A brief, oral history of mask blocs: Part 2

Established mask blocs — mutual aid groups distributing high-quality respirator masks for free — often support newer blocs with educational materials or mask stock to get started. In part two of our three-part series, organizers describe how they created resources for other blocs to get started, including a collaborative, in-depth zine co-authored by bloc members and solo mask distributors from North America and Europe.

Additionally, organizers explain how they source, store, and distribute enormous amounts of high-quality respirator masks, such as N95s, as well as huge quantities of rapid tests obtained from government entities. Many organizers, including those on a budget, spend their own funds on supplies and delivery costs. Organizers also describe supporting other community groups, protest actions, and mask-required events through mask distribution and education.

Read part one of the series, which includes introductions to many of the organizers quoted in this piece, HERE. Read part three here.

Interviews have been condensed. Full interview transcripts and audio will eventually be available at MaskBlocHistory.org.

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Lily, Mask Up Pittsburgh: I’m the primary author of the How To Start a Mask Bloc zine. Last summer I was stuck on my couch for two weeks after surgery. I [thought], all my spoons [due to disabilities including dysautonomia] can go toward resting and doing this. I have an MFA in fiction writing, and I’m a copywriter for an advertising agency. I work with a lot of medical clients, and I’m used to compiling information that seems really technical into easy-to-digest pieces in a short period of time.

For the zine, I spoke with folks in New Orleans and [Los Angeles] and we found we were getting the same questions over and over [from organizers wanting to distribute masks]. We included basic resources on how mutual aid works, how to deal with money, as well as operational security. We also included resources on disability justice and organizing as a disabled person. It’s really easy to burn out and hurt yourself, trying to save the world.

I only have one professionally published piece, and then I have this 38-page zine that has been seen over a thousand times. It’s cool that whenever I go into the document, there’s always somebody in there. I’m always [wondering who they are]. It’s my most popular work to date.

In addition to resources like the zine, mask bloc organizers regularly share information with one another about mask sales, auctions, and giveaways.

Anonymous organizer, Bluff City Mask Bloc (formerly The MidSouth’s CDC): I’m 25, one year before I’m booted off my parents’ [health] insurance. My pronouns are she/her. Living at home with your parents has always been the norm with my culture since I’m Nigerian-American. That’s part of why I started a mask bloc. I have a high level of financial privilege. I don’t pay rent. I don’t pay for groceries. So this is me being a proper member of society, buying masks that people can’t afford to get on their own and mailing it to them. One of my parents is literally a physician. I mask everywhere outside of my bedroom since I’m the only person who takes COVID seriously in my household. 

I make mask deals threads on Twitter. I’m not doing anything special. I am on the retailers’ email list and I see 40% off with a code. And then some are more specific, really steep discounts, like $22 for a case of 550 masks. I aggregate these from other organizers. I’m trying to figure out how to teach people how to do this on their own.

Miranda, Mask Bloc NYC: One of the big ways that mask blocs have been getting supplies now has been from businesses, schools, and governments that were auctioning off mask stockpiles that they sat on in 2020 and 2021 when there were shortages. They could have been giving them to people, and they finally decided to sell those masks at lovely cheap prices. 

Lily, Mask Up Pittsburgh: We had the local Allegheny County Health Department reach out to us. “We have some expired masks, we can’t give them out. We need to empty this so we can buy more.” And I [asked]: “Oh, are you going to give them out?” And they were like: “Well no, it’s for an ‘emergency.’” 

We rented a U-Haul truck one morning [to pick up the masks]. I think the approximate count was 50,000 masks. [Some of those masks] had been there since swine flu in 2010. Half of them had vents [that don’t stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2]. It was a hot mess. But I think we ended up with like 30,000 usable masks that we’re still going through. 

Bona Fide Masks sent us two donations, about a thousand total. Local community members [also donated masks to us.]” I try to fill the gaps when I can. Sometimes I have a little bit of money left over after bills that I usually funnel straight into mutual aid stuff, which pays for things like our storage unit, my own gas to get around, printer ink.

A couple of times, somebody [said]: “I have a big box of rapid tests my work doesn’t want anymore. Do you want them?” It’s just us scrounging random stuff that clinics are getting rid of. With the tests, the regular expiration was still good. I wonder how many people [the clinics] would be giving these to, that now we’re giving to instead. I mean, I’ll take them. But [they] have the infrastructure; we don’t. We’re just four people in a trench coat.

