Early Work

Coronacareʻs earliest work focused on organizing the creation, collection and distribution of hand-made masks in support of the Seamsters Union. Another of our first projects was “Personal Shopping,” which consisted of a form on our website where immunocompromised, financially struggling and kūpuna could send us a shopping list and we’d send a volunteer to purchase and deliver their items. During this time, we kept a running list of the most commonly requested items, which would later use to inform the contents of our Coronacare Package program.

Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Delivery Program

In April 2020, we were put in touch with Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies, a local nonprofit with a feminist perspective, who were trying to deliver meals to new mothers in a COVID-safe way. HMHB was able to secure a small fraction of the CARES Act funding which the settler state managed to allocate to human needs and not go carts for cops.

Coronacare organizers created and maintained a 100% remote volunteer driving training program and delivery management system to support this work, which served hundreds of young moms across Oahu. The program operated from April through December 2020, with more than 200 individual volunteer drivers making deliveries to hundreds of vulnerable moms across the island. At its peak, more than 30 volunteer drivers delivered meals to 270 families every Saturday.

Black Lives Matter and Abolition

Following the lynchings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Coronacare worked with local black and indigenous activists including veterans of the Standing Rock and Mauna Kea struggles to provide logistical support for several actions and demonstrations in support of the Movement for Black Lives. Volunteers were mobilized to run “Coronacaid stations” alongside march routes, and qualified individuals served as safety marshals and medics for actions, most notably the more than 10,000 person-strong BLM march on June 6. In the months following, members of Coronacare worked with the Hawaiʻi Abolition Collective, assisting in the organization of their Puʻuhonua Penpal Program, and joining our mutual allies at the Hawaiʻi Community Bail Fund to bail out incarcerated kanaka in celebration of Lā Kū’oko’a and draw attention to the repressive and racist nature of the American carceral system, which at the time was endangering the lives of countless incarcerated and pre-trial community members.

Coronacare Packages

As 2020 wore on, and with the CARES Act set to expire, we knew that the HMHB delivery program would be ending in December. In anticipation, we worked to transition our small Personal Shopping program into a more cost effective program we called Coronacare Packages, one which could be sustained without grants or funding beyond personal donations. This program was essentially a smaller version of the HMHB deliveries, but with a more modest set of goods curated from our most common requests from Personal Shopping. This program launched in November 2020 and quickly grew to deliver 50-70 packages of groceries and household supplies to neighbors across Oahu every week. Operating on a small budget funded by supporters and members themselves, this work involves cost saving methods such as buying eggs and rice in bulk before subdividing into household-sized packages. These cost savings allow us to deliver the contents for roughly half the cost one might pay buying small portions at the grocery store.

Houseless Aid

In January 2021, Coronacare organizers began delivering material aid to our houseless neighbors in Makiki. Cost effective care packages bundled alongside our Coronacare Packages are distributed to our houseless neighbors, along with other supplies and donations we are able to solicit from the community.

Reflecting Back, Looking Forward

Coronacare organizers have participated in numerous other actions and programs, including flood relief, supporting queer organizers, and the Stop Asian Hate march. We look to the community for financial and material support as we continue to develop our work and strengthen our bonds of solidarity. We hope you will join us.

To donate, Venmo us @CoronacareHI, or visit our website at coronacarehi.org/donate. To get involved in our work, visit coronacarehi.org/volunteer.

We would like to clearly state our stances on some important issues, before explaining how we are unique among many groups working in our communities today.

We are anti-capitalist. We believe capitalism is the primary cause of inequality and human suffering today and is exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis.

We are pro-Hawaiian sovereignty, and understand that Hawaiʻi is an illegally-occupied nation.

We believe that capitalism, racism, and patriarchy are intimately tied to the US occupation of Hawaiʻi.

We believe that capitalism, racism, and patriarchy are detrimental to the health and safety of both humankind and the ʻāina.

What makes Coronacare Hawaiʻi unique? To explain this, we should first define mutual aid and identify how it is different from charity. While this may seem like an arbitrary distinction for some, clarifying the key differences will help illustrate not just what we do and why we do it, but how we do it and why that’s important.

In a few words, we see charity as a top-down, one-way transfer of resources with the goal of bettering the giver’s position without creating long-term relief for the recipient. Charity serves to maintain the status quo by offsetting the uglier realities of capitalism, and takes the heat off the ones benefiting from the system. Charity feeds the ego of the givers, for whom giving money is no real sacrifice, without challenging the social and economic systems that create need among the many and wealth among the very few.

Mutual aid is a horizontal exchange of resources among equals, not with the intention of benefiting any one person in the form of tax breaks or the chance to say they made a difference. Many of us in Coronacare Hawaiʻi share the same challenges as those we serve with our activities.

None of us receive any pay for our work. 100% of funds we raise and receive from generous community contributions go toward serving the community.

Coronacare is also a registered 501c3 nonprofit. For most organizations, this would only be worth a brief mention. However, given the stances outlined above, we want to clarify a few points regarding our nonprofit status and our relationship to the government.

Faced with the degree of suffering wrought by the coronavirus crisis and the local and federal governments’ non-response, our primary goal is helping the people hit the hardest meet their needs. In pursuit of that goal, we strategically cooperate with the government of the occupying forces in Hawaiʻi by operating as an officially-sanctioned entity, and accept funds such as those provided by the CARES act in cooperation with other nonprofits. However, this aid does not change the fact that this government is the source of such need in the first place.

The meager aid dispensed by the government largely serves to obscure its own negligence and oppression. We accept any aid in service of the people who need it, but refuse to ignore this fact.

If we’re critical of nonprofits, why do we operate as one?

There are concrete benefits to our position as a government-sanctioned nonprofit. While we are registered as a nonprofit, we need not and do not operate as a typical nonprofit. Most nonprofits receive their funds from the state or rich capitalists, and have to fight each other for crumbs. That usually means sacrificing beliefs and ideals to appeal to people who have all the power and no interest in giving their money to anyone threatening their bottom line. Even when a nonprofit does receive a significant sum from the government, as our partner Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies did through the CARES act, that money can dry up on the government’s whim, and the nonprofit’s work along with it. This creates an atmosphere of constant competition and a businesslike mentality that does not belong in the work we are doing. We are not a business, and we don’t operate like one.

We operate as a group of equals, and we use the benefit of our legitimacy to extend the reach of our work and to try and give a mouthpiece to those normally excluded from the conversation.

At the end of the day, while there are things we don’t like about the nonprofit system, we feel we can do more good as a nonprofit than otherwise. We can always back out and operate without nonprofit status, but as long as we operate in a way that matches our beliefs, we are happy to accept the benefits that come with being a 501c3.

Today, Coronacare Hawaiʻi and its network of volunteers are doing our best to serve our neighbors in need, in the hope of building communities that can work together and help each other without hidden clauses or fine print. By focusing on the needs of our community and not the desire to line our wallets, we always strive to serve those normally excluded by nonprofits, without preconditions, and without hobnobbing with wealthy donors hoping to put another self-serving notch in their belt. We are in this together, and we are in this for each other.