She’s raised almost $20m to help Minnesota – she thinks you can do it too

From thousands of miles away in San Antonio, Ashley Fairbanks watched the news pour out of her home town of Minneapolis– federal immigration authorities flooding the streets and regular people stepping up to defend and care for their communities. She knew she had to do something. So the 39-year-old writer, artist and digital strategist started a Google Doc.

Soon, the list of resources for residents grew so long it became unwieldy, and Fairbanks, who builds websites for a living, launched Stand With Minnesota.

Immediately, she said, “People were really eager to help.”

Since its launch, the site has received over 2.4 million hits and helped raise almost $20m for affected Minnesotans, she said.

The site has also been used to coordinate flights – through donated frequent flyer miles – for people returning to Minneapolis after being released from detention in Texas. (Fairbanks lives about 40 minutes from Dilley detention center, where five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was transported with his father from Minneapolis.)

Now, as national attention has shifted away from Minneapolis, Stand With Minnesota is focused on covering families’ rent. Donations are being matched by a Minnesota grant-making foundation so residents who have been sheltering in place and have been unable to work during the ICE siege can afford to stay in their homes. The site also hosts a “giving directory” with more opportunities for mutual aid – helping residents with laundry needs, grocery drop-offs and even tow services for those whose cars were abandoned after ICE interactions.

“It’s been incredible to get to see all of the generosity and how people are eager to give, especially with the mutual aid efforts,” Fairbanks, who wants to help people in other cities set up their own online mutual aid hubs. “The most helpful part of all of this, to me, is actually seeing people just be like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to just give to a non-profit. I can give to my neighbor.’”

Fairbanks spoke to the Guardian about Minneapolis’s history of community-building, launching an online support network and how others can do it, too.

How did Stand With Minnesota come to be, and what have you heard about its impact?

People are kind of shocked when they find out that it’s not an organization – it’s just me.

It all came about organically because I have a decent size following on Bluesky. Without that, none of this would be possible. My Bluesky alone probably paid 25 people’s rent this month, if not more.

For weeks, I had not had a lot of answers for people. I had answers for people who wanted to help, but people who needed help – there wasn’t anything that was set up fast enough to meet all their needs.

[As one example,] a lady emailed me and was like: “I have 500,000 SkyMiles. Can you fly anyone home from Texas?” It was such a simple thing, where I could connect a person who needs to fly directly with a donor, and within a few minutes, they could have a flight home.

It hasn’t just been flights from detention; we reunited some families, too. I can’t think of a more rewarding thing you could do. One girl [who reached out], her mom was abducted by ICE, and she had siblings who were under 18. [Her mom] didn’t have the resources to fly home immediately. We were able to connect her with a donor who literally got her on a flight the next day.

What’s happening in Minneapolis that you think people are missing, with media coverage shifting away?

The need I keep talking about over and over again is rent. Right now, there are zero shelter beds available for families that might become homeless in Minnesota. And also, if you have a mixed-status family [meaning some members are undocumented and some are US citizens], you aren’t eligible for a lot of programs.

Everything else, we can rebuild. There’s other assistance. But with rent, no one’s coming to save them. The state doesn’t have the money to pay off everyone’s rent. It’s an estimated [over] $20m need. It’s really terrifying to think about what will happen when a lot of families who are still sheltering in place are forced to pay their rent next month.

Do you think Minneapolis’s mutual aid infrastructure is unique?

There have been incredible things done in Los Angeles and Chicago. Chicago has actually been really open in sharing all the lessons they learned with organizers in Minneapolis, which made everything a lot easier for us. But Minneapolis does have an incredible history of organizing going back to the truck strikes of 1934 and co-op movements [of the 20th century].

I grew up on the West Bank of Minneapolis, which is now where much of the Somali community is, but used to be a super hippie community, and so the places around me were mostly anarchist-owned co-ops. It’s not the neighborhood that most American children grow up in. We have a different idea of what’s possible, because we have a city that kind of works a little differently and has a history of collectivism and taking care of each other.

I think also because of what happened in 2020 [with George Floyd’s police murder setting off protests around the world], and even before that, with Jamar Clark and Philando Castile [who were shot and killed by police in 2015 and 2016], we’re reflexive organizers. It’s easy for us to get together and figure out how we’re going to approach something.

But this has been totally different. Back then, people were putting a lawn sign in their yard that said Black Lives Matter. Now people are driving an immigrant person to work every day.

Do you think this work is replicable?

We’re building a helper reflex where, instead of encountering a problem and saying that we can’t do anything, we’re just trying to do it. Anyone could start with something like this, by collecting together where they see people asking for help in their community. Linktree is a really nice, accessible way for someone to create a basic version of this.

A thing that I’ve offered to people in other states and cities is, if you want me to duplicate the website, you can just strip my data out of it and put yours into it and change the name on the page.

Every time I get an email from someone saying, “I want to do this,” I’m like, hell yeah, let’s talk about it. I’m working on this website 20 hours a day, and I still try to make time for people to actually get some help from me.

Are people reaching out to do so?

Not as many as I wish! I think a lot of people still feel like this isn’t coming for their city, like there’s not a reason to organize. Something I try to talk about a lot on Bluesky is that you want to do this before your city has the emergency.

Start talking to your neighbors, start figuring out where the mutual aid funds are in your community. People already need help, so you don’t have to wait for ICE to come. You can just do the thing.

What would you say to folks outside of Minneapolis?

Inter-connected, inter-dependent communities are resilient communities. Crisis will come to you. It might be ICE; it might be some other form of fascism. It might be climate disaster. Minneapolis was lucky, because we already had the idea of an infrastructure, we had people who knew how to build groups on Signal and who knew how to do certain things that could give us a little bit of a leg up.

Everyone’s community needs to know how to do those things and be able to move at that pace when it happens. And the very first step in that is the smallest stuff: meeting your neighbors, having their phone numbers, maybe you have a Signal thread.

Our system tells us the only answer to so many things is the police, or that the only answer is giving to an [established] charity. But really, the answer is actually just helping each other, knowing each other, depending on each other.