Street Safety hosts resources for protesters.

Affinity group medic or squad medic

If you have first aid skills and want to help protesters, the most useful thing you can do is get with a small group of friends to protest together. Promote health in your squad before, during, and after street actions:

• Help your small group organize into buddy pairs and prep for street conditions.
• Encourage them to prep jail support forms and leave with someone safe. Message the form-holder if a squadmate gets arrested.
• Learn where your people can get tested. Help everybody make care and quarantine support plans.
• Learn the health histories of people in your squad. Ask what kind of help they want from you.
• Carry a small first aid kit. Do first aid if anyone in your group is hurt. Go with them if they need advanced care.
• Wait for squadmates' release if they get arrested. Meet outside the jail.
• Check in when action calms. Get together, eat, and support each other. Help with aftercare needs.
• Keep confidentiality, have your own buddy, and take care of your own stress.

First aid team or street medics

First aid teams are small groups organized to provide education, care, and advocacy to anyone who needs it.

• Build relationships as intensively with protesters as you can, through education and simple care (like cough drops).
• Have ethics guidelines, respect protestor autonomy, and maintain high standards of consent, confidentiality, and humility.
• Make a list of local resources in your area, and build a referral network.
• Try to develop a relationship with existing street medics who have been doing this work for many years.
• Try to get everyone in your group to take a 20-hour training with established street medics if one is offered that you can attend.

More on street medics:

• Read Meet the Grandmother of Street Medics, originally published in the New York Times (10 June 2020) and Radicalizing Care: Street Medics and Solidarity (offsite link) by medic Riley Clare Valentine in the Activist History Review (1 June 2020).
• Read A Political Medicine: Trust and Power in the Ferguson Uprising (offsite link), an academic paper from 2015.
• Read Contusions (offsite link), a 2002 reflection by a street medic.

Clinicians and nurses

• Organize your colleagues (or professional body) with protesters to ensure good, free care for people injured in the protests, including undocumented people.
• Lobby for all care to be free at the point of service.
• Speak out as an individual medical professional, draft statements and write press releases from your workplace or professional body, and get your workplace or professional body to engage in research that advances protester demands.
• Serve protesters as a medical monitor, or organize a safe space for first aid and care to be rendered.
• Don't ever publicly badmouth protesters. Challenge colleagues if they publicly badmouth protesters.

More on clinicians and nurses:

• Read more about how medical providers can help protesters.
• Read protocols for intake workers (offsite link) at a street medic run free clinic after Hurricane Katrina.
• Read this excerpt from Solidarity Not Biomedicine (offsite link), an academic paper from 2007 about the model for care used by a street medic run free clinic after Hurricane Katrina.