Autonomous kitchen councils – the mutual aid organizing model emerging from the strugglee against cop-city

In 2021, in so-called Atlanta, GA, a group of young people land defenders began resisting the construction of a police training facility ( known now as Cop City) by moving themselves to live in the Weelaunee Forest in south Atlanta, putting their bodies against ecological destruction and police militarization. By 2023, they were forcibly removed. Some of them—Indigenous identified trans women — continued caring for each other and carried on important conversations started at the Weelaunee Forest. Out of this 4 years conversations process emerged a set of principles rooted in everyday survival: trying to build autonomy from the ground up by balancing community care with revolutionary broad actions and projects .The culmination of these processes of nurishment & recipes collective creation is called the Autonomous Kitchen Council( AKC) , an organizing & cultural production model, a tool for all communities building,defending and celebrating their spaces and mutual aid & abundance wirldwide. One lesson rings clear: There is no liberation without land. As the Weelaunee defenders teach us—abundance exists, but it must be recognized, celebrated and nowadays, increasingly, defended. By incorporating the four principles of the Autonomous Kitchen Council in the collective day-to-day struggle against the rising challenges of fascism, capitalism and resource scarcity, we are reclaiming the means to survive and nourish each other beyond the systems that are collapsing around us.