MH: Okay, so first of all, if you would introduce yourself in any way you like, tell us anything about you that you want us to know!

AA: I’m Amanda. I use she/her pronouns. I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon basically my whole life except when I went away for college. I rescue guinea pigs with my two partners that I live with.

MH: Aww.

AA: We have fourteen currently. [laughing]

MH: Wow.

AA: Nine boys and five girls, and I’m wearing a shirt that has a guinea pig in a mask on it that I drew, because guinea pigs are very important to me, because they’re fuzzy potatoes. And masking is important to me, because I had my lungs and immune system damaged by Long-COVID.

MH: Yeah. Word. So nice to have the [Always Masked PDX Discord Server] logo explained. Now I know!

AA: Yeah! It was a stand-in logo that I didn’t expect to actually be the server logo, but then the server got published faster than I expected it too.

MH: Yeah, cool. Our first question is for background about your family of origin, as much as you wanna talk about it. We’re always curious to know, especially for people who’ve ended up in non-nuclear situations and community care situations, what your upbringing was like and if community care was modeled for you in any way growing up.

AA: I grew up in a very traditional nuclear family. I was an only child, and I had my mom and my dad. And we were [a] very normal American family. Largely Democrat voting. I had some extended family, and we’d visit them on occasion. But no, very, very traditional family. Traditional in the American sense, not…

MH: Right. And were there parts of that that worked for you? Parts that didn’t?

AA: It mostly worked really well for me because that’s just the way things were done. I’m autistic, and so it was “this is how you do family” and I was like “cool, this is how I do family.”

I was really involved in school extracurriculars. But those never really felt like community care. Or as much community as just events and things that you do with other people, but it’s the event or thing that you’re doing, not the people, that’s important about it.

MH: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Were there any early experiences that showed you alternative ways to do family? Or to do care?

AA: Honestly not that I can remember. It really was the pandemic for me in 2020 that started radicalizing me and how I view community and family and things.

MH: Yeah, tell me more about that.

AA: Yeah, I had already begun bucking some social norms in that I’m polyamorous and I have two partners. And we live together as a family unit. And so, I was used to that kind of thing. But then when the pandemic hit, it became really clear how isolated everyone was in my life from each other and from actual community.

We all kind of knew each other, but none of us knew each other well enough to actually want to try and figure things out in the new world of masking and testing and caring about each other’s health and safety… In 2020 and 2021, it was really apparent that very few people were actually open to doing the whole “I’m not gonna see anyone else for two weeks, to make sure that I don’t get any symptoms from visiting you, and then I can visit someone else and we can do this in small groups,” thing. So [my] friends shrunk dramatically.

MH: Yeah, that must have been…

AA: Yeah and about the years following, as the unmasking of most people started happening, it was late 2022 when in a group of what I considered friends, I made the comment about Thanksgiving that people getting together without testing or caring about COVID are celebrating one genocide by perpetuating another.

MH: Oof.

AA: And boy did that not go over well.

MH: Mmhmm.

AA: It was a personal attack on everybody there apparently. Not an honest reflection of how I was actually feeling as I watched people go gather to celebrate a genocide. And that was sort of the end of that friend group for me, was the response to that being “no we're not.”

MH: What were some of those early community care practices when COVID started and how did you sort of develop any concept of that?

AA: So I got definitely thrust into the idea of it because I got COVID in March 2020.

MH: Wow.

AA: From a contractor that had to come into our house because we had no running water, which is also a bad thing for a pandemic. And I spent two weeks in our backyard in a tent, because I was the only one that had symptoms. And I didn’t want to get my partners sick.

And so for two weeks I literally lived inside a tent and did not leave the tent and spent the time working on cloth masks, at the time, because that was what people were doing, but then using my own skills of researching—I majored in chemistry, I don’t really do anything with that degree—but looking into different parts of it and making masks using that kind of research and knowledge and using a bunch of layers of nylon because they have electrostatic properties which is part of how N95 masks work.

