Operation Safe Winter

Operation Safe Winter is Anon's annual winter push to care for the homeless. While the homeless & destitute require help year-round, they are even more vulnerable in the wintertime as temperatures drop. This is especially true in northern regions, where those living outdoors frequently die of exposure as temps plummet far below freezing.

In recent years this operation has lost much of the energy it used to have. Drama and infighting within Anonymous has caused many of our longtime volunteers and community leaders to abandon ship and go home. Unfortunately, the homeless (by definition) do not have this same luxury as they are both literally & proverbially “left out in the cold.”

The Anonymous Military Institute has therefore decided to try and restore some direction to this beleaguered operation. We have consulted with Safe Winter volunteers from prior years, and compiled the following list of resources and best-practices based on their tales.

Operation Safe Winter is the decentralized model of Anonymous as applied to charitable activities. Anyone can participate in Safe Winter. It is an idea and a model that anyone can take up and deploy in their own locale. There is no oversight or “boss” of Safe Winter. It is up to you to decide your own level of participation, and how to go about it.

To help you get started, here are several ways you can participate in Safe Winter:

Use this QR code to direct others to this page.

You can also help by spreading the word about Operation Safe Winter to your family and friends, and by making use of the OpSafeWinter hashtag. Please do more besides just spamming the hashtag with random photos and memes. This is incredibly ineffective at actually helping the homeless, and buries useful posts! Try to describe the ways people can actually participate in this op. Publish lists of supplies people should be collecting. Give tips on how to engage with the homeless in a respectful manner. Provide contact information for local organizations and soup kitchens that volunteers can actually follow up with. Give potential recruits starting points to work with, or they are just going to scroll past your posts and forget about them.

Feel free to copy the resources available & tips on this page, or even just direct people straight to this “official” page. We even have a QR code that sends people here, that you can put on stickers or embed in fliers and banner ads.

Over the years, Anons have created all sorts of graphics to help promote Safe Winter. We have collected some of them here for reuse:

One of the most frequently asked questions we see on social media in regards to Safe Winter is “Why is Anonymous only helping the homeless in the winter? What about the other three seasons?” And to that we say “What are YOU doing in spring, summer & fall for the homeless?”

The purpose of Safe Winter is to provide a starting point for charitable activity. It is something to get people out there and doing things that they might not already be doing. You don't have to stop just because winter ends, and in fact the Collective encourages you to keep doing these things year-round. Stop nitpicking semantics, and just get out there and help your fellow man. FFS.

Just about every year since Safe Winter has started, there is always someone who tries to take advantage of the operation to promote fake charity drives. These people, who see the suffering of their fellow man as something to be profited upon, call for donations on places like social media, only to pocket the money for themselves. Be warned that Safe Winter does not run donation drives, and anyone who is caught doing this will face the full wrath of Anonymous.

Some of these grifters have been embedded in the community for years. They are usually the loudest ones virtue signaling about Safe Winter, when in reality they are parasites who do nothing of value for the homeless nor the collective. On top of that, some people you will find “advertising” Safe Winter are actually shills who are shamelessly using it as a cover for their activities. The point of Safe Winter is to help the homeless - not to tell the world that you are helping the homeless as part of a clout chasing gimmick.

As a very wise man once said a couple thousand years ago:

Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward. Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. When you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.