Ballard Solidarity - Join the Neighbor Union!

Mission & Vision

Mission Statement

Create a Ballard where we know each other, help each other, and work as neighbors for the common good.

Vision Statement

Imagine a world where your community was more than a collection of strangers in disconnected houses and apartments. Imagine a world in which you are part of a community where people know each other, take care of each other, work with each other, fight for each other, and make decisions together.

Ballard Solidarity seeks to achieve such a world within the Ballard Neighborhood of Seattle. We consider our neighbors to be anyone who lives, works, or regularly volunteers in Ballard.

Let’s talk Theory of Change.

We believe that the first step to building community is neighbors getting out and meeting one another. To facilitate this, we host monthly potlucks and coffee meetups; and we will soon have other purely social events on the calendar as well.

We call this starting point the building of social society, whereby having people know each other at the social level enables more meaningful collaboration than could be achieved among strangers. Also, it feels good.

Relationship building among neighbors sets the stage for both community and peer-to-peer mutual aid. It is human nature to help people we know and care about, just as much as it is normal to avoid going out of one’s way for strangers. Social interactions are what make mutual aid swim with the current, rather than against it. So far, our mutual aid has predominately been transferring leftovers to mutual aid groups and individuals who join us at the community potlucks. In November, we had volunteers help us carry the leftovers to unhoused residents at a local shelter. We’ve also done a winter clothing drive and seen an increase in peer-to-peer carpooling and work referrals in Ballard.

This leads us to the next pilar of our efforts – mutual prosperity. Where mutual aid is helping each other out, mutual prosperity is actively working together to create and recycle wealth within the community. This step, mutual prosperity, is what the organizers are currently working on behind the scenes at the time of this writing. We’re cooking here, potluck pun intended. Some possibilities that we envision are app displacement for gig-work (pay each other, not Rover), local networking for job placement, creation of worker cooperatives and solidarity cooperatives, creation of affordable housing, increased unionization for higher wages and better working conditions, creation of tenant unions to lessen the exploitation of inelastic housing demand, and the creation or expansion of community land trusts and housing cooperatives to create permanently affordable housing. This list is non-exhaustive, but the idea is that social society and mutual aid generate social capital, the interpersonal relationships connecting each of us to peers, resources, and institutions in our community. The active use of this social capital drives mutual prosperity.

What social society, mutual aid, and mutual prosperity all have in common is the deconstruction of the unknown “other” and integration of the community.

It is in these conditions where we see a chance for the expansion of democracy. Eventually, we want to hold discussion assemblies and decision-making assemblies that are representative of the neighborhood. This is inspired from events past and present – be it Cooperation Jackson and their struggle for the improvement of present-day conditions in Mississippi, all the way back to the first collective decisions Athenians made at the Agora. Community-level collective decision making and self-governance is the democratic direction we want to move things.

If this is the Ballard you want to build, here’s how you can get involved:

Financially, we’re not a 501(c)(3) – we’re a group of organizers with an EIN and a BECU account. Ballard Solidarity relies solely on Ballard neighbors’ financial support for funding. Donations are extremely appreciated.