💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › dean-spade-mutual-aid-1.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:17:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Mutual Aid Author: Dean Spade Date: 2020 Language: en Topics: mutual aid
Mutual Aid - Dean Spade
Mutual Aid
Mutual Aid
Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
Dean Spade
London • New York
First published by Verso 2020
© Dean Spade 2020 All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
A teaching guide to accompany this book is available online at
http://v.versobooks.com/Mutual_Aid_Teaching_Guide.pdf
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-212-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-213-0 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-214-7 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
Introduction: Crisis Conditions
Require Bold Tactics 1
PART I. WHAT IS MUTUAL AID?
Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid 9
One. Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared
understanding about why people
do not have what they need. 9
Two. Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build
movements. 12
Three. Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through
collective
action rather than waiting for saviors. 16
Solidarity Not Charity! 21
We Get More When We Demand More 31
PART II. WORKING TOGETHER ON PURPOSE
Some Dangers and Pitfalls of Mutual Aid 45
Deservingness Hierarchies 45
Saviorism and Paternalism 49
Co-optation 50
Characteristics of Mutual Aid vs.
Charity 59
No Masters, No Flakes 65
Group Culture 71
Making Decisions Together 75
Leadership Qualities That Support
Mutuality and Collaboration 98
Handling Money 104
Burnout 107
Conflict 118
Working with Joy 127
Perfectionism 130
Mad Mapping 133
Conclusion: Everything Is at Stake
and We’re Fighting to Win 143
Resource List 149
Introduction
Crisis Conditions Require Bold Tactics
The contemporary political moment is defined by emergency. Acute crises,
like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change–induced fires, floods, and
storms, as well as the ongoing crises of racist criminalization, brutal
immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth
inequality, threaten the survival of people around the globe. Government
policies actively produce and exacerbate the harm, inadequately respond
to crises, and ensure that certain populations bear the brunt of
pollution, poverty, disease, and violence. In the face of this, more and
more ordinary people are feeling called to respond in their communities,
creating bold and inno- vative ways to share resources and support
vulnerable neighbors. This survival work, when done in conjunc- tion
with social movements demanding transforma- tive change, is called
mutual aid.
Mutual aid has been a part of all large, powerful social movements, and
it has a particularly important role to play right now, as we face
unprecedented
dangers and opportunities for mobilization. Mutual aid gives people a
way to plug into movements based on their immediate concerns, and it
produces social spaces where people grow new solidarities. At its best,
mutual aid actually produces new ways of living where people get to
create systems of care and gener- osity that address harm and foster
well-being.
This book is about mutual aid: it explains why it is so important, what
it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of
mutual aid as well as concrete tools for addressing some of the most
diffi- cult questions facing mutual aid groups, such as how to work in
groups and make decisions together, how to prevent and address conflict,
and how to deal with burnout so that we can build a lasting mobilization
that can win.
Left social movements have two big jobs right now. First, we need to
organize to help people survive the devastating conditions unfolding
every day. Second, we need to mobilize hundreds of millions of people
for resistance so we can tackle the underlying causes of these crises.
In this pivotal moment, movements can strengthen, mobilizing new people
to fight back against cops, immigration enforcement, welfare
authorities, landlords, budget cuts, polluters, the defense industry,
prison profiteers, and right-wing groups. The way to tackle these two
big tasks—meet- ing people’s needs and mobilizing them for resist-
ance—is to create mutual aid projects and get lots of people to
participate in them. Social movements that have built power and won
major change have all
included mutual aid, yet it is often a part of move- ment work that is
less visible and less valued. In this moment, our ability to build
mutual aid will deter- mine whether we win the world we long for or dive
further into crisis.
We can imagine what is possible when we come together in this way by
examining the response of Hong Kong’s protest movement to COVID-19. In
2019, a massive anti-government mobilization swept Hong Kong, with
people opposing police and seeking greater control over their lives. By
the time the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Hong Kong’s chief executive,
Carrie Lam, had an 80 percent disapproval rating. Hong Kong’s protest
movement had escalated significantly, with protesters coordinating
sophisti- cated mass mobilizations, including the use of bold tactics
like fighting police with poles, projectiles, laser pointers, and petrol
bombs. Lam was remarka- bly non-responsive to the pandemic, despite the
vulnerable position of Hong Kong, a densely packed city with a history
of epidemics and a high-speed rail- way connection to Wuhan, where the
COVID-19 pandemic started. Hong Kong residents criticized Lam for her
delay in closing the city’s borders and her order barring city workers
from wearing masks. But, despite the government’s failures, the people
of Hong Kong, mobilized by the protest movement, launched a response
that suppressed the original wave of COVID- 19 and mitigated its
resurgence.
On the day the first COVID-19 case in Hong Kong was confirmed, people
from the protest movement
created a website that tracked cases, monitored hot spots, reported
hospital wait times, and warned about places selling fake personal
protective equipment (PPE). The protesters defied the government’s ban
on masks and countered misinformation from the World Health Organization
discouraging their use. They set up brigades that made and distributed
masks, specially making sure they reached poor people and old people.
They created a system of volunteers to set up hand sani- tizer stations
throughout crowded tenement housing and maintain the supply of sanitizer
at the stations. They also created digital maps to identify the station
sites.
This essential mutual aid work was complemented by bolder strategies.
When the government refused to close the border with China, seven
thousand medical workers, as part of labor unions that had been formed
during the protest movement, went on strike demand- ing PPE and that the
border be closed. Members of the protest movement threatened the
government with stronger action if steps were not taken to address the
epidemic, and explosives were found at the border with China, possibly
for this purpose. The Hong Kong government then created quarantine
centers in dense neighborhoods, but never consulted the people in those
neighborhoods, and the protest movement responded by throwing explosives
into the quarantine centers before they were used, causing the
government to change the location of the facilities to less densely
populated holiday villages.
As a result of these efforts by a mobilized and coor- dinated movement,
and no thanks to the government,
Hong Kong had an immensely successful response to the first wave of
COVID-19. Through the combination of mutual aid and direct action to
force concessions, the protesters did what the government would not do
on its own, saving untold numbers of lives.
This book provides a concrete guide for building mutual aid groups and
networks. Part I explores what mutual aid is, why it is different than
charity, and how it relates to other social movement tactics. Part II
dives into the nitty-gritty of how to work together in mutual aid groups
and how to handle the challenges of group decision-making, conflict, and
burnout. It includes charts and lists that can be brought to group
meetings to stimulate conversation and build shared analysis and group
practices. Ultimately, helps imag- ine how we can coordinate to
collectively take care of ourselves—even in the face of disaster—and
mobilize hundreds of millions of people to make deep and last- ing
change.
PART I
What is Mutual Aid?
Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs,
usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not
going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the
crisis, or are making things worse. We see examples of mutual aid in
every single social movement, whether it’s people raising money for
workers on strike, setting up a ride-sharing system during the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, putting drinking water in the desert for
migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine
because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow,
raising money to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, or
coordinating letter-writing to prisoners. These are mutual aid projects.
They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared
understand- ing that the conditions in which we are made to live are
unjust.
There is nothing new about mutual aid—people have worked together to
survive for all of human history. But capitalism and colonialism created
structures that have disrupted how people have histor- ically connected
with each other and shared every- thing they needed to survive. As
people were forced into systems of wage labor and private property, and
wealth became increasingly concentrated, our ways of caring for each
other have become more and more tenuous.
Today, many of us live in the most atomized socie- ties in human
history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines our ability to
organize together to change unjust conditions on a large scale. We are
put in competition with each other for survival, and we are forced to
rely on hostile systems—like health care systems designed around profit,
not keep- ing people healthy, or food and transportation systems that
pollute the earth and poison people—for the things we need. More and
more people report that they have no one they can confide in when they
are in trouble. This means many of us do not get help with mental
health, drug use, family violence, or abuse until the police or courts
are involved, which tends to escalate rather than resolve harm.
In this context of social isolation and forced dependency on hostile
systems, mutual aid—where we choose to help each other out, share
things, and put time and resources into caring for the most vulner-
able—is a radical act.
1
Three Key Elements
of Mutual Aid
understanding about why people do not have what they need.
Mutual aid projects expose the reality that people do not have what they
need and propose that we can address this injustice together. The most
famous example in the United States is the Black Panther Party’s
survival programs, which ran throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a
free breakfast program, free ambulance program, free medical clinics, a
service offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and a school
aimed at providing a rigorous liberation curriculum to children. The
Black Panther programs welcomed people into the liberation struggle by
creat- ing spaces where they could meet basic needs and build a shared
analysis about the conditions they were facing. Instead of feeling
ashamed about not being able to feed their kids in a culture that blames
poor people, especially poor Black people, for their poverty,
people attending the Panthers’ free breakfast program got food and a
chance to build shared analysis about Black poverty. It broke stigma and
isolation, met material needs, and got people fired up to work together
for change.
Recognizing the program’s success, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously
wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all field offices that “the BCP [Breakfast
for Children Program] represents the best and most influential activity
going for the BPP [Black Panther Party] and, as such, is potentially the
greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and
destroy what it stands for.” The night before the Chicago program was
supposed to open, police broke into the church that was hosting it and
urinated on all of the food. The government’s attacks on the Black
Panther Party are evidence of mutual aid’s power, as is the govern-
ment’s co-optation of the program: in the early 1970s the US Department
of Agriculture expanded its federal free breakfast program—built on a
charity, not a liberation, model—that still feeds millions of children
today. The Black Panthers provided a striking vision of liberation,
asserting that Black people had to defend themselves against a violent
and racist government, and that they could organize to give each other
what a racist society withheld.
