Help Cooperation Jackson’s Community Production Effort to Build Masks

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We are putting our Community Production capacity to work to make safety masks for our members and community to provide a layer of protection against the Coronavirus to as many as possible in our community.

What We Are Producing

We are making two types of masks. One is a 3D printed design, combining plastic with cotton fabric and a charcoal filter (see outlines of the design attached). The second type of mask we will be producing is a sewn design, made of cotton fabric and various types of filters (vacuum bags, coffee filters, etc.) based on the availability of materials to produce various levels of protection.

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Distribution Priority

Our distribution priority will be as follows:

  1. Our Core Staff to enable the production of the safety masks to proceed.
  2. Our Membership for their health and safety during this time.
  3. Medical facilities in the City.
  4. Community Distribution, some for sale at 5% of production costs.

How Will the Donations be Used

All donations will be used strictly to cover the production costs for the masks and for the labor of our cooperative members producing these goods. The main production costs include: sewing machines, cotton and other cloth materials, various plastics and resins for our 3D printers, etc. It should be noted that we are insisting on our members receiving some compensation as all but one of our cooperative operations have had to shut down due to the virus, leaving them without income during these trying times.

Why

We’ve seen our fair share of hardships and disasters in Jackson the past few decades, from deindustrialization, to the housing collapse, to Hurricane Katrina, and the steady decline of our cities infrastructure. However, we haven’t faced anything like the COVID-19 Pandemic since the Flu Pandemic of 1918.

Since our founding, we’ve been preparing strategically for various types of catastrophes, as it's been our analysis that the irrationality of late-stage capitalism and the advance of climate change, both pose long term threats to our community and to humanity. However, Like most, we were not prepared for the threat of the coronavirus.

In figuring out how we could respond we first endeavored to set up a mutual aid relief program, which many of our core have experience with as a result of organizing our communities to survive Hurricane Katrina. However, we learned from fellow cooperators in Italy that the standard ways many activists have endeavored to engage in mutual aid relief practices do not work in this case, instead many got sick.The primary reason being is that given the potency of the virus, you need an inordinate amount of disinfectant and safety gear to ensure that the workers and those they are exchanging with don’t contract the virus and become vextors for its further spread in the community. Out of concern for the safety of our members and our community, we therefore pulled back for this type of activity in the service of our community and sought new, creative ways of meeting the challenge addressing our communities needs.

After exploring several options, we landed on the production of masks both to address the urgent call for them and to put our unique set of skills and tools to use in the service of humanity. Thus we give you our Community Production Safety Mask initiative. We hope that you support the effort generously and that you encourage others to do so as well.