Episode 1: Mutual Aid and Community Resilience

Welcome to Outdoor Cats! The latest addition to the Worcester Sucks local media empire, the idea here is simple: weekly broadcasts from a city that punishes you for caring.

Today, we talk about mutual aid and community resilience. Are you tired of going to a rally and voting and not feeling like it got you anywhere? There are better ways to make change in your community, and plenty local examples of people doing it right now! We also talk about the real estate speculators and vulture capitalists ruining our city (and many others!). Relatedly, we cover why cities across the U.S. are overflowing with unhoused people who are alternately ignored and oppressed.

Links to some of the stuff discussed:

— More Than A Fridge by Alex O’Neil

— "It Could Happen Here"

Music: “Roaming The Cosmic Winds” by Mystic Realm, Worcester-based dungeon synth project by Kevin Fitzgerald. Check out the full album, Foresaken Kingdom, on the Mystic Realm Bandcamp.

Logo by Travis Duda (@hunchbacktravis)

If you like what you hear, drop us a line or give it a share to help us get the word out!

Future episodes will come to your inboxes one way or another, but you can also add the feed to your preferred player by copying this link into whatever the “add RSS” feed function is on your podcast player. It takes a little while but the show will be up on all the usual places: Apple podcasts, Spotify, etc etc. Updates on that as the listings come in.

These will be weekly episodes. Both of us believe that’s sorta the most important part of this kind of podcast. All of the episodes will be rooted in a basic theme: looking at Worcester as an urban knife’s edge of gentrification and vulture capital. We’ll discuss local current events, analyzing the ways in which these stories ripple outward from the city we call home. We’ll even talk some about what you can do to fight back!

If you like what you hear, please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this newsletter :-)

The direct reader support is, in its own way, a form of mutual aid. About 740 community members chip in a small amount of money that gives us the time and freedom to produce journalism for said community—with complete editorial freedom. Just one directive guides our work: “does this benefit the community?” From that basic concern ripple all sorts of related ones: “does this clarify power?” “ does this make people want to get involved?” “does this inspire the belief that things don’t have to be so awful? That things can change?”