In April of 2020, East Bay Mutual Aid was stood up as a mutual aid organization by students at UC Berkeley and a handful of supporters from the broader area, with the intent of providing pandemic relief to the deeply impoverished and heavily oppressed communities of the SF East Bay. We were swamped immediately with requests that were far outside of our capacity to assist, mostly having to do with rent assistance. We did our best to meet these needs, but ultimately, with support for the project dissipating almost from the start, we each went our separate ways and left the EBMA project to languish.

Now, almost one year later, EBMA is being stood up as an entirely reformatted organization under the auspices of the SF Bay chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association's mutual aid region system, drawing on the lessons from those early days as well as experience from the hot summer of 2020. In taking up this name and iconography again, we must also apologize to those who reached out in 2020 and were left in the lurch by our previous iteration. There were probably multiple reasons for this, but we did fail to keep our end of our probably too ambitious offers of help. For that we are immensely sorry, and we will make a conscious effort to not overpromise and underdeliver ever again.

EBMA in its current iteration is semi-autonomous in relation to the SF Bay SRA and the national SRA organization. This means that, although some of us are members of the SRA and the collective is synchronized with the mutual aid region system, we have our own membership rolls, financial accounting, vetting procedures and accountability processes. If you would like to donate to the SF Bay SRA instead of this organization, you can do so here.

Currently, OpenCollective does not allow recurring memberships from guest accounts. We apologize for the inconvenience, but in order to donate you will need to register for an OpenCollective account.