Solidarity Prepping Group meeting report: 21 March 2026
by Kat Soares & Susan Porter, 30 March 2026
In preparation for our first webinar on April 18th, we chose to use two of the four topics from our webinar guests' upcoming event in September.
We discussed:
- Medical and Emotional Support
- Collective Self-Protection.
In our upcoming Solidarity Prepping Group meeting on April 4th, we'll discuss the remaining two topics:
- Communication
- Food Supply & Logistics.
Summary notes from our two parallel conversations are provided below.
Medical and Emotional Support
In this topic there were conversations around natural remedies and wild medicines, the use of food as medicine and the benefits of a simpler diet. This extended to an exploration of natural pain relief and various tree resins for dressing wounds.
We also covered the importance of passing knowledge down through the generations, along with nostalgia for the skills and knowledge already lost through our "advancement."
People spoke about the skills and knowledge already available to us through CPR training and first aid training, and there was a big focus on the things we still need to learn.
Topics for future exploration on these themes included:
- Building a first aid kit for home
- How to purify water
- Medicinal herbs and traditional medicine
- Composting waste safely - humanure
- Remaining centered and focused amidst the chaos - the process of survival is mundane
- How to manage infection.
Collective Self-Protection
In this topic, curiosities ranged from the hard realities of weapons and ammunition, to the avoidance of accidental harm and injury, to other health considerations like the absence of easy access to dentistry, etc.
There was also conversation around "what is the collective?" What is the boundary? What is the right size? And how do you build a collective if you are not already in one?
There was some consideration of how we can collectively protect the vulnerable among us. There was general acknowledgement that people with limited mobility and other conditions have a great deal to contribute to the collective. There were also reflections on the how communities responded to crises during Covid while systems were still intact, and an acknowledgement that under collapse scenarios systems may no longer be functioning.
The question of adequate communication also came up, and the difficulties that can arise in communicating about quite mundane topics, with misunderstandings occurring frequently. The complexities involved in the territory we now occupy were felt to heighten the risk of conflict due to failing communication, thus emphasizing the importance of learning skills to address possible failures.
Interestingly, several participants in this conversation acknowledged that they had chosen this topic because it was least appealing to them, or something that they avoid thinking about.
We did not get to the point of identifying things we most want to learn in relation to the topic.
