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Mutual aid: Resources and examples
Scholar Jessica Gordon Nembhard says in her book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, that mutual aid societies were a cornerstone of African-American communities. A notable one is the Free African Society, formed in Philadelphia a decade after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. By 1830, more than a hundred mutual aid societies existed in Philadelphia alone. So drawing from existing knowledge instead of reinventing the wheel, this article is a guide to starting or increasing the capacity of, a mutual aid network. Start small and start anywhere with a core team. It's OK to not have a grand plan to save the world when starting a mutual aid network. In fact, it's better if you don't—mutual aid is a complex, emergent process where each member's abilities and ideas are respected. It also operates on a local scale. Not knowing all the answers—and being able to admit that—is a good start. From Aaron Fernando writing in Shareable.
Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable members of their communities. This survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. From Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade.
Hajooj Kuka, External communications officer for the Khartoum State Emergency Response Room, writes about their experiences in The New Humanitarian. One year into a devastating war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly nine million, there is one thing flourishing in Sudan: mutual aid. ... millions of Sudanese have remained in war-torn areas outside the reach of international aid agencies, finding ways to support each other using local resources and diaspora aid. Others like myself have found a way of helping from afar. Together, we have formed mutual aid groups known as Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) that have provided food, health, and other critical services, all while building partnerships, raising funding, and getting recognition as frontline humanitarian aid workers.
From the free Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit:
Mutual Aid is not...
Quid pro quo transactions
Only for disasters or crises
Charity or a way to "save" people
A reason for a social safety net not to exist.
Neighbourhood Pods How-To from Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville in Massachusetts (Facebook link).
Finally, Solidarity in the Rural South, an excerpt from an interview with a minister who grew up in, left, and then returned to Alabama written by Mitchell Atencio and published in Sojourners.
People always ask, "How did you convince your town to do this?" A lot of it is dependent on the relational aspect of building relationships with people who are in leadership. But it's also just asking — especially in rural areas. The town has a lot of property, but not a lot of money to do anything with it so it's just sitting there vacant. [We build] those relationships in my town with our town leaders and council people, and work with them to revitalize and breathe life into things and invite them to participate in new ways.
We're setting up a free "vending machine" for Narcan, which is the first one of those, maybe in Alabama, but definitely in this part of Alabama. Our county commission has all this money from opioid settlements and they're refusing to use it for anything good. So, we're saying, "Okay, we're not going to wait around on you. We're going to figure out a way to do it." And that vending machine is, again, in partnership with our local town. The county won't do anything, but the town says "Sure, we love this idea. You can put the vending machine on town property." Our communities are being burned alive by opioids, so anything we can do to help keep people alive, we want to do it.
posted by Bella Donna on Jul 02, 2024 at 3:56 AM
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graphic novel ~ Mutual Aid: Illuminated Factor of Evolution [pmpress]
posted by HearHere at 4:17 AM
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Thanks, HereHere!
posted by Bella Donna at 4:41 AM
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Cool post! My own feeling is that mutual aid is in some sense a necessity of being a participant in a just society, and also a useful tactic as part of a radical political project, but I think it's a dead end when it's a project unto itself. My comrade just shared this article with me the other day that sums up a critique I share: Socialism is Not Charity.
The linked article on Sudan was especially interesting. It seems like an incredible ambitious and life-saving project, but ultimately they seem to be building the structures that every other NGO relies on, only they are struggling to get the funding that established NGOs require.