During the same period, the Young Lords Party undertook similar and
related mutual aid projects in their work toward Puerto Rican
liberation. The Young Lords brought people into the movement by starting
with the everyday needs of Puerto Ricans in
impoverished communities: they protested the lack of garbage pickups in
Puerto Rican neighborhoods, hijacked a city mobile x-ray truck to bring
greater tuberculosis testing to Puerto Rican communities, took over part
of a hospital to provide health care, and provided food and youth
programs for Puerto Rican communities. Their vision—for decolonizing
Puerto Rico and liberating Puerto Ricans in the United States from
racism, poverty, and police terror—was put into practice through mutual
aid.
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, many overlapping movements undertook
mutual aid efforts, such as femi- nist health clinics and activist-run
abortion providers, emerging volunteer-run gay health clinics, childcare
collectives, tenants’ unions, and community food projects. Although this
moment is an important refer- ence point for the contemporary left,
mutual aid didn’t start in the ’60s, but is an ongoing feature of move-
ments seeking transformative change. Klee Benally, project coordinator
at Indigenous Media Action, argues that mutual aid is an unbroken
tradition among Indigenous people across many cycles of colonialism,
maintained through traditional teachings that contem- porary Indigenous
mutual aid projects are working to restore and amplify. Settlers have
long worked to under- mine Indigenous people’s self-sustaining practices
by first destroying food systems and then forcing depend- ency on
rations given at forts and missions and, now, by settler nonprofits.
Indigenous mutual aid efforts are both a matter of survival and a
powerful form of resist- ance to forced dependence on settler systems.
The long tradition of mutual aid societies and other forms of
“self-help” in Black communities, which, as early as the 1780s sought to
pool resources to provide health and life insurance, care for the sick,
aid for burials, support for widows and orphans, and public education
efforts, is another important exam- ple. These efforts have addressed
Black exclusion from white infrastructures by creating Black alterna-
tives. Long traditions of mutual aid are also visible in working-class
communities that have long supported workers on strike so that they
could pay rent and buy food while confronting their bosses. Perhaps most
of all, the pervasive presence of mutual aid during sudden disasters of
all kinds—storms, floods, fires, and earthquakes—demonstrates how people
come together to care for each other and share resources when,
inevitably, the government is not there to help, offers relief that does
not reach the most vulnerable people, and deploys law enforcement
against displaced disaster survivors. Mutual aid is a powerful force.
movements.
Mutual aid is essential to building social movements. People often come
to social movement groups because they need something: eviction defense,
childcare, social connection, health care, or help in a fight with the
government about something like welfare benefits, disability services,
immigration status, or custody of their children. Being able to get help
in a crisis is often
a condition for being politically active, because it’s very difficult to
organize when you are also struggling to survive. Getting support
through a mutual aid project that has a political analysis of the
conditions that produced your crisis also helps to break stigma, shame,
and isolation. Under capitalism, social prob- lems resulting from
exploitation and the maldistribu- tion of resources are understood as
individual moral failings, not systemic problems. Getting support at a
place that sees the systems, not the people suffering in them, as the
problem can help people move from shame to anger and defiance. Mutual
aid exposes the failures of the current system and shows an alternative.
This work is based in a belief that those on the front lines of a crisis
have the best wisdom to solve the problems, and that collective action
is the way forward.
Mutual aid projects also build solidarity. I have seen this at the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), a law collective that provides free
legal help to trans and gender-nonconforming people who are low income
and/or people of color. I worked with the group from 2002 to 2019. Again
and again I saw people come to SRLP for help because something bad
happened to them in a shelter, in prison, or in interac- tions with
cops, immigration authorities, the foster care system, or public
schools. People seeking legal services for these problems would be
invited to partic- ipate in organizing and become part of SRLP, work-
ing on changing the conditions that had brought them to the group. As
people joined, things were often bumpy. Members may have had some things
in
common—being trans or gender-nonconforming, for example—but also
differed from one another in terms of race, immigration status, ability,
HIV status, age, housing access, sexual orientation, language, and more.
By working together and participating in shared political education
programs, members could learn about experiences different from theirs
and build solidarity across those differences. This changed—and
continues to change—not only the individuals in the group, but the kind
of politics the group practices.
Solidarity is what builds and connects large-scale movements. In the
context of professionalized nonprofit organizations, groups are urged to
be single-issue oriented, framing their message around “deserving”
people within the population they serve, and using tactics palatable to
elites. Prison-oriented groups are supposed to fight only for “the
innocent” or “the nonviolent,” for example, and to do their work by
lobbying politicians about how some people—not all people—don’t belong
in prison. This is the opposite of solidarity, because it means the most
vulnerable people are left behind: those who were up-charged by cops and
prosecutors, those who do not have the means to prove their innocence,
those who do not match cultural tropes of innocence and deservingness.
This narrow focus actually strengthens the system’s legitimacy by
advocating that the target- ing of those more stigmatized people is
okay.
This pattern of anti-solidarity incentives and prac-
tices has been devastating for movements as
nonprofitization has taken hold, as I’ll discuss further in the next
chapter. Solidarity across issues and popu- lations is what makes
movements big and powerful. Without that connection, we end up with
discon- nected groups, working in their issue silos, undermin- ing each
other, competing for attention and funding, not backing each other up
and not building power. Mutual aid projects, by creating spaces where
people come together on the basis of some shared need or concern in
spite of their different lived experience, cultivate solidarity.
Groups doing mutual aid to directly address real problems in real
people’s lives tend to develop a multi- issue and solidarity-based
approach because their members’ lives are cross-cut by many different
experi- ences of vulnerability. Sometimes even groups that start out
with a narrow goal adopt a wider horizon of solidarity and a wider
vision of political possibility if they use the mutual aid model. An
initial goal of serv- ing people impacted by homelessness quickly
reveals that racism, colonialism, immigration enforcement, ableism,
police violence, the foster care system, the health care system,
transphobia, and more are all causes of homelessness or causes of
further harm to homeless people. Solidarity and an ever-expanding
commitment to justice emerge from contact with the complex realities of
injustice. This is exactly how movements are built, as people become
connected to each other and as one urgent issue unspools into a broader
vision of social transformation.
collective action rather than wait- ing for saviors.
Mutual aid projects help people develop skills for collaboration,
participation, and decision-making. For example, people engaged in a
project to help one another through housing court proceedings will learn
the details of how the system harms people and how to fight it, but they
will also learn about meeting facilitation, working across differences,
retaining volunteers, addressing conflict, giving and receiving
feedback, following through, and coordinating sched- ules and
transportation. They may also learn that it is not just lawyers who can
do this kind of work, and that many people—including themselves!—have
something to offer. This departs from expertise-based social services
that tell us we need to have a social worker, licensed therapist,
lawyer, or some other person with an advanced degree to get things done.
Mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian, demon- strating how we can
do things together in ways we were told not to imagine, and that we can
organize human activity without coercion. Most people have never been to
a meeting where there was not a boss or authority figure with
decision-making power. Most people work or go to school inside
hierarchies where disobedience leads to punishment or exclusion. We
bring our learned practices of hierarchy with us even when no paycheck
or punishment enforces our partic- ipation, so even in volunteer groups
we often find
ourselves in conflicts stemming from learned domi- nance behaviors. But
collective spaces, like mutual aid organizing, can give us opportunities
to unlearn conditioning and build new skills and capacities. By
participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being
together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind
of people who could live in such a world together.
For example, in the Occupy encampments that emerged in 2011 to protest
economic inequality, people shared ideas about how to resolve conflict
without calling the police. Occupy brought out many people who had never
participated in political resist- ance before, introducing them to
practices like consensus decision-making, occupying public space,
distributing free food, and engaging in free political education
workshops. Many who joined Occupy did not yet have a developed critique
of policing. Participants committed to police abolition and anti- racism
cultivated conversations about why activists should not call the police
on each other. This process was inconsistent and imperfect, but it
introduced many people to new skills and ideas that they took with them,
long after Occupy encampments were dismantled by the police.
Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a will- ingness to defy
illegitimate authority. Taking risks with a group for a shared purpose
can be a reparative experience when we have been trained to follow
rules. Organizers from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) share the
following story in their 2018 workshop
facilitation guide to illustrate their argument that “audacity is our
capacity”:
When a crew of MADR organizers [after Hurricane Maria] travelled to
Puerto Rico (some visiting their families, others bringing medical
skills), they found out about a government warehouse that was neglect-
ing to distribute huge stockpiles of supplies. They showed their MADR
badges to the guards and said, “We are here for the 8am pickup.” When
guards replied that their names were not on the list, they just insisted
again, “We are here for the 8am pickup.” They were eventually allowed
in, told to take what- ever they needed. After being let in once, aid
work- ers were able to return repeatedly. They made more badges for
local organizers, and this source contin- ued to benefit local
communities for months.
MADR asserts that by taking bold actions together, “we can imagine new
ways of interacting with the world.” When dominant ways of living have
been suspended, people discover that they can break norms—and even
laws—that enable individualism, passivity, and respect for private
property. MADR asserts that “saving lives, homes, and communities in the
event and aftermath of disaster may require taking bold action without
waiting for permission from authorities. Disaster survivors themselves
are the most important authority on just action.”
Mutual aid projects providing relief to survivors of storms, floods,
earthquakes, and fires, as well as those
developed to support people living through the crises caused by poverty,
racism, criminalization, gender violence, and other “ordinary”
conditions, produce new systems that can prevent harm and improve
preparedness for the coming disasters. When Hurricane Maria devastated
Puerto Rico in 2017, it was the exist- ence of food justice efforts that
made it possible for many people to eat when the corporate food system,
which brings 90 percent of the island’s food from off- island sources,
was halted by the storm. Similarly, it was local solar panels that
allowed people to charge medical devices when the electrical grid went
down.