And then in 2024, I actually confirmed that they filter with over 90% filtration, which is incredible for a cloth mask. So that was… that was really cool to have affirmed via Portacount, which is a mask testing device.

But I was making those for friends, and I was also relying on friends for supplies, because I was stuck in a tent. And so, being able to do that kind of thing made me realize who some of the people I was closer to in my life were, based on responses to that. And really drove the start of that, which was getting masks to people.

MH: Mmhmm

AA: Because by April 2020, my family was already wearing KN95 because as soon as I found out about COVID, I went looking for how to import these masks that will actually work. And so getting those and doling them out to people I was close to, which at the time was still very based in the nuclear family, and people you know from events and things.

And that has expanded into the greater Portland community, working with anyone who wants masks and also putting them out at free pantries and things because that was a skill that I have and can use well: finding deals on things, and making sure that the masks are legitimate before distributing them, and then making my disposable income, my family’s disposable income, stretch as far as possible on ordering masks.

Yeah, so the first thing I did ended up being one of the bigger things that carried through the last five years.

MH: That’s amazing.

AA: Mask distribution, just changing forms.

MH: Very cool. How does that mask distribution system work now?

AA: Right now, I’ve mostly handed the reigns over to Free COVID Tests PDX, which also does mask distribution because the need has grown and it was nice to be able to step back from doing that directly. I still help with acquisition and pointing out where deals are. Earlier today, I sent someone a link so that they could buy 1200 masks for an event, and then I also snagged a deal on another 1000 masks or so for distribution, but I will be putting those in a friend’s garage and that friend will take care of getting them to the people that actually do the distribution. And then they will go from there, because running around town delivering masks as a single family was just obviously not as sustainable as getting groups together, so I’m really grateful to the person who started Free COVID Tests PDX and how much work they’ve put into it.

MH: Mmm. Yeah. The work can expand so much when we get other people and organizations involved.

AA: Yes!

MH: That’s very cool. Tell me a little bit about the history of Always Masked PDX, the discord server.

AA: Cool, so that story goes back well beyond the creation of Always Masked PDX, in that there was a server COVID Cautious PDX, CCPDX for short, that was started after a call from the person who was running the mask block in 2023, and a couple of us jumped on and made a discord server happen for the community.

I did a lot of the technical setup, and discord is very much designed for one leader that has all the power in the server, and that has been a problem. And so, that server went on for eight months or so before the leader had some paranoia issues. Legitimate psychologically… I feel bad for them. And those ended up leading to the collapse of the server. And I got personally very hurt in the process, but I also recognize that it was not intentional, it was a different issue. And as that was happening there were a variety of people that also got hurt. It was very disruptive to suddenly have community being fractured.

Four of us got together and made a new server: PDX Masked Up Metro, PDX MUM. Three of us had good technical skills, and so we took the role that had all the tech privileges, and we gave the fourth person ownership of the server, so that I wouldn’t have to make her a separate role, because I had been so involved in CCPDX during the downfall of it. I didn’t want to be the owner of the new server because I didn’t want to feed into the idea that I was taking control. And it seemed like the best choice that this other person take ownership of the server. And so I built that server, and it ran for another eight months or so until she got very concerned about my husband and his girlfriend had a not-great one-month relationship.

It was… no one is pretending it was a good relationship. But the story of that relationship changed over time and just slowly became described [as] worse and worse, including to third parties who were there for the complaints about the kind of bad relationship during the relationship, and then also there as the complaints got worse. My husband stepped down from his role in the server, becoming just a member, but then she started adding new mods and adding new people with powers and controls and removing everyone who had said anything negative at any point about her or her plans.

And I was still actively trying to save that server because that’s where everyone was. Owning the server was not important to me—having a stable community was, and so I, behind the scenes, built Always Masked PDX, because I wanted to have a fail safe, and I wanted to be able to build it with a little less haste than I would otherwise as a just-in-case.

