2024 Year-End Update
2024 offered MALAN a number of new and exciting opportunities that we wanted to share with all of the followers, supporters, donors, and volunteers that helped make our work possible last year. Our group found a new fiscal sponsor, published 10 Dispatches, hosted 2 Hygiene Hello! kit builds, read 8 books, and distributed over 100 tons of fresh produce to community members! Read on for a full breakdown of our 2024 in review.
FISCAL UPDATE
In April 2024, MALAN entered a new fiscal sponsorship agreement with the Hack Club Foundation (HCB), transitioning out of our fiscal sponsorship with POWER. Hack Club’s one on one support and accounting platform made our process of tracking donations, expenditures, and group giving much easier.
In 2024, MALAN received $13,057.29 in donations. Our fiscal sponsorship fees totaled $594.72 (or 7% of all donations). Our total expenditures in 2024 (excluding the fiscal sponsorship fee) were $14,923.80.
Our group giving efforts allowed us to support more than 40 different groups with more than $11,000.
Our internal MALAN expenses were $3,605.87, these were used for our ongoing projects Produce in the Park, Open Art Supply, and Hygiene Hello.
PROJECTS
In 2024, the Dispatch ran as a monthly catalog of mutual aid efforts across the city, and grew in many new and exciting ways. Each month, our team assembled a list of mutual aid organizations with information about items they’re collecting, ways interested volunteers can get involved, and avenues to donate. In 2024, MALAN published 10 Dispatch newsletters, highlighting the work of over 50 different mutual aid groups across Los Angeles and Southern California.
Groups featured in 2024
- 714 Mutual Aid
- 909 Mutual Aid
- Aetna Street Solidarity
- All Power Free Clinic
- Bicycle Meals
- CAT911SFV
- CHPLA/Clean Needles Now!
- Community Loving
- Echo Park Mutual Aid (EPMA)
- Every Day Action
- Farm2Power
- Food for Comrades
- For the People LA
- Gracie’s Giving Hands
- Grow Together Glendale
- Home-y Made Meals
- Hope Street Distro
- Hyperion Garden Project
- Insula Collective
- J-TOWN Action & Solidarity
- Jail Support LA
- KTown for All
- LA Community Car Care
- LA Community Fridges (LACF)
- LA Street Care
- Lincoln Heights Outreach
- Long Beach Care Mutual Aid
- Long Beach Community Compost
- Los Angeles Abortion Support Collective (LAASC)
- Los Angeles Tenants Union
- Los Angeles Tenants Union K-Town Local
- Mac Park Breakfast Crew
- MARS Collective
- Mask Bloc LA
- Midnight Books
- Mutual Aid Action LA
- No Us Without You LA
- Nobody Fails at Scripps–Scripps College Mutual Aid Collective
- NoHarm
- Norfside Long Beach Outreach
- Northeast Neighborhood Outreach (NENO)
- Nuestra SELA
- Operation Olive Branch
- P.A.C. Solidarity
- Pasadena for All
- Pomona College Sustainability
- PowerBlossoms
- Project Ropa
- Proper Hygiene Project
- Resilient Agency
- SFV Mutual Aid
- Solidarity and Snacks
- SWOPLA Sex Workers’ Abortion Navigation Services (SWANS)
- Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles
- The Lavender Collective
- The Other Health Brigade
- The Public School
- The Valley of Change (TVOC)
- Union de la 8 (LA Tenants Union)
- Water Drop LA
- We The Unhoused
- Westwood Mutual Aid (WMA)
Additionally, new team members opened up doors for an expansion in medium and allowed us to re-launch the Dispatch Podcast! In addition to our email and social media formats, the Dispatch is also available in audio format, with a couple of exciting audio-only bonus segments.
MALAN’s Group Directory also launched in 2024, bringing a searchable and filter-able format to the Dispatch. The Directory, while under construction right now, will hopefully re-launch soon and continue to provide details about the services and outreach efforts provided by various mutual aid groups in the City, and ways community members can get involved.
Our Hygiene Hello! team hosted two kit builds this year (in January and July), making over 800 hygiene kits and countless period kits. These kits were distributed across the county by over 10 mutual aid groups. In addition to funding from cash and item donations, these Hygiene Hello! builds were funded in part by a grant that MALAN received from UCLA’s Luskin Center for Inequality and Democracy. We’d also like to thank all the groups and communities who made these events possible by providing substantial volunteer power and sourcing many of the items that go into these kits, including Cathartic, the Eagle Rock Yacht Club dodgeball league, Who Gives a Crap TP company, Liquid IV, Ethique, Chinatown Workspace, Dr. Bronner’s, Big Box of Razors, and LA Condom. We owe endless gratitude to a number of other groups and volunteers that shared hygiene items and helped make these events continue to happen, especially to Scribble where we hosted one of our builds.
To get involved with future Hygiene Hello! efforts, check out the list of items we try to include in every kit and be sure to reach out if you have any of these items (unopened, unexpired) you’d like to donate, if you’d like to to jump in and help source items from companies, if you want to help organize, or to hear about future builds!
Open Art Supply continued to assemble art kits and distributed over 130 kits to our community through partnership with other mutual aid groups across Los Angeles.
After listening to the needs of the community, we narrowed our offerings down to the most requested items – sketchbooks and marking tools (pencils, crayons, markers, pens, & colored pencils).
We held an art workshop party in March where three different artists led attendees through watercolor painting, weaving, and #TrashArt collage. We raised $386 in donations and all of that money was put towards purchasing art supplies for the kits. Thank you to Non Plus Ultra for generously donating their space for the event and to our artists Frieda, Ally, and April for leading the activities.
Our reading group met almost every Sunday and we read 8 books/essays and watched 2 movies together:
- Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson
- The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” by Audre Lorde
- “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” by Audre Lorde
- “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” by bell hooks
- Neptune Frost (2021) co-directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman
- Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea J. Ritchie
- A Bug’s Life (1998) Directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton
- The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
- Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
In 2024, Produce in the Park ran for 50 weeks of the year and distributed 201,225 lbs of produce – over 100 tons of fresh produce! We typically have at least 150 people coming to pick up bags of produce. We also were able to pick up 200 meals a week from Everytable, which is 10,000 meals that would have ended up in a landfill and were able to be redistributed to the LA Community Fridges and our food insecure neighbors. Each week we sent produce and water to 6 -10 fridges across Los Angeles.
MALAN, once again, wants to thank everyone who has supported our work– whether that be materially, through sharing information on social media, or by attending a meeting, food distribution, or kit build– your help drives our work forward. Additionally, thank you to all who have held fundraisers for us… podcasters, shows, artists… we look forward to further collaboration and to the opportunity to continue this work into 2026 and beyond.
That’s all for now!
Love,
The MALAN Team
Mutual Aid LA Network 