By looking at what still works in the face of disas- ter, we can learn
what we want to build to prepare for the next storm or fire. In The
Battle for Paradise, Naomi Klein argues that locally controlled micro-
grids are more desirable for delivering sustainable energy, given the
failures of the energy monopolies that currently dominate energy
delivery. In the wake of the devastating 2018 California fires, the
public learned that the fires were caused by Pacific Gas and Electric
Company’s mismanagement, and then watched as California’s government
immediately offered the company a bailout, meanwhile failing to support
people displaced by the disaster. Klein describes how large energy
companies work to prevent local and sustainable energy efforts, and
argues that in energy, as in other areas of survival, we should be
working toward locally controlled, participatory, transparent structures
to replace our crumbling and harmful infrastructure.
Doing so helps us imagine getting rid of the undemocratic infrastructure
of our lives—the extrac- tive and unjust energy, food, health care, and
trans- portation systems—and replacing it with people’s infrastructure.
For social movements working to imagine and build a transition from
“dig, burn, dump” economies to sustainable, regenerative ways of living,
mutual aid offers a way forward.
2
Solidarity Not Charity!
Mainstream understanding of how to support people in crisis relies on
the frameworks of charity and social services. We should be very clear:
mutual aid is not charity. Charity, aid, relief, and social services are
terms that usually refer to rich people or the govern- ment making
decisions about the provision of some kind of support to poor
people—that is, rich people or the government deciding who gets the
help, what the limits are to that help, and what strings are attached.
You can be sure that help like that is not designed to get to the root
causes of poverty and violence. It is designed to help improve the image
of the elites who are funding it and put a tiny, inadequate Band-Aid on
the massive social wound that their greed creates.
The charity model we live with today has origins in
Christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to
buy their own way into heaven. It is based on a moral hierarchy of
wealth—the idea that rich people are inherently better and more moral
than poor people, which is why they deserve to be on top. Not
surprisingly, the charity model promotes the
idea that most poverty is a result of laziness or immo- rality and that
only the poor people who can prove their moral worth deserve help.
Contemporary charity comes with eligibility requirements such as
sobriety, piety, curfews, partici- pation in job training or parenting
courses, coopera- tion with the police, a lawful immigration status, or
identifying the paternity of children. In charity programs, social
workers, health care providers, teachers, clergy, lawyers, and
government workers determine which poor people deserve help. Their
methods of deciding who is deserving, and even the rules they enforce,
usually promote racist and sexist tropes, such as the idea that poor
women of color and immigrant women have too many children, or that Black
families are dysfunctional, or that Indigenous children are better off
separated from their families and communities, or that people are poor
because of drug use.
We can see examples in government policy, like the Temporary Assistance
to Needy Families programs (TANF), which impose “family caps” in
fourteen states. These laws restrict poor families from receiv- ing
additional benefits when they have a new child. For example, in
Massachusetts, a single parent with two children receives a measly $578
in TANF benefits each month. But if a second child is born while the
family is already receiving TANF, that child is ineligi- ble, and the
family receives $100 less per month, for a grant of $478. This policy
emerges from the racist, sexist idea that poor women, especially women
of
color and immigrant women, should be discouraged from having children,
and the faulty assumption that their poverty is somehow a result of
being overly reproductive. We can also see harmful, moralizing
eligibility requirements when people have to prove they are sober or
under psychiatric care to qualify for housing programs.
Charity programs, both those run by the govern- ment and those run by
nonprofits, are also set up in ways that make it stigmatizing and
miserable to receive help. The humiliation and degradation of doing
required work assignments to get benefits too small to live off of, or
answering endless personal questions that treat the recipient like a
fraud and a crook, are designed to make sure that people will accept any
work at any exploitative wage or condition to avoid relying on public
benefits. Charity makes rich people and corpo- rations look generous
while upholding and legitimiz- ing the systems that concentrate wealth.
Charity is increasingly privatized and contracted out to the massive
nonprofit sector, which benefits rich people more than poor people in
two big ways. First, elite donors get to run the show. They decide what
gets funded and what doesn’t. Nonprofits compete to show that they are
the best organization to win a grant. To win, nonprofits want to make
their work look legitimate to the funder, which means working according
to the funder’s beliefs about the causes of and solutions for a
particular problem rather than challenging those beliefs. For example,
the funder may favor nonprofits that make sobriety a
condition of receiving a spot in a homeless shelter, because rich people
would rather believe that home- lessness is caused by poor people’s drug
use than that it is caused by a capitalist housing market. To win
grants, nonprofits also seek to make themselves look “successful” and
“impactful,” regardless of whether their work is actually getting to the
root causes of the problem. For example, social service nonprofits will
often claim they have worked with large numbers of people, even though
most of those people did not become less vulnerable or get what they
needed from their contact with the nonprofit. Similarly, homeless- ness
service groups sometimes claim that they reduced shelter use, but the
people who stopped using the shelter are still unhoused and simply not
using the shelter for various reasons.
In this way, poverty-focused and homelessness- focused nonprofits are
essentially encouraged to merely manage poor people: provide limited and
conditional access to prison-like shelters and make people take
budgeting classes or prove their sobriety. They do not do the more
threatening and effective work that grassroots mutual aid groups do for
hous- ing justice, like defending encampments against raids, providing
immediate no-strings health care and food to poor and unhoused people,
fighting real estate developers, slumlords, and gentrification, or
fighting for and providing access to actual long-term housing. Rich
people’s control of nonprofit funding keeps nonprofits from doing work
that is threatening to the status quo, or from admitting the limits of
their
strategies. In worst-case scenarios, nonprofits are integrated into
programs that make vulnerable people even more vulnerable. An example of
this is the Homeless Management Information System, a federal
computerized information management tool that requires homeless services
and charities to record the names and information of their clients in
order to receive federal aid, putting criminalized and undocu- mented
people at further risk.
Second, the nonprofit system creates a tax shelter for rich people. They
can put a bunch of their money in a charitable foundation, allowing them
to avoid paying taxes on it and instead getting to direct it to their
favorite pet projects. Most foundation money goes to things the board
members and executive direc- tors (who, in the case of US foundations,
are over 90 percent white) value, such as their alma maters, the opera,
and museums. Foundations are not even required to give much of their
wealth away: they give out only 5 percent a year and still reap the
benefits of a tax haven for their money and the social cachet of being a
philanthropist. And that 5 percent can also be used to pay their friends
and family hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to be “trustees” of
their foundation.
The creation of the nonprofit sector that has ballooned in the last
half-century was a direct response to the threat posed by mass mutual
aid work in anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist movements of the
1960s and ’70s. Nonprofitization was designed to demobilize us,
legitimizing unjust systems and
hiding the reality that real change comes from move- ments made of
millions of ordinary people, not small groups of paid professionals.
These days, the nonprof- its that purport to address poverty are mostly
run by white elites. The idea promoted by nonprofits and universities is
that people with advanced degrees are best suited to figure out the
solutions to social prob- lems. It mystifies the causes of poverty,
making it seem like some kind of mysterious math problem that only
people with advanced degrees can figure out. But any poor person knows
that poverty is caused by the greed of their bosses, landlords, and
health insurance companies, by systems of white supremacy and colo-
nialism, and by wars and forced migrations. Elite solutions to poverty
are always about managing poor people and never about redistributing
wealth.
The nonprofit sector not only fails to fix injustice but also replicates
it within the groups themselves. Nonprofits are usually run like
businesses, with a boss (executive director) at the top deciding things
for the people underneath. Nonprofits have the same kinds of problems as
other businesses that rely on hierarchical models: drastically unequal
pay, race and gender wage gaps, sexual harassment in the workplace,
exploita- tion of workers, and burnout. Despite the fact that they pitch
themselves as the solution for fixing the problems of the current
system, nonprofits mostly replicate, legitimize, and stabilize that
system.
One way the charity model is manifested is in the idea of “having a
cause.” Celebrities and philanthro- pists show us that picking an issue
to care about and
giving or raising money for it is part of their brand, in a similar vein
as their fashion choices. This idea of a charitable cause that is
disconnected from other aspects of life keeps us in our places. We are
encour- aged to be mostly numbed-out consumers, but ones who perhaps
volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, post videos about animal
rights on our social media accounts, or wear a T-shirt with a femi- nist
slogan now and again. Only those few experts or specialists who work in
nonprofits are supposed to make concern for justice a larger part of
their lives by turning it into a career, but even they are supposed to
still be obedient consumers.
The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and
the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing
to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us
passive and complicit. Robust social movements offer an oppos- ing view.
We argue that all the aspects of our lives— where and how we live and
work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, and get by are sites of
injustice and potential resistance. At our best, social movements create
vibrant social networks in which we not only do work in a group, but
also have friendships, make art, have sex, mentor and parent kids, feed
ourselves and each other, build radical land and housing experiments,
and inspire each other about how we can cultivate liber- ation in all
aspects of our lives. Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like
volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment
with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven
us.
The charity model encourages us to feel good about ourselves by “giving
back.” Convincing us that we have done enough if we do a little
volunteering or posting online is a great way to keep us in our place.
Keeping people numb to the suffering in the world— and their own
suffering—is essential to keeping things as they are. In fact, things
are really terrifying and enraging right now, and feeling more rage,
fear, sadness, grief, and despair may be appropriate. Those feelings may
help us be less appeased by false solu- tions, and stir us to pursue
ongoing collective action for change.
That doesn’t mean that mutual aid work never feels good. In fact, it is
often deeply satisfying and connective, creating caring relationships,
raucous celebrations, and an enduring sense of purpose. In my
experience, it is more engagement that actually enliv- ens us—more
curiosity, more willingness to see the harm that surrounds us, and ask
how we can relate to it differently. Being more engaged with the complex
and painful realities we face, and with thoughtful, committed action
alongside others for justice, feels much better than numbing out or
making token, self- consoling charity gestures. It feels good to let our
values guide every part of our lives.
