text: The federal government officially launched the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) on April 6, providing two thousand dollars each month to out-of-work Canadians. The release announcing the program said the cash would help people "put food on the table and keep a roof over their head." To be sure, it was a relief for millions of suddenly jobless Canadians. But the move was also one that had been an agonizingly long time coming. By then, many people had already been without a paycheque for weeks. Others, including the elderly, people with disabilities, those with poor health, and single parents with nobody to watch their kids, couldn't have trekked out to get food even if they did have the funds. All across the country, people struggled toward the possibility of tomorrow. And, incredibly, all across the country others offered what they could. A group of Vancouver activists established a survival fund to dole out no-questions-asked increments of twenty-five to one hundred dollars for things such as electricity bills, groceries, diapers, baby formula. An Indigenous artist named Lianne Spence raised funds to help buy and deliver groceries to elders in the Prince Rupert area. Libraries transformed themselves into foodbanks. And in Toronto, a disability support worker named Mita Hans offered to help one neighbour and unknowingly sprinkled the seeds for a worldwide mutual-aid movement.
  
  Hans grew up in East Africa, or, as she put it, "the area that spawned Ebola." An incoming pandemic means something different, she told me, when your grandfather has had dengue fever—when you yourself remember what childhood malaria felt like. When you know these things in your DNA, then something like a treacherous new coronavirus isn't abstract. It's real. It is "big shit." Hans had been following reports from China. They were vague and disjointed, but all stacked up they felt like something familiar, something dangerous. Hans is also Sikh, and, growing up, when bad things happened her community taught her to ask, "What can I do to help fix this?" After her family moved to Etobicoke when she was thirteen, Hans organized a fun fair to rally her neighbourhood together. As an adult, following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and a subsequent rise in racism and Islamophobia, she co-created BuddyUpTO. Two men had attacked a Toronto woman wearing a hijab, and the Facebook group allowed anyone who felt unsafe travelling to their destinations to request a buddy. When it comes to helping people, Hans noted, "I've been doing this my whole life." When the pandemic arrived she wasn't about to sit back.
  
  With every new project, Hans asks herself three questions. One: Who are the most vulnerable? Two: What do they need? And, three: How can we get it to them? She started to seriously consider those questions again after knocking on a neighbour's door in mid-March. Hans worried that her neighbour, who has mobility issues and is on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), wouldn't be able to navigate a packed grocery store or secure the government-recommended two weeks' worth of supplies. Initially, the neighbour tartly told Hans to "stop scaremongering her." Hans replied that she wasn't trying to scare her; she cared. Turning the encounter over in her head later on, near midnight, she began to think about those who would get hit hardest: racialized and Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ people, the disabled, seniors, the poor and underhoused, everyone on the margins—the same people who always get the knockout blows when crisis comes, compounding already existing issues. She decided to create another Facebook group to connect people who could offer help with the people who needed it. Thinking of the earlier conversation with her neighbour, Hans gave the group a pointedly clever name: Caremongers-TO. She imagined that a couple dozen friends, at most, would sign up to become "caremongers." By March 24, the group had nearly twenty thousand members and was being modelled both across Canada and in thirty-five different countries.
  
  One of those members was Valentina Harper, a fellow activist and friend. Harper grew up in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and came to Canada during the 1980s. When Hans asked for help with her new project, Harper remembered how, only a month before, Hans had immediately said yes when Harper was grief-worn and needed help—in this case, with emptying her father's house following his death. And so, without thinking too much about it, Harper also said yes. Together, they worked to get advisers from communities that had some of the highest needs. An Indigenous elder signed up, and so did members of the Black Medical Students' Association of Canada. They built a structure that prioritized the most vulnerable and got them the help they needed, without judgment or restrictions. Any person could join the Caremongers-TO Facebook group in their area, post a request, and wait for help to arrive. Many people asked for groceries and other essentials. Others needed face masks, help paying bills or rent, a way to escape an abusive situation, temporary shelter, or medical supplies for chronic conditions. Later on, some asked for help figuring out their CERB paperwork or talking to their landlord. Anything. Everything.
  
