Get Involved

Here are some projects we are currently working on to serve our community!
Contact us via the Let’s Chat page, DM us on Instagram (@mutual_aid_omaha),
and/or join us at one our MACE meetings to get involved.

A neighborhood map of Omaha featuring names, contact information, and skills/ experiences to share with each other. We have devised various layers of privacy and protocol around this database to keep us safe. You are welcome to omit/add as much personal info as you feel comfortable divulging. Some folks just want to be accessible in person, at MACE meetings only. Some add their signal handles, along with a first name or moniker to connect with. We go by a referral basis to keep it secure.

This list of skills & experience we want to offer to each other is entirely up to each individual’s schedule/consent. There are no obligations to fulfill any requests or reply to any inquiries. If there is a spark of interest to an inquiry, then it can be collaborated on. Sometimes people just need advice or a question answered on how to complete a project they’re stuck on.

The vision for this project is that eventually the participation levels grow so much that neighbors will meet each other, and build support networks in a very localized manner.

Community Resource & Skillshare Map

To help with this project contact:
OmahaPacksForFriends@Proton.ME

Venmo Donations: @Felina-Kavi

We are working towards scaling up the network of community fridges in the Omaha/Council Bluffs area.

The dismantling of the social safety net amidst late-stage-capitalism has put the honus of survival for the most marginalized people on our collective efforts. It is up to us to keep each other safe & fed. Not everyone is able to work. Not everyone has the privileges afforded to function well in this society. We want to make sure everyone can eat. To do that free food must become highly accessible, with zero barriers to entry.

We are collaborating with the DSA Mutual Aid Working Group, Omaha Supper Share, Saving Grace and the City of Omaha to realize this vision.

The first two installs are in Omaha community centers. We are currently on a pilot program with the City of Omaha. If they consider our efforts to be successful and well-maintained, we may get the green light to build more in other Omaha community centers!

But we’re not waiting for that. We've got many more community fridge/pantry construction projects coming up! Whether that be outside of local art galleries, businesses, or on the sidewalk of residential zones.

We continue to scavenge and store quality building materials mostly from upcycled cedar fences, gather monetary donations from our network of support, and will begin building out the next ones as soon as our volunteer electricians get the wiring completed at the next host sites.

Currently the volunteering of electricians is our biggest bottleneck. We have so many other volunteers ready to pour concrete, frame out the pantries, artists to paint them, etc. But what we need most right now is more licensed electricians, with the available time and resources to run conduit and GFCI boxes out from the buildings.

If you’re interested in hosting a community fridge/pantry please reach out to us.

We aren’t asking for funds to install these, but donations help make them go up a lot faster. We hope to install our meadowlark mesh-nodes in/near each one we build too. So, on top of the free food we expand the public communications network in or near each structure we build.

Fill the Fridges!

“Turtle Island Precolonial Staple Planters Outmaneuvering with Wild Edible
Resources”

Next Spring there will be a shipment of 1100x+ bare-root native,
edible trees and shrubs. Here is what we got so far on the order.
If we get sponsors before the order deadline, we may add
some more species in:

200x Black Cherry Trees

100x Bur Oak

200x Chinkapin Oak

100x American Plum

100x Hazelnuts

300x Black Chokeberry (Aronia)

100x Redbud

The source of these very affordable trees (averaging $0.44 cents each) originates from the Stop Cop City organizing in Atlanta. Comrades there realized that they could not save the Weelaunee Forest from clearcuts for a slated police urban warfare training facility, but they could organize to reforest Turtle Island. [Learn more about that movement here: Stop Cop City! – Atlanta DSA]

For 5 years now Omaha has hosted annual free tree distributions in the Spring as a result of this.
MAO wants to multiply these efforts next year.
Therefore the groundwork needs to be laid this Fall/Winter 2026,
so we can come out swinging in the Spring of 2027!

Join the next MACE meetup if you’re interested in helping organize this project.

We need:

• Surveyors of lead remediation maps to find safe places to plant

• Lot and lots of planting volunteers

• Shovel donations

• Compost would be ideal for each planting, but on this scale can become cost prohibitive.
  Luckily for us native plants have co-evolved with these soils for millions of years, and will do fine without it.