Mutual aid projects, in many ways, are defined in opposition to the
charity model and its current itera- tion in the nonprofit sector.
Mutual aid projects mobilize lots of people rather than a few experts;
resist the use of eligibility criteria that cut out more stigmatized
people; are an integrated part of our lives
rather than a pet cause; and cultivate a shared analy- sis of the root
causes of the problem and connect people to social movements that can
address these causes. Part II of this book focuses on how we can build
our mutual aid groups in ways that can most successfully accomplish
these goals, avoiding the pitfalls of the charity model and the learned
hierar- chical behaviors that can reproduce injustice even in activist
group settings.
What we build now, and whether we can sustain it, will determine how
prepared we are for the next pandemic, the climate-induced disasters to
come, the ongoing disasters of white supremacy and capitalism, and the
beautifully disruptive rebellions that will transform them.
3
We Get More When We Demand More
Disasters are ruptures—existing systems break down and then are either
repaired, replaced, or scrapped. Disasters exacerbate and expose
inequalities, show- ing the preexisting crises that elites strive to
ignore and hide from view. When disasters emerge, govern- ments and
corporations quickly move to downplay them, hoping to get back to the
status quo of extrac- tion and profit-making as soon as possible, to
take credit for having resolved them, and to silence demands for relief.
Governments and the 1 percent also use disasters as opportunities to
push their favored reforms. COVID-19, for example, has gener- ated
right-wing wins like closing the border; suspend- ing environmental
regulations; giving the FBI, DEA, and local police hundreds of millions
of dollars; and expanding the capacity of police to harass and crimi-
nalize the poor for allegedly violating public health regulations.
At the same time, disasters are opportunities for exposing injustice and
pushing forward left-wing
demands. COVID-19 has also been an opportunity for mobilizing people to
resist injustice. As more people are laid off or forced to work
dangerous jobs, we are increasingly standing together against land-
lords, bosses, police, prisons, and a profit-driven health care system.
In seeking to curb the worst effects of the pandemic, some forms of
government relief have emerged that give us hope for another way of
life: eviction moratoriums, increased unemployment benefits and income
support, free public transit, suspension of student loan payments, and
more. While this relief has been far from universal or adequate, it has
demonstrated that many of the things our movements have fought for are
entirely possible.
Disasters are pivotal times in the competition between political
programs, moments when much can be lost or won. Winning the world we
want is far from guaranteed. Our opponents, those who currently control
the most of the land, work, food, housing, transportation, weapons,
water, energy, and media, are feverishly working to maintain the status
quo of maldistribution and targeted violence, and worsen it to increase
profits and power for themselves. Our capacity to win is possible to the
extent that we can collectively realize what they do not control—us— and
collectively disobey and disrupt their systems, retaking control of our
ways of sustaining life. If we want as many people as possible to
survive, and to win in the short and long term, we have to use moments
of disaster to help and mobilize people. Mutual aid is the way to do
that. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid groups have prolif- erated and more people
are learning how to organize mutual aid than have in decades. This is a
big chance for us to make a lot of change.
We need mutual aid groups and networks capable of bringing millions of
new people into work that deepens their understanding of the root causes
of the crises and inequalities they are fired up about and that builds
their capacity for bold collective action. We need groups and networks
that do not disappear after the peak of the crisis, but instead become
part of an ongoing, sustained mobilization with the capac- ity to
support people and keep building pressure for bigger wins.
As mobilization builds, governments, corpora- tions, and corporate media
will approach mutual aid in three ways, all of which, as I write this,
are already visible in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. These three
responses often happen simultaneously, among different agencies, elected
officials, and levels of government: Some will ignore proliferating
mutual aid efforts. Some will try to fold them into a narrative about
volunteerism, labeling mutual aid efforts “heroic” and portraying them
as complementary to government efforts and existing systems rather than
as oppositional to those systems. And some police and spy agencies will
surveil and criminalize mutual aid efforts.
This was visible in the response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Occupy
Sandy, a volunteer-based mutual aid network that emerged from Occupy
Wall Street,
organized over sixty thousand volunteers to provide food, water,
medicine, and other necessities to people left without power and in dire
conditions by a govern- ment utterly unprepared to help them. The
Department of Homeland Security extended its spying from Occupy Wall
Street to Occupy Sandy at the same time that some New York City
government agencies helped Occupy Sandy get supplies to redis- tribute.
Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg mostly
ignored Occupy Sandy’s frontline work as they focused on managing their
own reputations.
The fundamental goal of all three of these responses is to ensure the
legitimacy and stability of the current systems and delegitimize
alternative ways of meeting human needs. At best, mutual aid projects
get framed as non-threatening temporary adjuncts to existing systems.
Elected officials and government agencies sometimes even seek legitimacy
by associat- ing themselves with mutual aid projects if those projects
are more successful at meeting needs than the government. At worst,
mutual aid projects are portrayed as unlawful, dangerous, and criminal.
As we saw with the police attacks on the Black Panther Party breakfast
programs, or more recent Trump administration raids on the medical camps
of No More Deaths (which offers support to migrants at the southern US
border), when mutual aid efforts truly build and legitimize coordinated
action and auton- omy against existing systems, governments typically
crack down on them.
The criminalization of mutual aid work has been ongoing throughout
social movement history precisely because mutual aid directly confronts
unjust systems and offer alternatives. Groups doing frontline mutual aid
work that is particularly risky today, such as those helping with access
to abortion drugs or procedures illegal in the jurisdiction where they
are working, providing clean needles and safe consumption spaces to drug
users where that is illegal, supporting the well-being of people in the
criminalized sex trades, and helping homeless people occupy vacant
homes, have useful knowledge and experience for all of us about
navigating safety risks. Studying those groups’ experiences and methods
for evading and/or confront- ing police, securing electronic
communications, and sheltering the most vulnerable people from exposure
can benefit all mutual aid groups as we prepare for our work to
(hopefully) become threatening to the status quo.
In the face of increased mobilization and resist- ance—as with the
rebellion against racist police violence in the summer of 2020—or
fearing another destabilizing disaster, governments and the corpora-
tions they represent will sometimes grant conces- sions, many of which
look similar to what mutual aid projects provide. In moments of deep
social and economic turmoil—such as during COVID-19— governments expand
income support, usually in the form of welfare benefits, unemployment
benefits, or a one-time stimulus check. But government aid can also take
the form of legalizing squatted property,
providing mobile clinics, offering meals at public schools, creating
restorative justice programs, creat- ing resources for people being
released from prison, and more. Concessions like these, where the
govern- ment provides something previously only offered by mutual aid
groups, can be celebrated as limited victo- ries by movements: Our
organizing was so strong they had to co-opt us! These concessions might
also provide vital support to many more people than mutual aid groups
can reach, as with the USDA’s free breakfast program in schools, which
fed more chil- dren than the Black Panther Party breakfast program that
prompted its expansion.
However, it’s crucial to remember that these concessions are necessarily
limited. First, they can be shrunk or taken back whenever the moment of
insta- bility passes. This has been the historical pattern for poor
relief in the United States: it gets expanded during a crisis, and then
contracted and stigmatized as soon as the crisis has lessened, quickly
making people once again desperate and exploitable by their employers.
Second, while government provisions sometimes reach more people than
local mutual aid can, they usually exclude particularly vulnerable
people, like people who are criminalized, working in underground
economies, homeless, or undocumented. The welfare and income support
programs in the United States, ranging from old age and disability
benefits to support for families in poverty, are consist- ently designed
to ensure that women, people of color, and Indigenous people get left
out or get less. For
example, the New Deal, which emerged to quiet the anti-capitalist
rebellions brought on by the Great Depression and stabilize the
capitalist system, was designed so that women and domestic and agricul-
tural workers (disproportionately Black and Latinx) were excluded from
the benefits created. By tying many benefits to work, the New Deal also
perpetu- ated a status quo of grinding poverty for people with
disabilities.
Whenever we rely on a capitalist, imperialist system to provide vital
necessities, we can guess that the provisions will be fragile and
inadequate, and designed to transfer far more wealth toward the popu-
lations those systems were designed to support: white people, rich
people, straight people, and men. Often, the concessions are never
delivered at all, only prom- ised in an effort to quell resistance.
One pattern that is clear in regard to concessions is that, because the
aim of elites is to concede as little as possible and maintain the
status quo as much as possi- ble, we get more when we demand more and
build bolder, bigger pressure. It took mass movements threat- ening
capitalism’s very existence, like those seen during the Great Depression
and the 1960s uprisings against racism, just to get stigmatizing,
ungenerous welfare benefits. Decades of uprisings against police
brutality yielded only surface police reforms, many of which expanded
police budgets and numbers. Even unsatisfy- ing concessions, in other
words, only come with big, sustained, disruptive mobilizations.
Nonprofit leaders and politicians frequently encourage “pragmatism”
and peaceful incremental change, but the most radical imagination of
what we want, and the escalation of direct action to get it, is what is
truly pragmatic if we seek to win real change. Concessions won in
crises— crises of sudden disaster and crises created by powerful social
protest—will be as strong and lasting as the mobilizations that made
them necessary. Elites and their nonprofit gatekeepers encourage us to
make small, “reasonable,” or “winnable” demands, and they try to
redirect our action to official channels that are non-disruptive, with
narratives about “peaceful protest” and “coming to the table.” They
encourage reforms premised on the assumption that the systems we seek to
dismantle are fundamentally fair and fixa- ble. We have to refuse to
limit our visions to the conces- sions they want to give—what we want is
a radically different world that eliminates the systems that put our
lives under their control.