And so it was built following mostly the pattern of how I built the first two servers and then watched them develop as the community influenced how they were being used and which channels were getting used and which weren’t. And I just sort of built that and set it aside.

And then a couple weeks later, I built the PDX Life Raft. [The idea was,] since we had problems with servers, what if we had another server where everyone just was and it wasn’t the community talking but we all just vote on who gets to own it and then someone owns it, and it’s there in case of another fallout like this? And so I built that and ran the election. I also outsourced the voting to someone else, and then based on the results of that, gave that server to a different person. It’s still there sitting just in case we need it.

And then a few weeks after that, the owner of PDX MUM banned 20-something members from the server. Anyone who had spoken any form of dissent, including people who were like “wow it sounds really awful that you’re going through this,” but also your screenshots don’t match the texts you sent about them.” And so that was over half the regularly active community in the server that got banned over that. For reference, according to Discord, we have 39 active contributions this week to our current discord server, so 22 was a lot of people. And then immediately upon doing that, I started sending out invites to AMP, and I made it very clear that after the trauma and debacle of the first two servers that I built being destroyed and having the community destroyed in a way for me, that I was like ‘no, this time I’m keeping server owner.’

I have a team of helpers that all do different parts of server usefulness. One of them, for example, regularly, anytime someone new joins the server, they read the profile and then send a welcoming message that’s very specific and point out a few channels that they might be interested in and put that detail into every new person, which is really cool.

That’s not a thing that I’m particularly skilled at or have time for. I read them as I approve them for the server just because it’s blocked by ‘you have to give an introduction’ before you can access most of the server, except for all the resource channels about COVID information like masks and testing—anyone can view those channels, so that any information that’s there is not hidden behind anything, because those are the universal resources.

MH: Yeah.

AA: And then I have other people on the team that are much better at conflict resolution than I am. I tend to shut down and run away from conflict, and that’s not the greatest response. But I have people that do that, and so it’s made it much better. We’ve had conflict within the server multiple times and it’s been resolved without shutting down the server. And so it’s really nice to have a team of people with a variety of skills and all be able to jump in as needed or when we have time for different things.

MH: Yeah, awesome. I wanna hear more about conflict resolution stuff, but I’m gonna backtrack a little bit and ask first about the goals and intentions of the server. What you were hoping to help create?

AA: So it’s interesting that this is about community because that was actually a big point of conflict that led to the breaking of the previous two servers, was niche community or cliques or things like that forming, like ‘this server is for my friends and people that agree with me’ and that’s not the case. And so one of the founding principles that I put in place for AMP and has been reworded a couple of times so I’m probably not going to get the wording right, is that it’s a resource first and a community second. It is for all people in Portland who are masking and taking COVID precautions.

Honestly, Always Masked PDX was a stand-in name just like the stand-in icon. I did not expect the server to be needed, but they stuck. And so Always Masked is maybe a bit of a misnomer because the server is open to people who only mask on airplanes. Which, we’d like you to do more, but if we shut you out of the community that will tell you how to do more and why you should do more, you’re not going to learn about those things.

MH: Right.

AA: So being a resource first means being open to people that you don’t necessarily agree with. And there’s also language in there about how it is very reasonable that you might feel attacked if someone says “ahh I can’t believe people eat at restaurants still,” and you eat at restaurants. You’re probably gonna feel attacked because we do air on the side of assuming that people should mask everywhere and not be doing things like indoor dining because that creates a problem for everyone. But also, you’re welcome to be here and learn and participate because we want you to do better and just saying ‘no, go away’ doesn’t help.

And so that’s also led to the conflict resolution portion—that it is a resource first and a community second, so interpersonal conflicts that don’t actually involve other people are sort of outside our scope of things. And just because the two of you had a bad interaction about something, that’s not on us to moderate.