  Day in and day out, Hans and Harper witnessed acts, big and small, that gave them hope. One woman in Mississauga shared that she was down to her last meal for her three children. She hadn't eaten that day at all and she had no money coming in for another week. Hans phoned her and the woman broke down on the call: "I don't know what to do." Hans passed the story on to her sister in Mississauga, who helped the woman connect with their local caremongering group. Within a couple of hours, someone had delivered two Little Caesars pizzas to the woman's front door. Within a couple more, she had $350 in grocery gift cards. People contacted her offering pasta, canned goods, stuff with shelf life. The woman, in turn, contacted Hans again, a new worry on her tongue: "Am I allowed to take it?" Hans told her, "Yes, if somebody offers you something, you take it." That was the whole point. To freely give and receive was something beautiful in the gloom. Hans knows those little moments of generosity helped many donors get through the early months of the pandemic, too. Being isolated at home while others are suffering is a different kind of helplessness; it's an absence of faith, optimism, community, worthwhile tomorrows.
  
  In many ways, it's unsurprising that the idea of caremongering resonated so deeply and so widely. Justin Trudeau tweeted about the movement, saying, "We're only going to get through this by pulling together." Barack Obama called it "a great example of the kind of community spirit we need to get through this." In April, the Oxford English Dictionary's senior editor called caremongering her favourite word to emerge from the pandemic, defining the term as: "the provision of help, such as shopping, for vulnerable members of the community during the COVID-19 breakout." She added that it was "a relief to focus on something positive in all the darkness." International media, from the BBC to the Washington Post, ran stories about the movement. The former pointed out that Canada is "a country whose inhabitants are stereotyped in the media as being kind to a fault" and called the cumulative #caremongering posts "an uplifting read during anxious times." The latter deemed caremongering "the antithesis in name and spirit to fearmongering." The media storm was intense and often overwhelming, but it wasn't what underscored for Hans how quickly her neighbourhood movement had gone global.
  
  That realization, she said, came when caremongers in Malaysia helped three hundred stranded Rohingya refugees, a group that the UN has dubbed the most "persecuted minority in the world." Though Human Rights Watch has condemned Malaysia's treatment of the thousands who've fled the tyrannical rule in their home country, Myanmar, the caremongers in Malaysia led with defiant kindness. When one member found the refugees in the mountains, too far from any town and begging for water and help, he brought Jeeps full of supplies, donated by other caremongers. In short order, he saved their lives. "And that was the day the magnitude of what we were doing hit me," said Hans. She realized the philosophy of caremongering wasn't only being applied to local challenges, but world-stage tragedies. "The weight on my shoulders felt so enormous. I had a full-on panic attack. I was hyperventilating. This was no longer just a Facebook group. Our actions had very, very real consequences. People's lives depended on how we moved forward." That kind of pressure can make you feel like a bent bough, waiting to crack. Hans and Harper found the increased attention to be heavy and surreal and also, at times, incredibly frustrating.
  
  More than once, they got the chilling sense that both corporate interests and narrowmindedness were co-opting their movement. They saw trendy caremongering T-shirts being sold for profit. And, in some groups, judgment had seeped in like bitter tea. Instead of giving what they could, certain members had started to ask why. To expunge the bad taste, they trademarked the term "caremongering" and began to block and vet members who weren't into giving radical kindness. But it was more than that: too many people were simply missing the point. The problem, wrote Yvonne Su, an assistant professor at York University, is that aw-shucks-Canadians coverage runs the risk of "happy-washing" the pandemic. "While there is an upside to this solidarity, it is often short-lived and romanticized by both media and politicians," wrote Su in an April Policy Options piece. "In fact, it may allow the government to download its responsibilities to Canadians and the private sector and abdicate its role in ensuring that everyone is protected and secure." Hans and Harper hadn't started the movement because they were nice Canadians doing nice Canadian things—and they hated to see their movement flattened into a pat-on-the-back moment, especially without discussion of the deeper issues. "The thing is that if Canadians were really nice," said Harper, "we wouldn't be in this predicament."