The financial and political crisis in Lebanon has changed the lives of vulnerable communities. People’s daily survival needs have ushered in a mishmash of strategies of survival that are reshaping the role of local actors in political and social life. This research project aims to investigate the means through which some of Lebanon’s most vulnerable communities access basic public goods and services to weather a compounded crisis. Using a qualitative ethnographic approach, I take the shantytown of Wadi Al Nahle and Al-Mankoubin in the northern city of Tripoli as my sites of research. These shantytowns are considered to be “slums-within-a-slum.” They lie at the center of a triangle of abject poverty that connects the city of Tripoli to its northern suburbs. In my work, I look at how nascent community-based initiatives and community members interact with dominant tribal and clientelist networks in their own locales to secure goods and services. My research focus is two-fold: (1) to unpack informal channels of welfare and service provision in these areas that have compensated for the welfare vacuum in governmental institutions; and (2) to unpack local ties of survival, and community groupings attending to people’s basic needs. This project asks: How are vulnerable communities responding to the crisis in Lebanon? How are the local efforts of community-based structures in northern Lebanon’s slum districts delimited by, or else dependent, on informal and politicized networks of aid provision? Studying both clientelist and solidaristic ties of survival is key to understanding how indirect and informal networks of aid are defining a politics of survival in unsettled times. As part of my field research, I have secured my participation in the work of two community-based initiatives within my sites of research, as well as limited access to the work of political brokers. These actors are imbricated within clientelist-patronage networks and engage in social and charity work. As part of my ethnographic methodology, I immerse myself in the daily lives of participants to better understand their challenges as well as the complex relational dynamics that facilitate or delimit their work.