How a scrappy group of volunteers kept transforming to help where it was needed most
It was well after midnight, and Tricia Wang sat on her front stoop deep in thought. Tricia, a sociologist and tech ethnographer, and Bitsy Bentley, a data designer and trauma-informed facilitator, had been working for months with a network of volunteers to distribute personal protective equipment to healthcare workers who were risking their lives to help patients. The group they’d established with other volunteers, Last Mile, had distributed nearly a million high-filtration masks to those who needed them on the front lines of the pandemic—as well as to people at Black Lives Matter protests around the country. But now, in June 2020, the group found themselves at a new juncture.
COVID-19 kept spreading—especially hurting communities that had high concentrations of essential workers and people of color. Tens of thousands of people working in cramped meatpacking plants had been getting sick. Many of them had died. Yet despite mounting evidence that the virus was spreading through unventilated indoor air, the Centers for Disease Control was failing to educate the public, or adapt. Essential workers at places like factories, grocery stores, and restaurants might be told to sanitize their hands, and some might know about face coverings in general—but the things that could truly prevent the spread of illness and death, like employers providing proper air filtration and ventilation, were largely absent.
Trica mulled all of this over, trying to figure out what the group should do next. Despite the late hour, she called Nathaniel Raymond, a Yale lecturer and Last Mile advisor who’d worked on Ebola and other infectious disease crises. If this network of volunteers really wanted to save lives, Nathaniel said, they needed to get to the root of the problem.
To do that, he suggested a harm reduction approach: acting on available information in order to decrease harm in communities whose jobs forced them to put themselves at risk. While scientists were still gathering data, he said, there was enough information to realize that unventilated indoor spaces were where people were most often getting sick—and that meant Last Mile should focus on people who had no choice but to be in those spaces while at work.
That late-night phone call hatched a new project for Last Mile: COVID Straight Talk Lab. With this new project, the group would move from delivering masks to delivering life-saving information. They would cut through the noise and false ideas around COVID and help essential workers protect themselves and fight for safer conditions.
During the earlier mask-distribution program, Last Mile volunteers had analyzed data to determine which zip codes faced the most structural inequities, then prioritized getting supplies to those neighborhoods. By the time Tricia called Nathaniel on that summer night, Last Mile groups had already popped up across the country, with reach in more than 50 tribal nations. The new project, a public health communications campaign, would be a continuation: helping where systems had failed people most, and taking into account histories of structural racism and trauma that put essential workers at greatest risk for the virus.
Guided by these principles of equity and solidarity, COVID Straight Talk Lab was intentionally collaborative. That meant rather than having volunteers and scientists merely assume what workers needed—and likely get it wrong—the group eventually realized they should interview community members. That way, they could learn what workplace conditions were like, what types of tools would be most helpful, and what workers truly needed.
One of the very first Last Mile volunteers and founding members, Dr. Sabriya Stukes, a microbiologist by training and adjunct professor, already used this approach in her lectures teaching scientists and engineers to design thoughtful medical devices. She helped infuse the approach into COVID Straight Talk Lab’s work. This idea of designing tools not in a vacuum, but in collaboration with those who would ultimately use them, informed every aspect of the project.
To make that happen, the group, now with grant funding, made their first big hire: Amanda Altman, a labor and community organizer. Her involvement meant that the scientists, designers, and other volunteers could connect with existing coalitions of worker health and safety groups.
Through various partnerships, COVID Straight Talk Lab created accessible resources to help people stay safe. They hosted a town hall where community members could ask questions directly of scientists; co-designed a customizable vaccine flyer with Harlem Health Action Project that anyone could use; and created a policy guide for unions and worker centers in both English and Spanish. They also successfully advocated for policy change at both the state and national levels, and influenced the passage of the New York HERO Act to help protect workers from the virus.
After the volunteers had worked countless hours on top of their regular jobs, Bitsy, Tricia, Sabriya, and the rest of COVID Straight Talk Lab transitioned the work out. As of January 1st, 2022, the University of Oregon’s Institute for Health in the Built Environment will carry part of the project forward by maintaining COVID Straight Talk Lab’s online presence and posting updates with the latest science. Meanwhile, unions and worker centers will continue to build worker power and push for policy change.
“A lot of people thought, ‘You are a bunch of volunteers with no knowledge about air ventilation and no knowledge about PPE or COVID,’” Tricia says. But when the federal government, cities, and employers fail to protect people from dying, she explains, people come together. Here, a scrappy team of volunteers brought workers in collaboration with world-renowned air safety and infectious disease experts.
When larger infrastructure breaks down, Tricia says, “we can build on our own trust systems and networks to fix things.”
