Hello to our lovely supporters!

It's been a busy year here at Charlotte Mask Bloc, marking our first full year on Open Collective. Since we began this group in 2023, we’ve been providing free resources for COVID protection to the greater Charlotte area. So far, we’ve focused on sharing reliable safety information; distributing masks at community events; and driving through Charlotte to deliver masks and (sometimes) tests right to the doorstep of anyone who requests them (Note: the free COVID tests program we used to deliver tests ended in this year). We gave out 24,240 masks and 4,848 tests through 731 individual deliveries in 2024. We gave out 8,880 masks and 1,760 tests through 166 individual deliveries in 2025.

So far, several groups in Charlotte have planned five Mutual Aid Fairs, and we have attended every one. It always energizes our group to go. We love being able to hand out free masks and tests to people directly, and to talk to them about what we know about COVID and how masks can help them avoid the transmission of airborne sicknesses. Several individuals who have visited our booth also tried putting on their first trifold headstrap mask, and we were happy to hear that many people felt like they were much more comfortable than they expected! Since the fairs are so busy, we don’t have estimates of how many masks and tests we gave out, but we know that hundreds of individuals have visited our booth across the five fairs. During several fairs, our volunteers conducted teach-ins about why masking is an important part of community defense, and we loved talking with other organizers who made connections between issues they're working on and how COVID safety directly ties into their work. 

Thanks to your incredible contributions, whether that be direct financial contributions or sharing our posts or our fundraising links, we were finally able to start renting out a storage unit. Up until this year, our members were storing masks and tests in their home. That meant that there were frequent trips volunteers made to swap supplies and restock each other's inventories, driving up to an hour just to get certain mask types before we could even start to fulfill requests. The storage unit is in a more central part of the city, and we can access it on our own time, so volunteers could more directly get what they needed. This has made our work so much more efficient and helped us respond to requests faster, while still allowing community members to choose between several sizes and styles of masks.

We have also introduced two pickup locations. Our first location is a partnership with a local thrift store - Thrift Pony, located at Camp North End. Our second is at Troubadour Booksellers in east Charlotte. We're still fine-tuning our pickup options, but we're so grateful that local businesses support our work and want to help be a part of it. Anyone who visits these businesses can help themselves to whatever masks are currently in stock. But don’t worry––our delivery option is not going anywhere. It’s our priority to get masks to those who need them most, especially people who can’t enter unsafe public spaces or leave their homes.

Additionally, we have also been able to participate in several government auctions to secure tens of thousands of masks for our community, learning how best to take advantage of these opportunities in conjunction with a coalition of other mask blocs across the United States and beyond. We have been a part of both multi-state efforts and individual efforts to bid in these auctions. Multi-state efforts have included purchasing masks in Suffolk, Virgina, where we collaborated with four other COVID-prevention groups in North Carolina, Maryland, and South Carolina to purchase masks and ship them by freight to our home communities. Even earlier, one of our members personally fronted $2,225.50 to secure 14,080 masks for our group in a multi-state collaboration for an auction based in Urbandale, Iowa. The planned freight company had backed out of shipping, resulting in the scramble to find another alternative, which turned out to be more expensive. 

We have also successfully bid and secured masks in auctions alone, in 2025 purchasing 29,920 3M Aura masks for $115, equalling around $0.0038 per mask. With the help of Soda City Mask Bloc members in Columbia donating their time and labor, we were able to secure and transport those masks in time. If you have friends in Columbia, urge them to request masks too––the auction amount was enough to stock up both our blocs with high-quality masks for our neighbors. 

You can read more about how mask blocs use government auctions to bulk-buy thousands of masks for less than a penny per mask in the fantastic reporting by The Sick Times, which features two of our very own members. 

We remain a living, evolving group, adapting to changes in our environments on a local, state, and national level. We’ve also matured as an organization, learning from key events in our group’s history, whether that be from the increase in national attention on our social media after the introduction of North Carolina’s mask ban bill, or the time that we got featured in local media and saw over 400 requests for masks within a week––more masks than we had delivered in our entire history as an organization up until that point. We’ve been thinking about ways to adapt and thrive as a volunteer-run group, with fluctuating individual capacities. If you have any interest in learning more about how we run or in being a part of our organization, please reach out at [email protected]. 

We’re reaching out today to give you an overview of what we’ve accomplished so far, and to honor the support that the community has given us. Donated masks and hundreds of unpaid hours of labor have been key to what we’ve achieved. And thanks to your generous financial support, we can streamline processes like our storage unit, quickly participate in auctions that get thousands of masks in our communities, and buy high-quality child-sized masks to help protect the little ones in our community. We know that times are tough––they’re tough for us, too. We know that not everyone will be able to donate money to causes they care about. But we can tell you that your donation, no matter how small, makes a big difference to us. Thanks to you, we can dream about future projects where we expand our reach and continue to grow as an organization. Our monthly supporters allow us to plan for vital recurring expenses. Our one-time supporters remind us that there are always people in our community who are just discovering our work and making a sacrifice to support us and the important work that we do. 

Thank you so much for your support, and, as always, contact us when you need masks. 

Sincerely, 

Your neighbors at Charlotte Mask Bloc