind was still in Morningside Heights,
finishing the semester online. (“I have
not prepared very well for my presen-
tation tomorrow on comm law,” he told
me.) Maggie Connolly, who put up the
handwritten sign in Carroll Gardens,
had started working with Invisible
Hands, making grocery deliveries in her
neighborhood. “I still love what I do as
a hair-and-makeup artist, and I can’t
wait to get back to work,” she said. “But
this has really made me realize that I
would like to shift more time into doing
work that serves others.” She had raised
money from people she knew who were
also out of work—photographers, styl-
ists, models—to buy food boxes for New
York hospital staff.
On Day Twenty-two of self-isola-
tion, I called Fratesi and Mathews, from
Bed-Stuy Strong, on Zoom. The group,
they said, had signed up twenty-five
hundred volunteers, a third of whom
were active in the group’s Slack chan-
nel on a daily or near-daily basis, and a
fifth of whom had signed up to shop
and make deliveries. Mathews hoped
to sustain the network with the small
donations it was getting, most of which
seemed to be coming from Bed-Stuy
residents and people who knew them.
The group’s tech and operations teams
had revamped the online system so that
the most urgent requests—from people
who’d been waiting the longest or who
had explicitly said that their cupboards
were bare—were continually resurfaced
for delivery volunteers. “Oh, Sarah, what
do you think—should we have a sec-
ond Google Voice number where we
just give people a phone tree of other
resources?” Fratesi asked at one point,
thinking through logistics as I inter-
viewed them. New York City had an-
nounced a daily free-meal program, and
other nonprofits were turning to corona-
virus relief. We talked about whether
mutual-aid work represented what the
state ought to be doing, or what the
state could never do properly, or maybe
both. Three minutes after we finished
our Zoom call, Bernie Sanders an-
nounced that he was suspending his
Presidential campaign. “Our best-case
scenario is that Biden wins????” Fratesi
texted me. “DIRECT ACTION IT IS THEN,
I GUESS.” By the beginning of May, Bed-
Stuy Strong had provided at least a