But [they] have the infrastructure; we don’t. We’re just four people in a trench coat.

Lily, Mask Up Pittsburgh

Alex, Boston COVID Action: In January 2024, we started getting free rapid tests from the Boston Public Health Commission [BPHC] to hand out, basically doing their job for them. The city has more than enough resources but no will to structure those resources or target the people who need them the most. 

Community organizations could apply to receive a bunch of BPHC tests and then hand them out. Usually [the tests] were expiring within the next three months. We realized, well, we’re an organization and we’re in the community, even though we don’t have a physical location, even though we don’t have 501(c)(3) status; we’re five disabled raccoons in a trench coat or whatever. So we applied and they were like, “Oh yeah, sure.” The first time we drove up, we grabbed a thousand tests. At the beginning of the summer, we went and picked up 5,000. 

In eight months, we’ve delivered 14,185 rapid tests, of which the vast, vast, vast majority are from the Boston Public Health Commission. 

This is a large-scale version of what was happening on the Northeastern campus where they quite literally had a warehouse full of free tests… They had the funds to purchase them en masse, but they had none of the political will to say the word COVID anymore.

Celeste, Charlotte Mask Bloc: I currently have somewhere around 60,000 masks in my house. They’re all in my front room. Another member has thousands of KN95s.

For personal mask requests, one of us will just go to their house and drop it off. I’ve mailed masks to some people or ordered them sent to their house. I’ve done that a lot with tests too. It happened more last year. During the winter surge, I’d order same-day delivery from CVS. It’s expensive, and I don’t do that very often. But some people are just in dire straits, and I’m the nearest person that’s actually addressing this, which is super terrible. But we can help pretty quickly compared to others. 

When I travel, I reach out to any groups and get an estimate of how many masks they might need. We went to an anarchist book fair in Asheville, and I was able to get the masks a ride the rest of the way to their blocs, to a fledgling Asheville bloc and a ton to Atlanta. 

I traveled not too long ago and took [around] 2,000 masks to Mask Up Pittsburgh. I knew for sure I had someone that would be able to take the boxes, so I wasn’t afraid to pack my car completely full of them. I was sleeping in my car because finding COVID-safe lodging is very difficult and/or impossible — and I’m allergic to hotel bedding because they use enzyme detergent — so in my car, I had a little castle of boxes I slid in between.

Anonymous organizer, Charlotte Mask Bloc: I always say to anyone who is talking about starting up, thinking about it, or in the early stages: we wish we had put in the organization systems when it was a handful of people. We’ve experienced a lot more interest, and now we have to retroactively make it all fit together. 

I think when it comes to groups like these, one of the challenges is that there’s usually a sense of [working horizontally], of not having a leader or power and authority over each other. But it can also make things difficult when you’re new to the group. We’ve talked about formalizing an onboarding procedure, which sounds very corporate, but [that would mean giving] people a sense of what tasks they can volunteer for and help them envision what their role here could be. I know some groups that do that. If I could go back in time, I would definitely tell myself to do that.

I think that people who aren’t in a mask bloc might have the impression that finding the masks is the hard part. And in my experience, that’s been the easy part. Everything else has been hard: thinking about structure, thinking about how you want this to work, thinking about people’s different needs.

I think that people who aren’t in a mask bloc might have the impression that finding the masks is the hard part. And in my experience, that’s been the easy part. Everything else has been hard.

Anonymous organizer, Charlotte Mask Bloc

Samwise, Mask Bloc Seattle: In the beginning, it was mostly having people pick up masks from [our table at] the farmers market. Now we’ve expanded a good amount and also do deliveries. From the beginning, we were trying to be very aware of not stretching ourselves too thin as a group, especially because everyone in the group is disabled in some way. We didn’t want to be in a situation where we’d overpromise and then let people down. We have been very conscious about every time we take on new things that are going to need routine amounts of time committed to it every week. 

Sally, Mask Bloc St. Louis: We have 20-25 members right now, so we’ve split ourselves into committees that people voluntarily join. There’s a procurement [committee] that’s working on getting masks and tests for us. There’s a committee for coordinating distribution for actually getting masks to people. We have a social media and outreach committee, and we have one for inter-bloc collaboration, projects like mask procurement from auctions.

