By Jack Billotti
It is coming up on a year since major COVID-19 lockdown measures took hold in the United States, and in these past eleven months, this country has faced widespread suffering like we haven’t seen in a generation. Not only has the virus disproportionately ravaged Black and Latino communities, and killed almost five hundred thousand Americans, but also unemployment numbers in this country have reached their peak since the Great Depression.
In the last few weeks alone, snowstorms across the southwest have caused a grocery shortage, forcing thousands of Texans to line up for hours in an attempt to feed their families. In Portland, there has been a similar demand for food. When the grocery chain Fred Meyers discarded thousands of perishable goods following a power outage, groups of people began to form hoping to salvage items from the dumpster, but they were met by armed resistance from about a dozen PPD officers.
From the national response to the pandemic in general, down to these specific instances in Texas and Portland, it has become abundantly clear to those facing hardship that the United States government has failed at several levels to adequately protect its citizens. As more and more people have begun to feel the effects of this government negligence, many have committed to taking matters into their own hands.
There are many different ways people are working to impact real and material change in their communities, but mutual aid projects are one of the most effective and accessible forms of active political participation. Transgender activist and lawyer Dean Spade defines mutual aid as “a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions. Not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on representatives, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.”
This definition is relatively broad and allows mutual aid projects to look like almost anything. In fact, many people are already engaged in some form of mutual aid in their day-to-day lives without necessarily classifying it as such. This could look like picking up groceries for an elderly neighbor or setting up a carpool system to ease the burden for other working parents during the morning before school.
When people take those same concepts of community care, and they channel them into an organized project or network, incredible change can be made. Sometimes mutual aid projects, like the Radical Indigenous Mutual Aid Emergency Fund, take the form of a larger fundraising network that redistributes resources to frontline grassroots organizations and the community-at-large. Other mutual aid funds, like the For the Gworls collective, redistribute resources directly to those who most need them. Some organizations, like Boston’s Solidarity Supply Distro, work on the ground distributing goods directly to community members; whereas other initiatives, like The Oakland Power Projects, focus on preemptive community training programs. This doesn’t even begin to cover the wide array of mutual aid projects that are currently underway—especially considering the sheer volume of new groups that have formed over the last year during the pandemic. Within just a few weeks into the COVID-19 crisis, organizers had compiled Google Docs that listed mutual aid projects broken down across the country and Slack channels that allowed organizers to communicate more effectively to share strategies and tips.
While all of this is true, and there is a diverse range of mutual aid projects that each provide an invaluable service to their community, it is worth noting that there are some things that mutual aid distinctly is not. Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when having these kinds of conversations is that mutual aid is not charity. Mutual aid follows a horizontal power structure and focuses on community participation and consensus. Charity subscribes to a vertical power structure where wealthy individuals or social workers make paternalistic decisions about where and how members of a vulnerable community spend their money.
Asanni Armon is the founder and Head Doll in Charge of the For the Gworls collective, a mutual aid fund that has redistributed over a million dollars to Black trans fems in need of housing and medical assistance. Armon explained the distinction between charity and mutual aid to me simply: “The difference is, quite literally, when this dollar comes to me, am I putting the dollar in my pocket? Or am I putting this dollar in somebody else's pocket?”
I do not want to make it seem like mutual aid is a new concept borne out of necessity from the pandemic. Communities—particularly communities of color—have practiced these solidarity-based support tactics for hundreds of years. The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, which provided 20,000 free meals to children, is perhaps the most famous historical example of mutual aid in the United States, but mutual aid tactics have a long-standing history in the fight for racial justice.
In 1835, well-known Underground Railroad conductor David Ruggles formed the New York Committee of Vigilance to combat the kidnapping of free Black New Yorkers along with other self-emancipated Black people. The Committee would gather to confront and intimidate slave kidnappers, in addition to providing other services like offering legal defense in court to African Americans, and feeding, clothing, and housing self-emancipated people along the Underground Railroad. Throughout this same time, Abolitionist women held what were known as anti-slavery fairs. There they would sell household products and baked goods to fundraise for Abolitionist activities, all the while exchanging and discussing anti-slavery literature.
The term “mutual aid” itself wasn’t coined until 1902 when Russian anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin published his essay collection titled “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution,” but the idea of cooperation for the sake of the common good has been around for as long as society has failed to meet people’s needs.
If the storied history of mutual aid projects, along with the hard work that activists and organizers are putting in today teaches us one thing, it should be that we all have a stake in each other’s well-being and liberation. In a time where so many people are experiencing such immense hardship, those of us who can should spend less time engaging in online arguing and more time engaged in online organizing. There are thousands of worthwhile mutual aid projects that, of course, need funds and resources—but they also need brainpower and energy.
If you would like to learn more about mutual aid, please listen to the “Mutual Aid” episode of the Best Praxis Pod with Head Doll in Charge, Asanni Armon, and Boston Solidarity Supply Dispo!