If concessions are signs of our impact, at best providing some relief to
some people but ultimately stabilizing existing systems, what would
winning look like? As we build mutual aid groups, what do we hope for if
not that the government, instead of us, will someday provide what we are
providing? If our current systems are based on illegitimate authority
and use coercion and violence to keep us tied to them, and if those
systems primarily pursue the aim of concentrating wealth and
decision-making power, what is the alternative?
From our current vantage point, living in a world with the most
militarized borders, the most expansive
surveillance technologies, the most severe concentra- tion of wealth,
the most imprisonment in human history, the most military bases and
high-tech weap- ons, and the most advanced mechanisms of propa- ganda,
it can be hard to imagine other ways of living. Disasters often
stimulate fantasies of a benevolent government as we face brutal
government failure and wish that things were different.
Part of the reason our dream of a savior govern- ment is so compelling
is that it is hard for us to imag- ine a world where we meet core human
needs through systems that are based on principles of collective
self-determination rather than coercion. We are accustomed to a
situation where the choice is between a government that either denies
the disas- ter’s significance and abandons people to its devas- tations
or a government that responds with inade- quate aid that comes with
enhanced policing, surveillance, militarization, and wealth transfers to
the top. This is no choice at all. Because of how capi- talism controls
the means for getting by—food, health, housing, communications,
transportation— and how dependent we are on systems we do not control,
it can be hard to imagine that we could survive another way. But for
most of human history, we did, and mutual aid projects let us relearn
that it’s possible and emancipatory.
Mutual aid projects let us practice meeting our own and each other’s
needs, based in shared commit- ments to dignity, care, and justice. They
let us practice coordinating our actions together with the belief that
all of us matter and that we should all get to partici- pate in the
solutions to our problems. They let us real- ize that we know best how
to address the crises we face. We don’t need to be saved by
professionals, government agents, or people elites consider “experts.”
Mutual aid cultivates the practices and structures that move us toward
our goal: a society organized by collective self-determination, where
people get a say in all parts of their lives rather than just facing the
coercive non-choice between sinking or swimming; between joining a
brutal and exploitive workforce, insurance scheme, or housing market, or
risk being left in the cold.
How do we imagine “scaling up” mutual aid to a point where everyone has
what they need, and gets to meaningfully co-govern and co-steward the
structures and conditions of their lives? Because of the domi- nance of
corporate and nonprofit models, people often think that “scaling up”
means centralizing and standardizing projects, but this runs directly
counter to the wisdom of mutual aid. “Scaling up” doesn’t mean making
groups bigger or merging them into one organization across a region,
state, or country. Locally operated mutual aid works better for meeting
people’s needs in all kinds of situations, including disasters, because
our needs are best met by those with the most local knowledge, and when
we are the ones making the decisions affecting us. Scaling up our mutual
aid work means building more and more mutual aid groups, copying each
other’s best practices, and adapting them to work for particular
neighborhoods,
subcultures, and enclaves. It means intergroup coordi- nation, the
sharing of resources and information, having each other’s backs, and
coming together in coalitions to take bigger actions like rent strikes,
labor strikes, or the toppling of corrupt governments and industries.
Factory takeovers, where workers push out owners and take control of the
factory, deciding together how it will run and making fair systems for
all, are good examples of this type of shift: a labor strike that
becomes a factory takeover is “scaling up.” Similarly, we might imagine
people working to create local energy grids using solar power. The grids
would be cultivated and cared for by the people using them, but they
might be sharing practices and resources with other groups building and
maintaining local grids. Governance and innovation remain local, but
knowledge, support, and solidarity are networked and shared.
To imagine a society where we share everything, co-govern everything,
have everything we need and don’t rely on coercion and domination, we
have to shed the capitalist propaganda that tells us people are
naturally greedy, and that without police keeping us in our places we
would all hoard and harm. Instead, we can notice, as is particularly
clear in times of disaster, that people are naturally connective and
generous, though we often have cultural baggage to shed from being
conditioned by white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Again and
again we see people sharing what little they have after storms, floods,
and fires, saving each other. Through mutual
aid projects, many of us get a chance to deepen those practices of
generosity, and make them long-term support systems that we co-govern to
help us all survive and mobilize for change.
Mutual aid is only one tactic in the social move- ment ecosystem. It
operates alongside direct action, political education, and many other
tactics. But it is the one that most successfully helps us grow our
movements and build our people power, because it brings people into
coordinated action to change things right now. As mutual aid expands in
the context of the COVID-19 crisis, in climate change– caused disaster
zones, and during economic crises, we have a chance to cultivate
millions of new resistance fighters, to teach ourselves to work together
in long- term ways, and to develop our ability to practice soli-
darity-based co-stewardship in all areas of collective life. The climate
crisis will continue to bring worsen- ing disasters into our communities
in the coming years and decades. The stronger we build our networks of
mutual aid now, the more prepared we will be to help each other survive
those disasters and transform our ways of living together toward
liberation.
PART II
Working Together
on Purpose
Mutual aid work is important for meeting people’s survival needs right
now, and for mobilizing hundreds of millions of people to join struggles
for justice and liberation. Most people newly fired up about injustice
are eager to work on the conditions happening to them or to people they
care about. Mutual aid projects are the on-ramp for people to get to
work right away on things they feel urgent about, plug into social move-
ments where they can learn more about things they are not yet mad about,
and build new solidarities.
This section of this book is for people who want to start mutual aid
projects or who are already in them and want to intentionally build
group cultures and structures that will help the work flourish. Chapter
4 describes some of the larger political pitfalls of mutual aid groups,
and chapter 5 turns to the nitty- gritty, providing tools for addressing
common obsta- cles in mutual aid work. This section includes things
groups can do to address conflict and avoid slipping
into charity-model or business-model practices, as well as ideas for
things individuals within groups can do to expand their own capacity to
do this work with as much compassion and care as possible—according to
our principles.
4
Some Dangers and Pitfalls of Mutual Aid
Even while they explicitly work to reject the charity model, mutual aid
projects can slip into some of the well-worn grooves of that model if we
don’t root deeply in our principles and practice careful discern- ment.
Mutual aid groups face four dangerous tenden- cies: dividing people into
those who are deserving and undeserving of help, practicing saviorism,
being co-opted, and collaborating with efforts to eliminate public
infrastructure and replace it with private enter- prise and
volunteerism.
People start mutual aid projects because existing programs or other
services are not meeting people’s needs, and often are leaving out
particular groups of vulnerable people. The notorious failures of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the face of disaster are a
good example. The 2018 Camp Fire in California was the deadliest and
most
destructive wildfire in the state’s history, the worst wildfire in the
United States in a century, and the most expensive natural disaster in
the world that year. At least 85 people were killed in the fire, over
18,800 structures were destroyed, 52,000 people were evacu- ated, and
the total damage was estimated at $16.5 billion. A tent city of people
displaced by the fire emerged in a Walmart parking lot in Chico,
California. In the days following the fire, as displaced people with
more resources began to leave the tent city because they could afford to
find new housing or stay with family or friends, city officials and
media portrayed the people that remained as ordinary home- less and
itinerant people who were “undeserving” of help, rather than as
sympathetic fire survivors. The hierarchy of deservingness is built into
FEMA’s eligi- bility process, which excludes people who cannot confirm
an address before the disaster, such as home- less people or people
living in poor communities where individual dwellings are sometimes not
given an individual mailing address.
The distinction between deserving and undeserv- ing disaster survivors
rests on the idea that suddenly displaced renters and homeowners are
sympathetic victims, while people who were already displaced by the
ordinary disasters of capitalism—and are espe- cially vulnerable after
an acute disaster like a storm or fire—are blameworthy and do not
deserve aid. As I argued above, state and nonprofit disaster recovery
and social services models generally work to stabilize the existing
distribution of wealth, not transform it,
so it makes sense that they provide little or nothing to the poorest
people.
After disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, the federal
government offered loans to homeowners and business owners, and smaller
loans to renters for replacing personal property. Only those who were
deemed to be “creditworthy” could qualify, and many of those who
qualified still never saw a penny. People in crisis are unlikely to be
helped by having more debt—but putting them in debt does make money for
banks reaping the interest. Similarly, during the initial COVID-19
outbreak in the United States, the federal government offered loans for
businesses suffering economic losses. Almost immediately, stories broke
about how giant corporations like Shake Shack and Potbelly received
millions while small businesses owned by people of color received the
least. Among individual workers, those with the most precarious jobs
were cut out of unemployment benefits and the stimulus checks that were
supposed to provide relief. Undocumented people were ineligible for
relief. Disaster relief and poor relief are designed to uphold and
worsen inequalities. Deservingness narratives justify those designs.
Even though mutual aid projects often emerge because of an awareness of
how relief programs exclude people marked “undeserving” or “ineligible,”
mutual aid groups still sometimes set up their own problematic
deservingness hierarchies. For example, mutual aid projects replicate
moralizing eligibility frameworks when they require sobriety, exclude
people with certain types of convictions, only include families with
children, or stigmatize and exclude people with psychiatric disabilities
for not fitting behavioral norms.
In his book Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics, Myrl Beam
tells the story of a Minneapolis group founded by queer and trans youth
to support their community. As the group formalized and got funding, it
diverged from its initial mission and commitment to youth governance and
became dominated by adults. The group began to work with the local
police to check warrants for youth who came to the drop-in space. This
functionally excluded crim- inalized youth—disproportionately youth of
color— from the space and endangered people who came seeking help,
turning what had been a mutual aid group into an extension of the local
police depart- ment. When mutual aid projects make more stigma- tized
people ineligible for what they are offering, they replicate the charity
model.