Socks, Mask Bloc OKC: We’re offering three masks per person right now because when you have a low stock, you want to be able to help as many people as possible and leave room for people to ask later on. If somebody runs out of masks, it doesn’t matter if [they request again] next week. I’ll do the deliveries as often as I need to because I have that ability.

Many blocs focus on individual requests. Some larger, more established mask blocs are able to support community groups in need, major protest actions, and larger mask-required events.

Katrina, Covid Safe Colorado: We have a large influx of refugees in Denver right now, especially from Venezuela. I don’t know what their government has said or done about COVID. And then they come here and they’re just trying to eat and have shelter. We have given them masks and tests because they’ve been living in tents or hotels. COVID just runs through those populations because they are not able to protect themselves.

Miranda, Mask Bloc NYC: We had a statement in solidarity with Palestine in the fall that was a lot of stress to put together, but I’m really proud of how it turned out. We were able to pretty well articulate why, if you care about COVID, you need to care about mass death everywhere and specifically be anti-genocide, anti-imperialist, etc. We wound up pivoting toward doing a lot of distribution at protests. I think that that has done a lot for public perception of masks and renormalizing seeing masks in society. [But] That’s been harder to sustain now that it’s harder to get masks in such mass quantities.

Sally, Mask Bloc St. Louis: We believe that protesting is an essential activity, and that people should be able to do it and stay safe. We bring masks with us to protests. That’s actually one of the first things [our bloc] did; I went to a protest in downtown St. Louis in early October [2023] with a backpack full of masks. That’s how some of us found each other, seeing [each other] masking at a protest. We’ve been present at most of the large, well-advertised Palestine protests in St. Louis.

We believe that protesting is an essential activity, and that people should be able to do it and stay safe. We bring masks with us to protests.

Sally, Mask Bloc St. Louis

On tour in 2024, Seattle, Washington-based rock band Glass Beach partnered with mask blocs to get audiences to mask up to protect the band and fellow concertgoers.

Keeny, Mask Bloc Seattle: I used to go to shows all the time pre-pandemic. I’m a musician myself. I knew that I wanted to go to the [Glass Beach] show. It’s worth noting these are working-class musicians, right? This isn’t Taylor Swift. These are people who have to rely on touring to make their money. 

There were probably about 300 people there, and I made it a mask-required show. I told people that they were not optional. And nobody stopped me from saying that. I know at some other venues, the employees might not let that fly. When people were queued up, I went out and handed out masks in the line. It was just me and one other person making sure everybody in that crowd wore a mask. And that was the image that blew up on Twitter.

I shared my learnings with Glass Beach: you really need somebody there to hand out masks because nobody’s going to just take them on their own. There’s another mask-required show that’s pretty big coming up. I ended up giving [the organizer] the mask bloc buying guide and helping them buy the masks on their own so that it didn’t have to come from mutual aid resources materially, but it could come out of our educational resource that we put on the internet for people to use for this very reason. That’s more sustainable.

Lyra, Covid Safe Colorado: My pronouns are they/them. I’m 31 and in Colorado Springs with my husband Tim. I have fibromyalgia, potentially as a result of having mono when I was a teenager. This also happened to my mother; she had mono and now she has fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. It was eerie to see how Long COVID was very close to what my mother and I experienced. And I [realized], I don’t need more of that. 

In the before times, we were really into live music. Since everyone stopped doing online streaming concerts, we have not gotten to do live music, except if it’s outdoors in very specific situations. 

[Glass Beach] emailed us asking if we could supply masks for their concert. We had the masks for it, and [Tim and I] also lent two Corsi-Rosenthal boxes that we brought from home. 

We developed a line: “The band has requested masks for the show.” That generally worked, especially if we explained that the band was trying to stay safe. When it’s this band that [people in the audience] respect, they’re down with it. Occasionally, we had a couple people who just outright refused masks and you know, we can’t enforce anything. And then they would see everyone in the concert area wearing masks, and they would come back and ask us for masks, kind of sheepish.

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Britta Shoot is a San Francisco-based journalist and editor. She is writing a book about early HIV/AIDS pandemic civil resistance. Learn more about her mask bloc oral history project here.

Editor’s note: Betsy Ladyzhets, who edited this series, has collaborated with Mask Bloc NYC through her band and obtained a care package from the group when she and her partner had COVID-19 early in 2024. She has not been involved in organizing efforts.

All articles by The Sick Times are available for other outlets to republish free of charge. We request that you credit us and link back to our website.