Mutual aid is an
organizational model where voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place amongst community members to overcome social, economic, and political barriers to meeting common needs. This can include resources like food, clothing, to medicine and services like breakfast programs to education. These groups are often built for the daily needs of their communities, but mutual aid groups are also found throughout relief efforts, such as in
natural disasters or
pandemics like
COVID-19.
Resources are shared unconditionally, contrasting this model from
charity where conditions for gaining access to help are often set, such as
means testing or grant stipulations. These groups often go beyond material or service exchange and are set up as a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions.
Mutual aid groups are distinct in their drive to flatten the hierarchy, searching for collective consensus decision-making across participating people rather than placing leadership within a closed executive team. With this joint decision-making, all participating members are empowered to enact change and take responsibility for the group.
History
The term "mutual aid" was popularized by the
anarchist philosopher
Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind
evolution, through
biological mutualism.[1][2] Kropotkin argued that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of humans and animals and has been promoted through
natural selection, and that mutual aid is arguably as ancient as human culture.[2] This recognition of the widespread character and individual benefit of mutual aid stood in contrast to the theories of
social Darwinism that emphasized individual competition and
survival of the fittest, and against the ideas of
liberals such as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love.[3]
Practice
Mutual aid participants work together to figure out strategies and resources to meet each other's needs, such as food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief while organizing themselves against the system that created the shortage in the first place.[4]
As defined by radical activist and writer
Dean Spade and explored in his University of Chicago course "Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization", mutual aid is distinct from charity.[6] Radical activist, social welfare scholar, and social worker Benjamin Shepard defines mutual aid as "people giv[ing] what they can and get[ting] what they need."[7] Mutual aid projects are often critical of the charity model, and may use the motto "solidarity, not charity" to differentiate themselves from charities.
In 1969, the
Black Panthers created the
Free Breakfast for Children program to serve families in
Oakland, California. By the end of 1969, the program fed 20,000 children across 19 cities. Other survival programs included clothing distribution, classes on politics and economics, free medical clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to upstate prisons for family members of inmates, an emergency-response ambulance program, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and testing for
sickle-cell disease.[18]
In the 1970s, the
Young Lords, an organization devoted to neighborhood empowerment and
self-determination of
Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and colonized people in the United States, operated multiple community programs, including free breakfast for children, the Emeterio Betances free health clinic, free dental clinic, community testing for
tuberculosis and
lead-poisoning, community day care center, free clothing drives, and "Garbage Offensive" to clean up garbage in Puerto Rican neighborhoods neglected by city sanitation.[citation needed]
Food Not Bombs was founded in the United States in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists to share free vegetarian food with hungry people and protest war, poverty, and destruction of the environment. Food Not Bombs continues to recover food that would otherwise be discarded and shares free food in over 1,000 cities in 65 countries.[19]
Disaster relief
Occupy Sandy
In 2012 in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the NYC area, mutual aid efforts called
Occupy Sandy helped facilitate aid faster and with more efficacy than federal government efforts at the time.