The charity model often ties aid and criminaliza- tion together,
determining who gets help and who gets put away, as we can see in this
account from a Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) participant:
After Hurricane Irma, a local sheriff announced that, “If you go to a
shelter for Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly escort you to the
safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail.” [This] . . .
essentially weaponizes aid against the most vulnerable and put[s]
numerous lives in
danger . . . There is always a shocking number of guns that show up
after a disaster. A dehydrated child without access to electricity or
air condition- ing in the blazing Florida or Texas or Puerto Rico sun,
needs somebody carrying Pedialyte, not an M16.
Mutual aid projects must also be wary of saviorism, self-congratulation,
and paternalism. Populations facing crisis are cast as in need of
saving, and their saviors are encouraged to use their presumed superi-
ority to make over these people and places, replacing old, dysfunctional
ways of being with smarter, more profitable, and more moral ones. In the
wake of Hurricane Katrina, politicians, nonprofiteers, celeb- rity
philanthropists, and corporations conspired to remake the city of New
Orleans and the people in it by implementing devastating “innovations”
that elim- inated public housing, permanently displaced Black residents,
privatized schools, and destroyed public health infrastructure. After
storms, floods, and fires, there is often this kind of push to “rebuild”
in ways that center the plans and dreams of elites and do real harm to
the populations who have lost the most.
Paternalism is also visible in programs within welfare and criminal
punishment systems that force criminalized people and people seeking
welfare bene- fits to take parenting classes, budgeting classes, and
anger management seminars. The idea that those
giving aid need to “fix” people who are in need is based on the notion
that people’s poverty and margin- alization is not a systemic problem
but is caused by their own personal shortcomings. This also implies that
those who provide aid are superior.
Mutual aid projects and their individual partici- pants must actively
resist savior narratives. These ideas are so pervasive that even those
who have a systemic analysis of vulnerability still sometimes fall into
the trap. Most mutual aid projects benefit from an explicit ongoing
effort to build shared analysis among participants about the harms of
saviorism and the necessity of self-determination for people in crisis.
For decades, politicians have combined attacks on public infrastructure
and public services with an endorsement of privatization and
volunteerism. As public services are cut, politicians push for already
inadequate social safety nets to be replaced by family and church,
implying that those who fail to belong to either deserve abandonment.
Alongside the destruc- tion of public welfare, public-private
partnerships are celebrated and bolstered by the fiction that everything
from hospitals to prisons to city governments should be “run like a
business.” The prevailing myth is that business models are more
“efficient.” The truth is that making everything profit-centered, as
we’ve seen with our health care system, actually degrades the
care that people receive, as businesses seek short-term gains at any
expense.
A cultural narrative about “social justice entrepre- neurship” has also
emerged in recent decades, suggest- ing that people should not fight for
justice but rather invent (and patent) new ways of managing poor people
and social problems. One example of this kind of “entrepreneurship” that
has received media fanfare is Samaritan and other smartphone apps that
coordi- nate digital donations to homeless people in ways that ensure
restrictions on how they can use the cash. These apps are more focused
on the experience of the giver than on the person in need of aid, and
are designed to make the giver more comfortable by knowing their
donation can only be used at local partner businesses, or if the
homeless person’s coun- selor authorizes it for a specific purpose like
rent. This is typical of the kind of “innovation” that the social
justice entrepreneurship model celebrates—it embraces ideas of
paternalism central to the charity model, focuses aid on making donors
“feel good,” and has no connection to work that aims to get to the root
causes of the problem. In fact, it is being devel- oped by the same tech
industry that has gentrified cities and increased housing insecurity.
In this atmosphere, mutual aid projects have to work hard to remain
oppositional to the status quo and cultivate resistance, rather than
becoming complementary to privatization. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey
in 2017, corporate media news stories of boat owners volunteering to
make rescues
followed this script, neither criticizing government failures to rescue
people nor interrogating the cause of worsening hurricanes and whom they
most endan- gered. That is, the media stories of individual heroes hid
the social and political conditions producing the crisis. Politicians
and CEOs, who fantasize about a world where nothing is guaranteed and
most people are desperate and easily exploited, love the idea of
volunteerism replacing a social safety net. If we don’t design mutual
aid projects with care, we can fit right into this conservative dream,
becoming the people who can barely hold the threads of a survivable
world together while the 1 percent extracts more and more while
heroizing individual volunteers.
We can see this struggle to resist co-optation in the work of mutual aid
projects that support people who have been criminalized. Programs that
divert some arrestees from the criminal system to social services or
drug treatment, or that provide mediation between people who have done
harm and those they have harmed as an alternative to the criminal legal
process, can keep people out of jail or prison. However, they can also
become non-disruptive adjuncts to carceral control, as they
professionalize and become funded and shaped by police and courts. In
Seattle, for example, throughout a seven-year fight to stop the building
of a new youth jail, public officials have relentlessly used the small
diversion programs run primarily by people of color—which receive
minimal amounts of public funding—as cover to argue that King County has
already addressed concerns about youth incarceration through progressive
work with community partners. They have gone so far as to co-opt the
ideas of the youth jail opponents, pass- ing legislation stating that
the city and county are committed to “zero youth detention.” Meanwhile,
the County built a youth jail for hundreds of millions of dollars. This
story of a local government co-opting the message of the radical
opposition, and showcasing grassroots, community-initiated programs to
legitimize expansion of the racist infrastructure of state violence is
chilling and highlights the thorny terrain of co-opta- tion that mutual
aid projects must navigate.
Mutual aid projects may appear to overlap with privatization and
volunteerism in that participants critique certain social service models
and believe that voluntary participation in care and crisis work is
necessary. But the critiques of public safety nets made by mutual aid
project participants are not the same as those of neoliberal politicians
and corporations who tout volunteerism. 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 redis-
tribute care and well-being, as part of larger move- ments that work to
dismantle the systems that concen- trate wealth in the hands of the 1
percent.
The difference between neoliberal projects and mutual aid approaches is
well illustrated when we compare the privatization of fire services with
the work of the Oakland Power Projects (OPP), which
seeks to build an alternative to calling 911. Increasingly, public
firefighting services are inade- quate and are facing further cuts, all
in the midst of climate change–induced fires. Meanwhile, the private
firefighting business is growing, with wealthy home- owners paying for
private fire services to come seal their homes, spray fire retardants on
the premises, and put owners in five-star hotels while less affluent
people watch their homes burn, struggle in shelters, and fight FEMA for
basic benefits. Fire profiteers aim to create a context in which only
those who can pay get help or protection in the case of a fire, which
means fires will be more deadly, the rich will get richer, and the poor
will get poorer.
In contrast, the OPP emerged out of anti-police and anti-prison movement
groups who observed that when people call 911 for emergency medical
help, the police also come, hurting and sometimes killing those who
called for help. In response, the OPP works to train people in
communities impacted by police violence to provide emergency medical
care for gunshot wounds, chronic health problems like diabe- tes, and
mental health crises. If people can take care of each other, they can
avoid calling 911 and avoid a confrontation with the police. This
strategy is part of broader work to dismantle policing and criminaliza-
tion, and it works to both meet immediate needs and mobilize people to
build an alternative infrastructure for crisis response guided by a
shared commitment to ending racist police violence and medical neglect.
Note that, although the OPP and private firefighting
both provide an alternative to inadequate public services, they are not
the same at all: instead of profit- ing and only serving those who can
pay, the OPP’s programs build new ways of responding that allow those on
the bottom to work together to meet survival needs while dismantling
racist infrastructure.
Many powerful lessons about co-optation come out of the feminist
movement against domestic violence. That movement started with mutual
aid projects, such as volunteer-run shelters for violence survivors and
defense campaigns for women criminalized for killing their abuser or
attacker. Unfortunately, the anti– domestic violence movement emerged at
the same time that criminalization was about to balloon in the United
States. The mass uprisings of the 1960s and ’70s brought a huge crisis
of legitimacy to policing, with Black liberation, anti-racist, feminist,
queer, and Indigenous movements protesting and exposing police violence.
In response, US law enforcement worked hard to repair its public image,
doing things like hiring cops of color, creating new police roles in
schools through initiatives like the D.A.R.E. program, and creating
programs and campaigns to portray the police as the protectors of women
and children. Toward this end, law enforcement sought out alliances with
the emerging anti–domestic violence movement, support- ing new laws that
increased punishment for gender- based violence and providing money for
groups will- ing to cooperate with police.
This drastically changed the anti–domestic violence movement. It shifted
from centering
volunteer-based, grassroots mutual aid projects to emphasizing larger
nonprofits, often run by white people with advanced degrees. These
groups increas- ingly towed the line of a pro-police message and
advocated for increased criminalization, meanwhile taking on
charity-model approaches that treated people seeking help in punitive
and paternalizing ways. This shift increased the criminalization of
communities of color, made the services less accessi- ble to the most
vulnerable survivors of violence, and provided good public relations for
police, prosecu- tors, and courts.
Notably, these co-optive approaches also failed to reduce gender-based
violence. Research has shown that pro-criminalization policy reforms
that became popular in this period, like mandatory arrest laws requiring
police to make arrests during domestic violence calls, resulted in the
arrests of abuse survi- vors, especially if they were queer, trans,
disabled, or people of color. This is a sobering story of how
co-optation can undermine our efforts to meet survival needs and cause
us to contribute to legitimiz- ing or expanding the very systems that
are harming us.
At the same time, these events also produced a vibrant resistance from
which we can learn much in developing mutual aid work that resists
co-optation. Women of color, working-class and immigrant femi- nists,
and feminists with disabilities have powerfully resisted this shift
toward criminalization in the move- ment against gender violence. They
have created
mutual aid projects to address harm and violence that refuse to
collaborate with police.