I'm curious how folks see mutual aid as materially different from charity?
posted by latkes at 8:15 AM
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On the positive side, I've been the beneficiary of an incredible mutual aid project - Hebrew Free Loans. The flavor of my experience requesting and receiving a Hebrew Free Loan was completely different from if I had gone to a bank - less punitive feeling, more supportive feeling, and I had to ask people I know personally to vouch for me - essentially to co-sign, which reinforced a sense of duty to the larger community. IT does feel 'mutual' in a way that many supposedly mutual aid projects do not - in that it's a group of folks with shared identity sharing resources in a flat-ish hierarchy. But one thing it does not do is change the larger society, or reduce the inequalities that cause it to be necessary.
posted by latkes at 8:25 AM
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I''ve been involved in activities which could be called "mutual aid" for some years. When I ws a young person hanging out with skater kids, they spoke of "flow". Flow is a situation where, for example, when you break your deck and I have a spare, I give you the spare. I'm not rich and I don't keep skateboard decks in stock, but I'm confident that I can get another one if I need one, because there's a community expectation that we support each other with what we need to keep skating. Otherwise we don't get to skate together :^(
Later I worked with a nonprofit org that distributed computer things and knowledge. That was unsatisfactory to me for many reasons, so I left and just continued doing the same work informally on my own. I don't have a need for means-testing or inventory control. Maybe I'm not reaching the "neediest" among us but I don't feel a need to optimize that.
Most of what I'm giving away in terms both of stuff and of knowledge, came to me by a similar process to how I'm giving it out. In a nonprofit org, it's expected that "donors" provide money and in-kind donations to the org, which then parcels that stuff out to "clients' or "donees" or what have you. The name doesn't matter. It's not mutual in that the donors are a different class of people from donees. Donors tend to receive some sort of compensation for donating, whether it's a tax deduction or "swag". The org has a name and one of a few prescribed legal structures. Donees often have to "apply" or otherwise give up information about themselves.
In my mind mutual aid does not feature any of these constraints. A donor one day might be a donee on the same day. Everybody helps out. For example, I joined in with a group feeding some homeless folks in the woods out by the state highway. I made food and brought it out. The people in the camp told us who was around and when to come back to reach others. They also helped to distribute the food. Some of them combined with some of the distibution team to lobby the city against an upcoming sweep.
My experience to date makes me skeptical of organized mutual-aid "groups" with names and legal business entities. Mutal aid isn't a special activity, it's a normal thing that people do together. Potluck dinner parties are mutal aid. Organizing into a special group with a name separates you from other people who aren't members. In my experience, it's ok to give a name to the activity, like "Neighborhood Distro Bloc Party" or whatever, and whomever shows up is doing that thing. When the officious show up and demand to know "whose responsible this"... eh, make something up I guess.
Mutual aid often attracts unfavorable police presence. They don't like spontaneous events and they always want the name of a "responsible party". Doing this work means either being willing to fend off or be arrested by cops, or in-quick-and-out-quick action.
hth
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 1:15 PM
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Socialism is Not Charity
...
I'm curious how folks see mutual aid as materially different from charity?
Mutual aid is based on relationships of solidarity, whereas charity is based on (and reinforces) relationships with hierarchical power differentials. Mutual aid is also based on the needs of each recipient, not the desires of each giver. Mutual aid (done correctly) is anarcho-socialism, from each according to their ability and to each according to their need on a smaller scale. (And that's part of what makes it also not quid pro quo/transactional exchange - it's a third way in between trade transactions and unidirectional charity.) Or, another way to think of charity is that it's not a unidirectional transfer: implicit and unspoken is that in exchange for the aid supplied, recipients give up at least some of their power and right to be respected. In mutual aid they get to keep those important intangibles.
(Caveat that there may be projects that call themselves mutual aid or that intend to be mutual aid but for various reasons related to the fact that we still live under capitalism and various other social hierarchies, or that people don't fully understand and instantiate theory in practice always, fall short of their goal a bit, and end up looking a little more like charity or trade than might be ideal.)
posted by eviemath at 3:57 PM
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This is very definitely so much my shit -- thanks!
And mutual aid is the furthest thing from charity? that's the "mutual" part? It's the recognition that we are all in this together. If I have some extra now, I contribute it to the community and know that if I ever have need in the future, the community will be there for me.
And if I'm lucky enough never to need that help, so much the better.
posted by allthinky at 4:39 PM
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