Mission And History
Warm Up Boston, founded in 2020, is a radical survival program serving, supporting, and empowering Boston’s unhoused community through solidarity rather than charity. Our mission focuses on the direct delivery of material aid and advocacy as well as on harm reduction strategies designed to prevent deaths from overdoses and transmission of infectious disease among people who use drugs and the larger community.
Through our work, we see clearly that Boston’s homelessness crisis is the culmination of policies, structures, and actors that perpetuate a housing shortage to create profit, entrench racism, criminalize homelessness, and deprive the poor of access to affordable, quality healthcare. While our day-to-day is focused on meeting the immediate needs of the unhoused community through material aid, our twin focus is working to end these systems of harm and create a world in which nobody is left behind.
Warm Up Boston works for the community living on Massachusett land. We also acknowledge the neighboring Indigenous Nations: the Wampanoag to the Southeast, the Nipmuc to the West, the Abenaki to the North, and the Narragansett, Pequot, and Mohegan to the Southwest. We extend our respect to citizens of these Nations who live here today and to their ancestors. This is and always will be Indigenous land.