The Ridgewood Tenants Union is an anti-gentrification, independent, and tenant-led housing rights organization run solely by volunteers that was formed in 2014 with the mission of building tenant power and fighting displacement in a neighborhood long controlled by homeowners and the politicians that advocate for them.  We are NOT a non-profit.  Even though tenants are a majority in the neighborhoods the group works in, which is Ridgewood, Maspeth, Glendale, and Middle Village, there is no strong and organized tenant voice advocating for our right to safe, truly affordable, and stable housing, especially for working class tenants of color, those that are undocumented, and our homeless neighbors.  

The Ridgewood Tenants Union has been filling a long and overdue void, especially during the pandemic.  Our part of Queens is not highly served by non-profit or service organizations that provide services to community members and during the pandemic, many of our neighbors did not have access to immediate support to meet their survival needs.  Due to the lack of service provision in our neighborhood, we created the Ridgewood Mutual Aid Project in March of 2020 at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.  Mutual aid has always been an aspect of our organizing work but with this particular project the group was able to collect monetary donations for the very first time to directly serve the material needs of our neighbors.  

With the mutual aid funds we collected we were able to provide groceries for our neighbors through food distributions, home deliveries, and our community fridge.  We provided small grants during the beginning of the pandemic and organized a winter coat drive in year two of the pandemic.  We purchased and secured COVID 19 masks and test kits that we’ve been distributing since the start of our project.  We were able to do this and much more with the support of over 600 members that joined our mutual aid project and the donations of our neighbors and extended network of supporters.  

This report offers a glimpse into our work during the pandemic and how the generous donations from our friends, neighbors, and our extended network of supporters have been used from March 2020 to the present.

Our mutual aid project has been trying to fill a need in our neighborhood which is lacking in survival resources.  Many of our neighbors and members lost work during the beginning of the pandemic and many of them continue to face unprecedented survival challenges.  Our group cannot meet the needs of our neighbors alone, but we have been able to do our small part for those in our network and neighbors that have reached out to us.

This support continued throughout 2022 and continues to the present day as we strategize on the best ways to support all our neighbors who are in need. We will be able to provide this support until we exhaust our current mutual aid funds.

We launched our first ever grassroots crowdfunding campaign through a platform called Chuffed.org in March 2020 and through this campaign we raised a total of $57,980.56.  In July of 2020 we launched our second crowdfunding campaign through another online platform called Open Collective.  Open Collective offers our mutual aid project a fiscal sponsorship which ensures that mutual aid donations can be tax-deductible.  We had also been tracking our initial donations through a public Google sheet to ensure transparency of all our donations--the public document can be found here.  Instead of tracking donations manually through our Google sheet, Open Collective provides us with built in transparency so that everyone can see where donations come from and where they go.  Up to this date, we have received a total of $83,000.68 (before fees) in mutual aid donations. 

Read more on our website: https://www.ridgewoodtenantsunion.org/update/