• Mulch is the same scenario, but easier to scavenge. If we’re doing 3’ diameter wood mulch rings around each planting 3” deep, that would require about 72 cubic yards of mulch, which would end up costing $3025, not even counting the delivery fuel. So, we’re probably just going to ask the adopted plant parents to tend to them individually in this way. Each planting would greatly benefit from two big bags of mulch spread around the planting and never piled on the stem!

• Cardboard is a biodegradable weed-mat that can be placed around the trees/shrubs, and under the mulch
  to keep the grass back. This is a critical component for the plantings to get established during that first year. Mulch/compost are a bonus, cardboard is necessary.

• Volunteer pickup truck drivers willing to make mulch or compost runs on
  big planting days will greatly increase the long-term success of this project.

• What is most important is that they are watered in weekly for the first couple months after planting.
  Hence the need for people to adopt their plant and take on the responsibility in getting it established.

We will optimize the workflow according to the amount of labor power and resources we have to make this happen. So, there are corners available to cut, such as not adding compost or wood mulch to the plantings, though it would be best for the long-term success of the trees/shrubs to have it added day one.

The TIPS-POWER Bike Club will host rides that get some of these precolonial staples out into the wild, near anyone who has offered to steward their adopted plants.

This keeps the project accessible to all.
Not just property-owners.

We hope that these efforts not only nourish the most marginalized of the working-class,
but reconnect all people willing with the Earth!
If enough people get reintroduced to the magic of tending a plant that grows alongside you,
we can get some momentum built towards rewilding our lives on a larger scale here in Omaha.

We will join a cohort of eco-conscious bicyclists in Spring to carry empty water jugs, hundreds of native bare-root tree/shrubs, and shovels on bike trailers and ride out together to forgotten pockets of the city to plant discreet sources of food for all, all day. To get warmed up we can start with mass planting sunchokes in fallow grounds this fall!

There will need to be surveys of the contaminant levels of the soil.
Unfortunately, Omaha has super high concentrations of lead in the soil. Thanks ASARCO!
So we will have to cross-reference remediation maps to prevent any harm to foragers.
General rule of thumb is West of 60th isn’t considered apart of the EPA superfund site.

“Ecology without class struggle is just gardening.”
-Chico Mendes, revolutionary, Brazilian socialist and environmentalist,
murdered for fighting rubber tappers in the Amazon basin.

Once food went under lock and key
is when the people became alienated from their labor.

Collective production of our necessities is the fulcrum
from which we can overthrow the death cult of Capitalism.

The colonizers purposefully destroyed this entire continent’s
food forests and buffalo herds to break the autonomy of Native Americans.
By replanting all those precolonial staples we can achieve sustainability
and independence from the trap of false scarcity, together!

TIPS-POWER Project

Omaha Tenants United

Arguably one of the strongest unions in Omaha.
Their list of victories is phenomenal.
They have continued to grow and evolve over the years, building out a robust network of tenant locals.

They famously defeated the most hated slumlord in Omaha, Dave Palladino by taking him to court and forcing him to make repairs on a building that was uninhabitable due to neglect.

They are so affective that the local landlord cartel, and their co-conspirators felt threatened enough to attempt to shut them down
via bogus charges of “Unlicensed Practice of Law.”

After a year of litigation, these charges were defeated in court, and OTU continues to be the vanguard for the working-class renters in Omaha.

Follow them on Instagram @omahatenantsunited

Visit their website:
About Us – Omaha Tenants United

Omaha New Labor Committee

“ONLC seeks to build the class-conscious labor movement here in Omaha by helping other workers get their shops organized, and provide support to existing labor struggles

We know that the primary contradiction in a capitalist society is that between capital and labor. It is workers alone who are responsible for generating all wealth under capitalism - which the capitalist exploits in order to enrich himself and his class, while pushing workers into ever greater economic precarity.

Despite the capitalist class currently being much better organized and stronger politically and economically than the working class, it is workers who possess the power to bring the capitalist system to its knees by virtue of our essential role in the capitalist mode of production.

Over the past couple months ONLC has been hosting private Labor Circle meetings, where workers across industries come together to share their experiences and develop plans to get organized. We are happy to say we have taken important practical steps, with one of our members already establishing an Organizing Committee with several of their coworkers.

We welcome all workers looking to get their shops organized.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”

Pulled from ONLC’s Instagram @Omaha.workers
Email: omaha-workers@proton.me