We try not to ban anyone, and there’s no one outright banned. Even the former server owner is welcome in the server. We do have a few people that are restricted from the local role, which is a role that gives you access to certain channels like events that are being planned and finding housing in the local area. Because there are some people who are an active problem at events, and so not giving them access to those specific channels is a choice that we’ve had to make a couple times. But [they] still have access to the digital community and are welcome to make friendships in the server and go off and have their own friendships and do things outside of the server.

MH: What are some of the procedures around conflict resolution if there is an issue in the larger group?

AA: It depends on who has the energy to take point at the time, and we wanted to make better conflict resolution procedures and just haven’t managed to get around to that because we’re all tired.

A lot of times it’s taking a step back. One of the last really useful things that came out of the previous server was an article about how urgency is white supremacy, and that the need to fix things immediately is something that’s just manufactured, and in reality most of these things you can take a step back [from] and wait until emotions have calmed down. Which is often what I do if I read something that gets me activated: I just step away from my computer for a little while, because I know responding when I’m highly activated by something is not going to be a good response.

We have some helpers that are really good at talking to people and hearing their side and being able to actively listen to the person and the complaints that they’re bringing. To actually understand their side, which was something that was lacking in previous servers, was the intent to fully understand what the actual complaint is.

And then some people are good at talking to folks who should change their behaviors based on some of these complaints. And working with them to understand the reasoning behind things. And it really depends on the severity of the complaints. Sometimes it’s me that’s the first one to see it, and then I step away for an hour, and I come back and it's resolved itself because no one jumped in and escalated it, and the person realized that their large complaint was actually something very small and reasonable.

One time, I got I think it was 13 messages that were all at Discord’s character limit about how the server was terrible and not meeting their needs. And it was really quite triggering and activating. And I stepped away and I came back and I reread them, and I was still activated, so I stepped away and I came back again, and I realized that the solution to this very long activating message was adding a new channel to the server because in all of that they did identify a need. And so there was a solution, and the solution was actually simple once I got past my own feelings about it.

MH: Yeah.

AA: And that’s a big thing… recognizing when our own personal feelings as helpers, because I also consider myself a helper even though I’m the server owner, and being able to separate our own personal feelings from what we’re doing as helpers and sort of leaders within the community. Even though we’re also just people. If we step in to use the helper voice, as we sometimes say, we need to be sure that we’re actually using our helper voice and we’re not just saying ‘I’m coming in here as someone with the power to do things and you need to stop doing that because it makes me feel bad.’

MH: Right.

AA: That’s not helpful.

MH: Yeah that’s a helpful perspective.

AA: Yeah. It’s amazing how far not escalating conflict goes in resolving conflict. Which is definitely something that I was unaware of until these servers started happening and I started having community that wasn’t based around close knit friendships or events or things where you could just step away from other people.

When it’s a community that you have to be a part of in a way, because masking is so outside the norms right now, that even though we have 500 people in the server—that’s 500 people in the Portland metro—that’s a very small number, percentage wise, and so being able to resolve those conflicts has become increasingly important. I did not realize how much just avoiding escalating conflict could do because that is largely my way of dealing with conflict. Is going ‘oh I’m gonna escalate this if I don’t step away,’ and so I step away.

And then people that actually know conflict resolution skills and are capable of real-time conversations are extremely beneficial in the cases where that doesn’t largely solve the issue.

MH: Yeah it’s so useful to recognize everyone’s different skills and role. We don’t all have to be good at everything.

AA: Yes. One might even say that’s a core part of building community. Is different people have different skills.

MH: So true. I also wanna know about the hub for mutual aid. That [the server] is connecting folks beyond sharing knowledge and emotional support. Is that stuff that’s always part of the server or did it grow into it?

AA: It was always a part of the server, but now people feel more confident sending the occasional like ‘oh I just want to get rid of this thing, I’ll list it in the group before listing it on Craigslist.’ And there are people who want the new tests and masks if you test positive. Or are willing to drop off care aids to others.

[We also do mutual aid by adding] any typical alt text assistance, so that alt text can be provided for most posts in the server. There are some pictures and meme channels that don’t need to have alt text, so we try to balance needs in other channels and [focus] especially on resource channels.

