NYCAM

New York City Action Medical

About NYCAM

New York City Action Medical (NYCAM) is a mutual aid collective of street medics based in the unceded territories of the Lenape, Merrick, Canarsie, Rockaway, Matinecock, Haudenosaunee, Schaghticoke, Wappinger, and Mohican peoples.

NYCAM was formed in 2016 out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We formally came together in 2017 with our first 20-hour street medic training and have been supporting movement workers and local communities since. Our collective is broadly aligned with abolitionist, anarchist, anti-fascist, and anti-colonial liberation struggles.

NYCAM provides ongoing first aid, community care, medical advocacy support, and medical education for the movement. This broadly looks like:

  • Mobilizing vetted street medics for direct actions, occupations, encampments, and mutual aid events, as well as in response to climate disasters
  • Offering ongoing care and harm reduction support for community members marginalized by the medical industrial complex
  • Training community members and movement workers in protest health and safety, radical consent, mental health and critical first aid, and street medicine
  • Supporting community members with medical advocacy, medical documentation, language interpretation, and making healthcare and vaccination appointments
  • Organizing and staffing neighborhood pop-up clinics
  • Offering infoshares, popular health education, and health resources
  • Coalition building with other health justice groups, medic collectives, and care workers

Members of our collective include comrades from a variety of experiences, modes of knowledge, and training modalities, both within and outside of the medical industrial complex. NYCAM is one of countless street medic collectives on Turtle Island and only one of many collectives and medic affinity groups in so-called New York City.

A vector illustration of a gray rat with a red cross on its shoulder and a red headband, inset on a pink-to-purple gradient circle. Surrounding the circle are the words PROJECT CALM repeated three times.
Image Description: A vector illustration of a gray rat with a red cross on its shoulder and a red headband, inset on a pink-to-purple gradient circle. Surrounding the circle are the words PROJECT CALM repeated three times.

NYCAM vs. Dispatch

Our collective is structured as a non-hierarchical group of core organizing members, which expands into a vetted Signal thread of trained street medics (referred to as “Dispatch”).

Our organizing members take on many roles, including:

  • Curriculum development and training, including shadowing and training opportunities for medics interested in becoming trainers
  • Offering mentorship and shadowing opportunities on the ground to newer medics and first aiders interested in becoming medics
  • Resource compilation and sharing opportunities for continuing education
  • Coordinating with organizers to dispatch medics for mass mobilizations and direct actions
  • Hosting debrief spaces, offering emotional care, and facilitating conflict-resolution
  • Vetting medics requesting to join Dispatch
  • Moderating and facilitating shared NYCAM spaces
  • Event planning and working group coordination for NYCAM events and trainings
  • Managing finances, reimbursements, and other technical and administrative logistics necessary for our collective to function

Our Dispatch medics are street medics who have been trained by either NYCAM or other street medic collectives, have committed to our Points of Unity and community asks, and have been vetted by us. Our vetting process includes verification of training, an interview, and character references.

Members of our Dispatch are not representatives of NYCAM.