Hurricane Katrina
In 2005 after
Hurricane Katrina, mutual aid efforts in
New Orleans began through the
Common Ground Collective. Efforts included aid distribution centers, opening seven medical clinics, house-gutting, roof-tarping, building neighborhood computer centers, debris removal, a tree planting service, establishing 90+ community gardens, and legal counselling services. In 2012 after
Hurricane Sandy, people formerly associated with
Occupy Wall Street formed
Occupy Sandy to provide mutual aid to those affected by the storm. Occupy Sandy distributed clothes, blankets and food through various neighborhood hubs.[20]
Due to mistrust of the
federal government of Mexico and its corruption, a number of organizations and volunteers were prepared to meet the needs of the people of
Mexico City immediately after the
Tuesday, 19 September 2017 earthquake. This included removing debris from collapsed buildings, searching for survivors, providing medical attention, disseminating news and information, donating and distributing food, etc.[22]
The UK mutual aid groups have a wide variety of politics. The first groups took inspiration from anarchistic models of community organisation. For example, the
Battersea group had a core team of local activists helping residents to self-organise in a non-hierarchical manner. This also allowed the group to connect with local, grassroots organisations providing social care and mental health services. Other groups were more charity-orientated with politics around saviorism rather than a horizontalist interpretation of mutual aid. Although the proliferation of mutual aid groups in the UK brought the term into the common parlance, not everyone involved in the groups are necessarily working from the same understanding of the origins and practice of mutual aid; for example, some groups are more deferential to
local authorities and politicians than others. Other conflicts in the early days of the groups included disputes over approaches to
safeguarding and
data protection (synonymous in the UK with the
EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)), for example over whether volunteers should be required to have a
background check for simply checking in on their neighbours.[35][37][38][39]
After the first few groups were set up, a website called "Covid-19 Mutual Aid" was created to help develop an organisational model for the mutual aid groups and facilitate the sharing of resources. It was frequently misreported as coordinating the groups.[40]
COVID-19 mutual aid groups in the UK undertake a broadly similar range of activities: offering support around shopping, collecting prescriptions, dog walking, and offering a chat to those who are lonely due to
self-isolation. Groups tend to organise themselves by initially setting up a
Facebook group corresponding to a local authority area, and then from there linking to a
WhatsApp group corresponding to a
council ward. From there the way that groups organise themselves vary greatly but they usually involve producing leaflets with the phone number of one or several volunteers and then trying to reach as many people in the neighbourhood as possible.[35] Other tools commonly used for organising include
Slack,
Google Docs, and
Zoom.[41]
In the context of the rapid growth of mutual aid groups across the UK, the government attempted to create a centralised effort with the
NHS Volunteer Responders scheme. Almost 750,000 people signed up to it, although most of these people were not called upon due to organisational issues.[42]
Academics from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the
University of Cambridge found that the density of COVID-19 mutual aid groups in the United Kingdom was positively correlated with
social capital (that is, areas which are already wealthy are more likely to benefit from the presence of mutual aid groups).[43] In deprived areas like
Wolverhampton, mutual aid groups were hampered by the legacy of the
United Kingdom government austerity programme.[44]
A report by the
New Local Government Network concluded that mutual aid groups are an 'indispensable' part of the United Kingdom's coronavirus response.[45]
^Bertram, Christopher (2020),
"Jean Jacques Rousseau", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2020-12-11
^Sonnenstuhl, Samuel B. Bacharach, Peter A. Bamberger, William J. (2001). Mutual aid and union renewal: cycles of logics of action. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University. p. 173.
ISBN0-8014-8734-X.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)
^Kropotkin, Peter (2008). Mutual aid: a factor of evolution. [Charleston, SC]: Forgotten Books. p. 117.
ISBN978-1-60680-071-3.
^Beito, David T. (2000). From mutual aid to the welfare state: fraternal societies and social services, 1890–1967. Chapel Hill [u.a.]: Univ. of North Carolina Press. pp. 1–2.
ISBN0-8078-4841-7.
^Shapely, Peter (2007). Borsay, Anne (ed.). Medicine, charity and mutual aid: the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, c. 1550–1950; [5th international conference of the European Association of Urban Historians, which was held in Berlin in summer 2000] ([Online-Ausg.] ed.). Aldershot [u.a.]: Ashgate. pp. 7–8.
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Midgley, James; Hosaka, Mitsuhiko, eds. (2011). Grassroots Social Security in Asia: Mutual Aid, Microinsurance and Social Welfare.
Routledge.
ISBN978-0-203-83178-6.
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Moyse Steinberg, Dominique (2009) [2004]. The Mutual-aid Approach to Working with Groups: Helping People Help One Another (2nd ed.).
Routledge.
ISBN978-0-7890-1462-7.
LCCN2004007025.
Preston, John; Firth, Rhiannon (2020). Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom.
Springer.
ISBN9783030577131.
Servigne, Pablo; Chapelle, Gauthier (2022). Mutual Aid: The Other Law of the Jungle.
Wiley.
ISBN978-1509547920.