[The reason] we made a decision on that was because in several servers we as the help team have regularly seen that not everything gets seen by alt text assistants that can do that (provide alt text on demand), and so instead making it a much more rarely tagged role, people are less likely to get burnt out and more likely to provide descriptions of infographics or posters, or things like that the original poster didn’t have energy to make an image description for. Instead of being tagged when everyone posts another picture of their cat! It’s very adorable, and it’d be great if we lived in a world where alt text could be on every image all the time. It just isn’t feasible with the current workload.

MH: Yeah.

AA: That seemed like a very strong example of how we’re doing things now instead of dreaming of the future of ‘it would be great to have a future where everything [has] alt text. But in the meantime that’s not feasible and we’ve decided to go about it [by] making sure that important things get alt text and unfortunately pet photos and memes are not as important as other things.

MH: Yeah. Something we’ve been thinking about over the project is that so often these community care projects come out of groups who are the most vulnerable and have the highest need. Therefore it is tricky to meet all of those needs because it’s people who are already vulnerable helping other vulnerable people.

AA: Yeah.

MH: And it seems like y’all are thinking a lot about how to abide by these access needs and energy and capacity. But I'm curious if you have any other thoughts about that.

AA: Some of the other decisions we’ve made that didn’t always go over the best were that we have bots in the server, as people do for role assignment and stuff. Carl bot is the normal one, and we coded commands for requesting alt text for an image and for requesting content warnings on things, because we do have a list of content warnings that people are supposed to hide. But also you never know what one-off things are going to happen that might need one.

And so, we set those up to allow people to anonymously request either alt text or a content warning so that if there was pushback about that it wouldn’t be directed at an individual and they wouldn’t be tagged in a ‘I’d like to request a content warning for dogs,’ let’s say. To not name something terrible ‘on this post’ and then getting tagged with ‘I don’t understand why you need a content warning for dogs.’ That’s not right, that’s not a great feeling and that would also not be acceptable behavior and ideally no one would do that. But just the fear of that happening makes people want to not request content warnings.

And they do get used on occasion, but there are also some people that are very vocal that those are impersonal and rude messaging, and so we workshopped the wording of them and tried our best to make them not feel impersonal. The point across the alt text assistant role, I use the command when I need alt text assistance because exclamation point alt is much easier than trying to tag the correct role. And so that was a similar competing desire and need of trying to make the bots easy to use for people and able to be used anonymously, while also not making them feel like [an] impersonal reprimand for doing something.

When usually that wasn’t how people were intending it, it was just ‘oh I see you didn’t tag the alt text assistant and there’s alt text. I’m just gonna tag the bot real quick.’ but the intention versus impact was a big thing on those competing desires and needs.

MH: That makes sense. In general, what are some challenges of trying to facilitate community care virtually? What challenges does that bring up? Drawbacks? Or benefits?

AA: One of the biggest benefits is that for a lot of people, digital access is so much easier than physical access. People that are homebound, for example, can come to the community movie nights that one of our members does on a regular basis or virtual gaming or things like that. As a community that is mostly chronically ill and disabled, that access [need] can be met.

When it comes to mutual aid… [When offering an item, and saying] ‘this is free to whoever can pick it up,’ who can pick it up are probably not most in need of it. It’s harder to get the word out to people then, ‘hey I heard about this server from someone at this event that I was at because we were the two masked people at it so they brought up the server.’ Because it’s digital it’s a much lower investment to be a part of the community than having a physical community center or something.

MH: Yeah, for sure. What makes running the server and the other kind of community care work that you are doing and have done with mask distribution possible? You talked a little bit about financially stretching your disposable income, but I guess in all ways: physically, emotionally, what makes this work possible for you?

