advice for starting a solnet

Search on this site for "building a solidarity network guide."

Are there any projects or groups active where you live? Have you gotten involved with them?

Hey, friend! Cool to hear you want to start a solidarity network. Here's the link to the guide Aunty was talking about if you hadn't found it already: http://libcom.org/library/you-say-you-want-build-solidarity-network

What made you think about starting a solidarity network, and what is H4H?

At John E, I'm gonna guess Habitat for Humanity. Not a bad project as far as those things go, admittedly I don't know too much about it, but hard to knock building homes for the homeless.

I will say that from my experience in doing a solnet locally, there's difficulties that aren't always apparent at the start. For the basics, it's important to flyer regularly and follow up with people who call you (we used Google voice for free) immediately - same day or next. Once you do that, meeting up with people and having a core group who can follow through on stuff is pretty key. That is, your group will respond to emails or be able to meet in person about potential fights and you know there's a group ready to go for that demand-delivery or escalating situation.

Even with all of this in place you may still find that a lot of those who respond will not be ready or able to take a confrontational stance or to take a leading role in their own struggle. The service model-idea is often present in people's minds, which is to say, a notion of the social service in where you delegate your struggle to some form of institutional body that speaks on your behalf. This is totally understandable in the present condition of many, but it's a hard thing to deal with when your model is about direct action led by those for whom the fight is built.

The Seasol materials are great, and I had good interactions meeting many of those folks in Seattle, as well as very prompt follow up with us when we contacted for more information.

Unfortunately, it would seem ours' was not the only solnet that popped up in 2010 that appears to have not garnered a single fight, or at least not listed them. What we found was a lot of people had grievances we simply couldn't help, such as those related to subtler forms of discrimination, rent hikes or evictions over non-payment of rent. Locally, housing was a huge issue, I think much bigger than we expected and easily 9-1 on the calls we received over wage/workplace ones.

With all that said, I do still think it's a strong model and a great project to try. We are actually talking about getting something going again like it or maybe somehow reworked (maybe heavily reworked?).