This work is often called “community accountabil- ity” or
“transformative justice.” It includes many innovative strategies
developed in mutual aid groups. Drawing on lessons from years of
experience, Creative Interventions authored a six-hundred-page guide on
how to address sexual violence and family violence through community
support and problem solving. GenerationFIVE and the Bay Area
Transformative Justice Collective have designed approaches to address-
ing child sexual abuse that aim to get to the root causes and stop it,
rather than just criminalizing the small percentage of people who get
caught. Hundreds of local groups like Philly Stands Up and For Crying
Out Loud have developed processes for supporting survi- vors of violence
and confronting harm-doers, working with them to figure out what they
need to never inflict the harm again. These processes sometimes last
several years, with community members providing harm- doers with support
for their sobriety, mental health, and housing needs, deepening
understanding of their behaviors and their beliefs about gender and
sexuality, and doing whatever else they need to stop the behavior.
The goal of this kind of work is to do the things that the criminal
punishment approaches fail to do: give the survivor support to heal,
give the harm-doer what they need to stop the behavior, and assess how
community norms can change to decrease the likeli- hood of harm in
general, such as by providing healthy
relationship skills training, addressing a culture of substance misuse,
and changing community ideas about sexuality and gender. The Safe
OUTside the System Collective, a part of the Audre Lorde Project in New
York City, has engaged a variety of tactics to address violence against
queer and trans people of color, including police violence. One strategy
it devel- oped was building relationships with people working in
businesses in a Brooklyn neighborhood where violence often occurred,
asking those bodega cashiers, restaurant staff, and other workers to
provide a place for people to run for help if something is happening on
the street, a place that pledges to not call the police. This
community-wide work of building long-term relationships increased those
people’s preparedness for helping people in need and de-escalating
situa- tions, which increased safety in the neighborhood.
Some transformative justice work is focused on prevention, and some is
focused on providing support after something happens. Both are mutual
aid approaches, since they address immediate survival needs with a
recognition that the systems that are supposed to guarantee safety—the
cops, prosecutors, and courts—fail to do so and actually make things
worse. These mutual aid projects work to build a new world, where people
create safety through community building and support each other to stop
harmful behavior through connection rather than through caging.
These feminist activists and groups with an anti- police, anti-violence
politics also developed much of
the analysis that informs this book. They identified how the system of
nonprofitization and pressure from funders were pushing anti-violence
work toward criminalization, how mutual aid approaches were undermined
when domestic violence shelters and hotlines became more like social
services, and how the co-optation of anti-violence work undermined
solidarity, further endangering communities most targeted by police.
Their wisdom can guide us in building successful groups and movements
and in resisting co-optation.
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 lots of people, rather than just a few people who have
been declared “experts” or “profes- sionals.” If we want to provide
survival support to as many people as possible, and mobilize as many
people as possible for root-causes change, we need to let a lot of
people do the work and make decisions about the work together, rather
than bottlenecking the process with hierarchies that let only a few
people lead.
Despite these important goals, avoiding the pitfalls of co-optation,
deservingness hierarchies, saviorism, and disconnect from root-causes
work requires constant vigilance. The last half-century of social
movement history is full of examples of mutual aid groups that, under
pressure from law enforcement, funders, and culture, transformed into
charity or social services groups and lost much of their transformative
capacity. Here are some guiding questions for mutual aid groups trying
to avoid these dangers and pitfalls:
Who controls our project?
Who makes decisions about what we do?
Does any of the funding we receive come with strings attached that limit
who we help or how we help?
Do any of our guidelines about who can partici- pate in our work cut out
stigmatized and vulner- able people?
What is our relationship to law enforcement?
How do we introduce new people in our group to our approach to law
enforcement?
While there is no single correct model for a mutual aid group, being
aware of general tendencies that distinguish mutual aid from other
projects can help groups make thoughtful decisions and maintain their
integrity and effectiveness. To help us think through where things can
get slippery, the chart below tracks characteristics within mutual aid
groups against those of groups working in the charity model. It may be a
good discussion prompt for a mutual aid group to clarify shared values
or find areas of agreement and disagreement, or desire for further
inquiry.
De-professionalized survival work done by volunteers
Service work staffed by professionals
Beg, borrow, and steal supplies
Grant money for supplies/phil- anthropic control of program
Use people power to resist any efforts by government to regu- late or
shut down activities
Follow government regulations about how the work needs to happen
(usually requiring more money, causing reliance on grants, paid staff
with professional degrees)
Survival work rooted in princi- ples of anti-capitalism, anti-
imperialism, racial justice, gender justice, disability justice
Siloed single-issue work, serv- ing a particular population or working
on one area of policy reform, disconnected from other issues
Open meetings, with as many people making decisions and doing the work
as possible
Closed board meetings, governance by professionals or people associated
with big institutions or donors, program operated by staff, volunteers
limited to stuffing envelopes or other menial tasks, volunteers not part
of high-level
decision-making
Support people facing the most dire conditions
Impose eligibility criteria for services that divide people into
“deserving” and “unde- serving” recipients
Give things away without expectations
Set conditions for getting help—recipients have to fill out onerous
paperwork, be sober, have a certain family status, have a certain immi-
gration status, not have outstanding warrants, certain convictions, etc.
People participate voluntarily because of their passion about injustice
and care for their community
People come looking for a job, wanting to climb a hierarchy, build a
career, or become “important”
Efforts to flatten hierarchies— e.g., flat wage scales if anyone is
paid, training so that new people can do work they weren’t
professionally trained to do, rotating facilitation roles, language
access
Maintaining hierarchies of pay, status, decision-making power, influence
that are typical of the mainstream culture (e.g., lawyers are more
valuable and important than non-lawyers)
Values self-determination for people impacted or targeted by harmful
social conditions
Offers “help” to the “under- privileged,” absent of an awareness or
strategy for transforming the conditions that produced injustice;
embraces paternalism, rescue fantasies, and saviorism
Consensus decision-making to maximize everyone’s participa- tion, to
ensure people impacted by decisions are the ones making them, to avoid
under-represented groups getting outvoted, and to build the skill of
caring about each other’s participation and concerns rather than caring
about winning or being right
Person on top (often the exec- utive director) decides things or, in
some instances, a board votes and the majority wins
Direct aid work is connected to other tactics, including disruptive
tactics aimed at the root causes of distress
Direct aid work disconnected from other tactics, depoliti- cized, and
distanced from disruptive or root causes– oriented tactics in order to
retain legitimacy with govern- ment or funders
Tendency to assess the work based on how the people facing the crisis
regard the work
Tendency to assess the work based on opinions of elites: political
officials, bureaucrats, funders, corporate media
“Members” = people making decisions, usually everyone involved in doing
the work and/or getting help from the group
“Members” = donors
Engagement with the group builds broader political partici- pation,
solidarity, mobiliza- tion, radicalization
Engagement with the group is not aimed at growing partici- pants’
connection to other issues, groups, or struggles for justice; main focus
is to meet grant deliverables and give the organization a good public
reputation with funders, media, elected officials
5
No Masters, No Flakes
One downside to the urgency that we bring to our mutual aid work can be
that we dive right into the work, very concerned about how many people
our project is help- ing, but fail to create good internal practices for
our group to be strong and sustainable. It makes sense that we are not
good at creating emancipatory group struc- tures. Most of us have never
been in groups that had fair, participatory, transparent structures.
We’ve been work- ing at jobs where bosses tell us what to do, or been in
schools, families, state institutions, or churches where strong
hierarchies rule and most people get no say in how things will go. We do
not have much practice imagining or being in groups where everyone can
truly participate in decision-making.
In addition, we are used to being part of groups that ignore ordinary
caring labor, much of which is seen as women’s work, like cooking and
cleaning and conflict mediation, while celebrating only the final,
outward- looking evidence of production: the big protest march, the
finalized legislation, the release of someone from prison, the media
coverage. We have not been taught to notice or care about how things
went along the way to a
victory, whether people’s capacity for confronting the next challenge
was improved, or whether it was destroyed through burnout or damaging
group dynamics. Capitalism makes us think about short-term gains, not
building the long-term capacity for all of our well-being. This can make
it easy to go for the quick fix and ignore the damage we might be doing
to each other along the way. Many of us think “process is boring.”
Everyone wants a selfie with Angela Davis at the big event, but many
people are less interested in the months of meet- ings where we
coordinate how to pull off that event according to our values and handle
the challenges of organizing.
But we must build strong structures for our projects if we want this
work to be effective at saving lives and mobilizing people. This is
essential to any effort to address injustice. Building efficient,
participatory, trans- parent decision-making structures and cultures of
care and principled action in our groups takes intentional work, but it
is crucial for allowing our groups to flourish and win. If we do it
right, it can help prevent the conflicts that tend to tear groups apart,
divide participants from each other, and drive people away.
Groups are more effective and efficient when partici- pants know how to
raise concerns, how to propose ideas, when a decision has been made and
by whom, and how to put that decision into practice. People who have
gotten to participate in decision-making and feel co-ownership of the
project stick around and do the work. People who feel unclear about
whether their opinion matters or how to be part of making decisions tend
to drift away. Strong
structures also help us plug in new people, orient them to the work,
train them in skills they need to build, and give them roles they want.
