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Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next)
Mutual aid projects emerge because public services are exclusive, insufficient, punitive, and criminalizing. Neoliberals take aim at public services in order to further concentrate wealth and, in doing so, exacerbate material inequality and violence. Mutual aid projects seek to radically redistribute care and well-being, as part of larger movements that work to dismantle the systems that concentrate wealth in the hands of the 1 percent. (53) Mutual aid projects depart from the charity model in crucial ways. Most mutual aid projects are volunteer-based and avoid the careerism, business approach, and charity model of nonprofits. Mutual aid projects strive to include…
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Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone, Can we create lasting mutual aid structures?
“Creating New Futures” states that capitalism is organized abandonment, so the only possible response is organized care. To me, that means mutual aid—non-transactional exchange based on a sense of safety, trust, and collective liberation. Mutual aid rejects scarcity. Mutual aid lays bare the false equivalence of obedience and safety. Communities experiencing incredible loss have stepped up to feed, house, and care for one another. People battling the police have carried critically injured strangers off the front lines, stood ready to wash away the effects of chemical weapons and risked their own lives to actively de-arrest others. There’s a huge shift…
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Haritha Kumar, Four Key Takeaways from Mutual Aid Organizing During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Mutual aid is not a substitute for the effective provision of social services, but policymakers can still learn from community aid networks. These groups, like Bed-Stuy Strong (BSS)—a Brooklyn-based mutual aid network—quickly organized and mobilized during the pandemic to generate flexible, far-reaching responses despite extremely limited time and resources. Though the mutual aid model is not the same as a service model utilized by government agencies, it is nevertheless important for policymakers to understand the importance of trust and perception particularly concerning the provision of social services. Negative experiences or perceptions of government services can decrease trust and turn people…
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Judith Levine, Mutual Aid in the Age of Fascism
Mutual aid is the brigade of volunteers mucking out basements after a flood, the church basement food pantry staffed by retirees, the GoFundMe to pay the rent for a tenant about to be evicted. It can look like an easier alternative to politics, which requires not just generosity but toughness, not just tolerance but side-taking. If we are to have any hope of surviving the coming dark age, we need mutual aid—not just to keep people housed and fed, but to keep them connected.It makes sense that immigrant communities, who are in the most drastic danger, have been the first…
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Eden Stiffman, Mutual Aid Groups Ponder Future of Community-Based Help
Mutual aid groups emphasize an egalitarian way of providing help with no strings attached. Community-based nonprofits may participate in and collaborate with mutual aid networks, but the groups themselves are typically volunteer led and unincorporated often because they prefer it that way. Under the stress of a pandemic and other crises, people had the experience of building decision-making structures with neighbors they’d never met before. “These mutual-aid groups basically are leading experts in how to get something done effectively amidst a network of broken systems. Source Link
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Kiley Kost and Nichole Neuman, Shape/Shift: Imagining a Discipline of Care Through Mutual Aid
In theory and practice, mutual aid centers the collective. The organization of the DDGC (Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum collective) mutual aid action group reflects this fundamental tenet: it has no specific leaders and utilizes a flat, nonhierarchical structure. All network and action group members are empowered to act and respond, to offer and request support, to determine their ability to participate and to step away when necessary. Members share the goals of strengthening the collective and working toward equity and sustainability within German studies by investing in ourselves over the discipline and institutions that uphold and replicate often…
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Danielle M. Littman et al, “Values and Beliefs Underlying Mutual Aid: An Exploration of Collective Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Mutual aid stands in contrast to large bureaucratic assistance structures (such as governmental and nongovernmental organizations) in that it provides relief in an informal, decentralized, nonhierarchic, and reciprocal manner (Beito, 2000), versus top-down approaches to helping. This ideological departure from traditional aid structures is communicated by the slogan solidarity not charity used in recent mutual aid movements (Spade, 2020a). Spade (2020a) recognized that providing for one another through coordinated collective care is radical and generative, highlighting both what is possible through mutual aid care structures and the reality that formal government systems designed to provide support consistently fail to adequately…
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Victoria Méndez, “What Is Mutual Aid, And How Can It Transform Our World?”
Mutual aid is about cooperating to serve community members. Mutual aid creates networks of care and generosity to meet the immediate needs of our neighbors. It also addresses the root causes of challenges we face and demands transformative change. Mutual aid networks don’t require community members to fill out burdensome paperwork or require anything in return for their support. This helps reduce the stress, stigma, and shame sometimes associated with asking for help. Source Link
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Janelle O’Malley, “Art Education as Mutual Aid: Community and Social Justice”
When a school lacks funding it cuts programs that are deemed nonessential. But when funding is no longer an issue this problem ceases to be. By creating a mutual aid network of collaborative organizations, students will have access to more art education than before. The ability to pool resources and to share skills will make it possible to create additional courses and give broader selections of art classes. This type of collaborative network will differ from other models as it provides mutual benefits across the organizations involved. This process will also create community buy in and allow for students to…
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Charles D. Garvin, Lorraine M. Gutiérrez, Maeda J. Galinsky, eds., Handbook of Social Work with Groups
A significant challenge for the mutual aid model is the lack of group work education inschools of social work. Social work students receive limited exposure to group work theory,methods, and skills related to forming groups, contracting, supporting mutual aid in phasesof group life, building mutual aid group structures and cultures, and dealing with blocks tomutual aid. Without sufficient exposure to group work history, theory, and practice traditions ofcommitment to democratic values of partnership, mutuality, and social justice, graduates do notfully appreciate the potential of mutual aid and lack sufficient group work skills (Kurland &Salmon, 2002). Thus what remains unclear is…