Shakira King. (Photo pulled from King’s Facebook with permission.)

Shakira King is an educator and activist, passionate about literacy and reading. She’s also passionate about the city of Philadelphia. 

“I love this city to my core, and I know it can work well and be good. I just need more people to believe it, too,” said King. 

And one way she loves on Philly is through mutual aid in direct response to community needs. That love is why she started Jawn Aid in March 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, responding to the immediate need she saw after the pandemic.

It’s also why she recently brought it back in response to SNAP benefits being cut due to the recent record-setting 43-day-long federal government shutdown, which ended last week. 

Even though the shutdown is over, many are still set to be affected by the H.R. 1 legislation that set new provisions to SNAP benefit holders, King still believes that money and assistance are needed. 

“The government just showed us that it has the power to snatch food from millions of us without any reason or feeling of guilt. Mutual aid is not only an act of survival, it’s an act of resistance that has kept people alive and will be more necessary now than before,” she said.

Philadelphia is the second largest poorest city in the U.S., behind Houston, and still faces a food insecurity crisis, so King knows this new round of Jawn Aid will still help many people despite SNAP benefits being reinstated.

The first round of Jawn Aid was a response of many people giving $5, $10, and $20 donations, where she was able to give away $24,000, and then another round in the summer of 2020, which amounted to an estimated $37,000.

She hopes to bring that energy back in this iteration, which she has named Operation Feed The Jawns, and raise and distribute $10,000 before the end of the year.

King says this type of mutual aid shows folks that the small ways they show up are impactful and can make an immediate difference.

As someone who likes to study the movements of people who came before her, she said studying gives her a blueprint of how collectively people, especially Black people, have come together in times of need and have provided mutual aid. Even if they were not using the term. 

“Traditionally, Black people showing up in small numbers with pennies, dollars, quarters — whatever they had — made things happen,” said King, citing examples of Black churches, universities, and social justice movements that were funded by collectively small donations. 

“It’s all about the collective, and it’s about how you show up in your collective to make a difference, and also how the collective shows up for you when it’s time.”

On how she began to raise emergency funds, back in 2020, King shared she didn’t want to wait for the government to do so. So, she took to Twitter, where she had an active and engaged following, to do so.

After tweets and retweets, she raised a significant amount of money and began distributing it by paying people’s overdue bills. 

King said folks would send copies of their bills, which was a requirement in the first application round for Jawn Aid. She said most folks sent internet and gas bills.

She gave more context to the times: “…PGW hadn’t made the commitment to not cut gas off or lights off during the pandemic. And folks had not gotten Comcast to agree to not cut Internet access off. And the school district was telling parents to go let their kids sit in the parking lots so that they could go to school online, and there was no way that that was going to be sustainable. And it just didn’t make any sense.” 

On who she takes inspiration from in this work, the Jawn Aid organizer credits the women in her personal life who came before her.

She names her mother, Kimberly, her grandmother, Gwendolyn, and her aunt Tonya, who built a network of support around her, showing her an example of how community works in real time. It’s the example she models her work around to this day. 

For folks looking to apply to Operation Feed The Jawns for financial support, click here. For folks interested in helping, King is currently still taking donations for distribution.