Meeting: Saturday 3 January

The Preparedness Support Group will meet on Zoom, Saturday 3 January at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 7pm London, 8pm Paris.

David B.

30 Dec 2025 — 3 min read

Photo by Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

I offer three things for your consideration, for us to talk about at our meeting:

1) The Community Action Group web app (beta)

I am building a web app. It is a map and directory for people around the world to post themselves and their projects, so we can find each other.

The slogan is: "Connect globally, act locally. Preparing for resilience in an unstable world." The focus will be on mutual aid and building networks of care, which are the backbone of resilient communities.

At this early stage, it's just people on the map and in the directory, but the next step is to add projects, so people can link up with organized efforts in their area.

I hope you will put yourself on the map. Please check it out: https://communityaction.ghost.io.

2) Mutual Aid, à la française 🇫🇷

The French branch of Deep Adaptation, Adaptation Radicale, has been holding sophisticated discussions about how to create local mutual aid groups.

They call their groups "REEL" = "Réseaux d’Echange et d’Entraide Locaux" ≃ "Networks of Local Exchange and Mutual Aid".

I translated their notes about the conversations they've had. They asked their members: 1) What do you think a mutual-aid network would look like? 2) Are there any existing organizations that could support mutual-aid work? and 3) What are the values behind organizing for mutual aid?

Two files are available:

For the Implementation of REEL
A summary of the discussions (see note about AI, below)

3) From Vermont: a top-notch toolkit for community resilience

I just received The Resilience Toolkit from Jane Dwinell, a native of Vermont and woman-of-all-competencies. It's the most advanced system I've seen for organizing grassroots disaster response at the community level.

From their site:

2023 and 2024 Floods Left Vermont Communities Scrambling: When the waters rose, government response was slow. Resources were scattered. People needed to organize supplies, volunteers, and information, but had no clear framework. Neighbors became first responders by necessity, not by choice.

Frontline Responders Created This Toolkit: Community organizers, mutual aid groups, and flood survivors documented what actually worked. The result: a free, tested framework any community can use to build resilience before disaster strikes. We made this because we needed it when the waters rose.

There's a lot here, and I haven't yet had the chance to get into it deeply. I hope you'll check it out so we can talk about it at our meeting. https://www.resiliencetoolkit.org/

A note about AI

In my last post, I undertook not to use AI in the management of this group. I have changed my mind: I will use AI. I understand this may not be acceptable to some people. I'm sorry.

It is not possible to work at the necessary speed and scale in today's Internet without using AI. I use AI to discover developer tools like databases, mapping systems, and input-form systems. I use AI to quickly determine what are the fundamental historical sources of information about topics like mutual aid. And I use it to summarize long documents so I can understand whether to allocate scarce attention to particular resources.

I do not surrender my judgement and I do not rely on AI as a source of primary information. The machines are not trustworthy to say what is true, but they can point you to multiple sources of truth in seconds, when a manual search would take hours or days.

I'm happy to discuss this in detail with anyone who's interested, but I'd prefer not to take meeting time to do it. Please email me if you like.