Inside this Seattle home: water bottles, helmets, and other supplies for the front lines of protest
Inside this Seattle home are stacks of water bottles, ear plugs, helmets, and supplies waiting to be delivered to the front lines.
Organizers in support of #BlackLivesMatter have operated out of this storage unit for the last month. And despite CHOP closing down this week, they’re just getting started.
“It started with housing goggles,” says Garrett, one of the organizers of this underground repository.
He describes getting a phone call in early June where organizers were trying to figure out where to gather supplies and accept donations for the protests rippling throughout Seattle.
The house he rents with three other housemates has a giant basement, so he thought, why not offer up the space?
In 48 hours, boxes of protein bars, stacks of water bottles, and medical supplies started flooding in. Soon Garrett and his housemate Jen, started working 12 hour days, wrangling volunteers, in-taking items, and delivering them to protesters on the front lines. Now, it resembles an Amazon warehouse -- except here everything is free and the goal is to keep protesters fed, hydrated, and safe.
For safety reasons, we’re not using the exact location of the house or the organizers' full names.
The decentralized team has about 100 volunteers connecting over Telegram, Signal, and Google Docs working locally and supporting remotely from Eastern Washington, California, and even Michigan.
The basement -- now operating for about a month -- holds everything from goggles, backpacks, rain ponchos, supplies to counter tear gas, hand sanitizer, first aid kits, masks, and more. Supplies like these are ready to be distributed as protests continue in Seattle.
Organizers estimate the supplies totals above $40,000.
As the waves of protests eventually morphed into a standoff with Seattle police in Capitol Hill, the needs changed and the group responded. Garrett describes the night of the now viral "purple umbrella" incident.
“There was one night where there was a need for umbrellas on the front line because the police were using tear gas on protesters,” he recalls.
“We had people that were communicating with us about the need, and then we packaged things really quickly and then sent out a courier to run them to the front line.”
A wave of umbrellas eventually served to protect protesters from pepper spray and tear gas.
Now as Capitol Hill's Autonomous Zone comes to a close as police force the remaining protesters to leave, Garret says they are re-calibrating the supply center and strategizing next steps.
"I anticipate that requests might go back up," he says.
Already there are at least five marches set to happen around Seattle this Fourth of July weekend.
The supply center is readying and if the social uprisings continue into summer, Garrett and Jen say they'll expand the network, and maybe even teach other people how to build a supply chain like this one to keep the protests fueled.