AA: An extreme abundance of care about other people. It seems to be one of the big ones. Because it does keep coming back to that. Honestly, I’ve burned myself out doing things for the community more times than I can count. And it’s the care and desire to have this community exist that keeps bringing it back. Financially, my partners and I, there’s three of us, and for a good while we had two engineer incomes out of the three of us. And so we had plenty of disposable income, and it felt only appropriate to put that into the community and people who need it.

While we are doing much better, we've done that a lot less since one of them lost their job two years ago now I think? Two and a half? It’s been a while. We’ve been on one income, and so financially it’s been a lot harder to do as much. And that’s also where it’s been great that other people have been picking up the care because the community is more stable, and so when you have something stable it’s easier to build new things.

Like Free COVID Tests PDX started up because the person finally had the resources and ability to… There used to be a source from the government for free COVID tests for organizations that you could get in large supply. And so organizing a distribution network for those. And so that was like a second source in addition to the local mask block that primarily did masks, and then I was able to work with the person at Free Covid Tests PDX and get them masks as well. And so there’s three different resources that people can easily access depending on what different networks they’re on.

And so spreading the load for things like that where it’s financial and there is an actual maximum amount that any person can do on their own in capitalism. And then energy-wise, I rely on my partners a lot as a disabled person. And I burn myself out frequently because there’s just so much to do, and I feel compelled to do as much as I can. And I’m trying to get better at not burning myself out on that. And then emotionally, the biggest thing is that I just take complaints well. I learned to do that at a job that shipped thousands of faulty products that they knew were faulty.

MH: Wow.

AA: And just relied on customer service to make everyone happy, but we weren’t allowed to tell anyone that the product was faulty.

MH: Geez.

AA: Trial by fire. And I’ve learned that if I just don’t take them personally, if I just set them aside, wait, and reread them [with] the idea that I’m not a person, I’m like the owner/arbitrator/corporation of the server, it's a lot easier because that is often how people approach complaints, is that I’m not a human, I'm a robot. And I am human, but taking things personally was terrible for my mental health. And so learning to not do that and to separate... There’s a whole like ‘this is my server-owner personality’ and ‘this is who I am as a member of the community’ and just separating those two things so that when there are complaints, they’re not complaints about me personally, even if they’re coming in in a way that feels very directed at me. It’s not easy.

MH: Yeah.

AA: I don’t blame either of the previous server owners for being burnt out and tired of people complaining. But on a day-to-day basis it’s not bad, and it’s definitely something that I can deal with. But it really does take an ability to separate what you’re doing as a builder of community from what your personal feelings are.

MH: Interesting. How would you say that practicing community care in the different ways that you have over the last five years has changed your life? Your life in general, your personal or home life?

AA: Our garage has a lot more stuff in it, that’s for sure. I’ve pretty much completely changed friend groups. I have like two friends from pre-pandemic and then my partners and I, and I’m really grateful that I’m not one of the many disabled women who have been abandoned by their partners. And so the people that we interact with on a regular basis have changed.

But also the connections with people have changed in that, instead of it being a lot of people that I know a little bit about, that are all surface level things like ‘oh you work at this place’ or ‘you like this very basic television show,’ all the people that I know, the things that I found that are more in-depth, useful, like what types of masks you wear and what your connections are, how we can help each other.

And so it’s been really interesting changing those [connections], and as a server owner there’s a lot of… I still have these connections to people in the community because I’m near the center of things, and so people reach out to me who I don’t know all, but even those shallower ones feel deeper, and even ones that are with people that I’ve never met in person despite living near each other, because they’re based on a care about people and society and community and not based on ‘oh we both like Scooby-doo, that’s neat.’

MH: That's beautiful. The deepening of relationships through caring about each other and showing up to support each other in that more real way maybe.

AA: And I’ve seen a lot of really great friendships grow out of the community. Friendships and relationships and different groups of people that all start getting to know each other and hanging out and forming those like one-on-one deep friendships. Which has been really great, and the community being stable and me not being afraid of someone ripping it out from under me has meant that I could pursue friendships recently. Which was something that was pretty severely lacking for a while as focusing on keeping the community alive was a big project.

I’ve built four… five servers for the COVID community in different portions of it at this point. And I think two of them are still active. Because that’s just sort of the nature of how things seem to go. And so, putting all the effort into keeping the community from getting fractured meant that I had almost no energy for my own personal life.

But since starting AMP and getting through the first big conflict that we had a couple weeks into it, because tensions were still high because everyone had just gone through a very intense couple of months leading up to the mass banning of the server and then resources being ripped in half as all the history was lost again to a previous server. And so tensions were still high, but then we got through that first conflict and it was like ‘oh hey it turns out we can do that. We can have big arguments about specifics and get through it as an entire community.’

MH: Yeah.

AA: Maybe we can relax a little now. And we still have the life raft in place. Someone else owns the server and it’s just there with everybody in it in case I ever go wild with power and start banning people, which I hope I don’t do, and I don’t plan on doing. But it’s there in case I do, and I’m really glad it’s there in case I do.

Because if I ever end up at a point where I want to tear the community apart or I want to take actions that would tear the community apart, I don’t want that to happen, and so having that plan in place and available is really important to me currently. Because I don’t know what the future actually holds and while I hope that it’s never, ‘I don’t want community anymore,’ what if it is? What if something happens?

MH: Yeah. Having a failsafe does seem wise.

AA: Yeah.

MH: Do you have any advice for someone who is interested in like starting their own community care project? Which I know is vague but…

AA: Just start. It sounds trite but honestly, like, just make the space and people will come via word of mouth. It might not grow quickly, it might take a long time, or it might have a ton of people pour in. But the way to make community happen is to provide a stable space for that community.

And so deciding what your goals for the community are is important so that that can guide decisions. In this case, the goal is to have anyone in Portland who still masks and cares about COVID to have access to this space. And that necessarily means that there will be conflicts at the extremes because not everyone who cares about COVID has all of the same politics as each other and we’re not a monolith.

So know what your community is and how that will impact other things. Recognizing ways that it might impact other things is important because while we are largely a leftist server because we care about community, we have Democrats and people who even consider themselves centrists. And while they’re the outliers largely, anyone who cares about masking and COVID is welcome. And so that’s just like an acknowledgment that needs to be made.

If you make a space that is safe specifically for one group of people, all other groups are not necessarily a perfect overlap, and there will be big feelings about that. So be ready for the weirdest and most intense complaints you could ever imagine and be able to just want to have something more concise than that. Make it happen and know that there will be problems.

MH: Yeah.

AA: It’s not gonna be easy, and no two people are a perfect overlap, let alone a community. And so just know that that’s going to happen, whether it’s sooner or later, and have an idea of what direction you’re gonna go with it. Because in this current world, perfection is not an option.

MH: Yeah.

AA: The best you can do is good enough. So put that effort into making it happen. Make mistakes and get better from them, but just do it.

MH: Yeah. I think that’s awesome advice. And I think that’s probably a good space to close. Unless there’s anything else that we didn’t touch on that you wanna say about the project.

AA: The number of people who said that they would be dead without the server when PDX MUM was falling apart was a lot higher than I had any idea was possible. And so that really helped form and cement the idea that it was a resource first—that there were lives depending on it.

MH: Yeah, wow. And do you think lives were depending on it from a material standpoint or from an emotional standpoint? Or some of both?

AA: Some of both, but a lot of material standpoint. In that, like access to masks is expensive at small scale and inexpensive at large scale. And so, providing someone with masks is a lot cheaper than everyone individually buying them.

And then people who rely on financial support or community food supplies. We have multiple people who do bulk cooking parties and then distribute meals to people. And so a lot of material support, but there definitely is the emotional connection of community and people that care about you, that I don’t wanna fully discount either.

MH: Sure. Yeah, wow, that’s very powerful.

AA: It's a good community. It really is.

MH: Yeah, that’s quite special. Well thank you for all that you are giving to keep maintaining this space for people.