Chart 2. Default Approaches to Organizing Groups
Practices Approach
Hierarchy Abuse of power;
Burnout of a few people and no way for others to plug in; Unprincipled
behavior by people at the top; People at the top can
Horizontal decision- making structure based on consensus that prevents
decision- making from being concentrated in one person or a small group,
be bought off by atten- and that can help tasks
tion, career opportuni- ties, or money
and roles get distributed to many people
Vague deci- sion-making process
Individuals make deci- sions without consult- ing others; Some deci-
sions don’t get made in time; Conflict over decisions
Clear decision-making processes that everyone is trained in and that
include all members
Leadership held by people who have seniority or self-select
New people drift away because they do not feel real co-steward- ship of
the group; White people, men, and others with social privilege dominate
Training new people in how to participate fully in decisions and in new
skills and roles; Cultivating a culture of group participation,
feminism, anti-racism
Clear structures help us stick to our values under pressure—and we’ve
already looked at many of the larger pitfalls that mutual aid groups can
fall into, so
we know what’s at stake. In groups that aren’t clear about
decision-making, it is much easier for a leader to get seduced by money
or prestige and sell out a group’s core values for a job, a grant, or a
moment in the spot- light. It is easier for law enforcement to
infiltrate and destroy the group. It is also easier for participants to
get burnt out on organizing. As I’ll discuss below, burnout is often
caused by conflict or by a failure to delegate decisions and tasks. A
clear structure can help prevent conflict or provide ways to move
through it, and can help make sure that people are sharing
responsibility.
This chapter will explore three organizational tendencies that often
emerge in mutual aid groups that can cause problems, and provide ideas
for how to avoid them:
One. Secrecy, hierarchy, and lack of clarity. Many groups that fail to
create clear decision-making methods and caring, emancipatory cultures
end up with participants not knowing what is going on or who is making
decisions, having all the decision- making concentrate in one person or
clique, and risk the group being torn apart by conflict because of these
dynamics.
Two. Over-promising and under-delivering, non- responsiveness, and
elitism. Many groups bite off more than they can chew, promising to help
more people than they can help or making it seem like they have a
community need covered when they don’t
actually have the capacity to address it. This problem seems to be
exacerbated when groups receive grants for specific projects, so there
is money at stake in falsely claiming to be able to accomplish more than
they are able. It also happens when people are not making decisions
together and someone makes promises for the whole group without
consulting everyone else about whether that work is a priority or a
possibility. This tendency can include being non- responsive, especially
to community members in need, and sometimes being over-responsive to
elites. Many groups, especially when money or ego is involved, answer
calls from media or elected officials, but not from the community
members they are supposed to serve.
Three. Scarcity, urgency, competition. Some groups also develop a
culture of scarcity (of money, time, attention, and labor), which makes
sense given the real scarcity that exists in many of our lives under
capitalism. However, when we do our work from a feeling that there is
not enough money, time, or attention to go around, we some- times get
competitive with other groups or with other people within our group, or
we feel so much urgency about particular tasks that we don’t take the
necessary steps to do our task well, and we forget about being kind to
each other in our rush to get something done. This can lead to conflict
or making mistakes that harm our communities.
Chart 3. Tendencies That Harm Groups
Harmful Tendencies
What Leadership
What Participation
Dangers What We Want Instead
Looks Like Looks Like
Secrecy, Hierarchy, Lack of Clarity
Over- Promising and Under- Delivering, Non-res- pons- iveness, Elitism
Decisions made by one person or small group; Not clear to newcomers how
decisions are made;
No clear procedures about decisions
One or more people making prom- ises about what the group will do
without consulting everyone; Group not responsive to the commu- nity it
serves,
Be or follow the charis- matic leader; If the leader disappears or sells
out, the group does; Confusion about roles and decisions
Participants don’t get a say in whether the group takes on more work;
Being over- worked and over extended; Conflict over workloads and unmet
needs; Charismatic leaders can
New people never able to plug in; Theft of resources; Conflict about
decisions; Cliques
Burnout; Conflict; Loss of align- ment with group princi- ples; Co-
optation by elites
Trans- parency; Shared participatory decision- making; Leaderless and
leaderful with every- one
co-leading
Clear plan- ning processes and shared decisions about work- load;
Account- ability to community being served, especially
yet responsive easily sell out its most
Scarcity, Urgency,
to elites and media
Competition within the
for attention or money
Exhaustion; Conflict about
Burnout; Conflict;
vulnerable members
Cooper- ation;
Competition group or
priorities and
Damage to
Generosity;
between the
over-extension; relationships
Planning
group and others doing related work for attention or resources; Rushed
decision- making
Blame between members about who cares most or does the most work
inside the group and with other groups doing related work; Benefits the
opposition to our movement
and pacing the work based on the group’s collective wisdom and
abilities; Staying in it for the long haul
This section will provide tools for addressing these tendencies in our
groups and in ourselves, so that we can cultivate transparency,
integrity, and generosity in our work and build our capacities to avoid
the pitfalls discussed in chapter 4. We will look at what decision-
making and leadership look like when these tendencies prevail, what
alternatives to these ways of working look like, and what personal
qualities and behaviors we need to cultivate to address these
tendencies.
Groups have cultures. Group culture is built from the signals we give
people when they join or attend an event, norms the group follows, how
we celebrate together, how we engage in small talk, what our meetings
feel like, how we give feedback to each other, and more. Group cultures
often reflect the personalities and ingrained behaviors and responses of
the founders. If the founder is vague and loose with money, or often
late to meetings, the group may be that way; or if the founder loves to
sing at the end of meetings, the group may keep that practice going for
a long time. But group culture also changes as new people come in and as
conditions change. We can make intentional decisions to change group
culture by having conversations about a group’s tendencies and methods,
talking about what is working and what is not, reflecting on how our own
behavior can match what we want to see, and influencing each other.
There is no one correct or perfect group culture.
Groups should be different from each other because
the people in them are different and we all bring different qualities,
skills, and viewpoints. Ideally, we want a group culture that supports
participants in doing the work they came together to do, to be well, and
to build generative relationships. In some groups that means people will
form sexual and romantic connections with people they meet in the group.
In others, that would be inappropriate or harmful, and the group will
create a culture that discourages it. In some groups, people will love
to sing and dance together, and in some groups people will want to
engage in spiritual rituals together. In some groups, the nature of the
work makes it essential to maintain certain forms of secrecy and
security, to protect members who are taking bold actions. In others,
culti- vating openness to new members will be essential for bringing
lots of people into the work.
The chart below is designed to provoke conversation about group culture
among people already in a project or those about to start one. For those
already in a project, the chart can be used to assess what the group
culture is currently like. And even if there has only been one
conversation so far about starting a project, the norms that the people
in that conversation may be likely to bring to the group’s emerging
culture will already be noticeable. This chart can be used to talk about
strengths and weaknesses participants have experienced before in other
groups, including families, jobs, schools, and congregations, and what
they want to emulate or avoid reproducing in this current group.
Chart 4. Qualities of Group Cultures
Reliable, responsible, punc- tual, follows through
Flaky, late, no follow-through
Welcoming to new people Unwelcoming
Flexible, experimental Rigid, bureaucratic, formulaic Collaborative
Isolationist, competitive
Realistic workload, sustainable work flow, real culture of well- ness
and care
Overworking, perfectionist, martyrdom
Direct feedback and growth Silence and/or gossip and shit
talk
Sticks to values Sells out, easily bought off, pushover when faced with
political or financial pressure
Humble Superior (can include taking credit for others’ work, refus- ing
to hear feedback)
Sharing work well A few people do most of the work
Fun, celebratory, appreciative of each other
Serious, resentful, stressful
Forgiving Holding grudges (between people inside the project and toward
outside people and groups)
Able to have generative conflict and learn, repair
Being conflict-avoidant or letting conflicts explode but never reach
resolution
Clarity about procedures Confusion
Human pace with clear priori- ties and realistic expectations
Rushed pace
Transparency Secrecy
Generous Having a scarcity mind-set, penny-pinching
Real contradictions exist in the above chart. We want to be flexible,
and we also want to have a culture of responsiveness, reliability, and
punctuality. How do we work to cultivate both? Most of us, having
received our concept of responsibility from dominant culture, associ-
ate it with being forced, lured, or shamed into being “good,” ignoring
our needs, and fearing punishment if we do wrong. How do we hold our
values of flexibility, compassion, and justice while building a culture
where we show up and do what we said we would? These tensions are real.
If we do not talk about them together, we run the risk of falling into
automatic behaviors, driv- ing out new people, and falling apart.
Creating a group culture intentionally, and having a shared vision about
how we want it to be does not mean we all need to be just like each
other. We can acknowledge differences in our capacities, talents,
desires, and difficulties and still aim to create a culture where we
support each other in the work, learn new skills, and are connected and
kind to each other. The goal is not that everyone be similar, but that
we all complement each other and build some shared practices based in
shared values.
MADR’s slogan is “No Masters, No Flakes,” and it’s a great summary of
key principles for collective mutual aid work. This dual focus on
rejecting hierarchies inside the organization and committing to build
accountability according to shared values asks participants to keep
showing up and working together not because a boss is making you, but
because you want to.
Perhaps the most central group activity that makes everything else
possible is making decisions. When we do it well, we make good decisions
on the basis of the best information available, we feel heard by each
other, and we are all motivated to implement what we decided. When we do
it poorly, our decisions are unwise, some people are left resentful or
hurt or disconnected from the group, and there is less motivation to
proceed together on purpose.
Most of us have little experience in groups where everyone gets to make
decisions together, because our schools, homes, workplaces,
congregations, and other groups are mostly run as hierarchies. Our
society runs on coercion. You have to work or go to school and follow
rules and laws that you had no say in creating, whether you believe in
them or not, or risk exclusion, stigma, starvation, or punishment. We do
not get to consent to the conditions we live under. Bosses,
corporations, and government officials make decisions that impoverish
most people, pollute our planet, concentrate wealth, and start wars. We
are only practiced at being allowed to make decisions as individual
consumers, and rarely get practice making truly collective decisions. We
are told we live in a system of “majority rule,” yet there is rarely
anyone to vote for who is not owned by—or part of— the 1 percent, and
the decisions those leaders make do not benefit the majority of people.
The opposite of this approach to decision-making is to make decisions
together, caring about every person’s
consent. This practice is called consensus decision- making. Unlike
representative government, consensus decision-making lets us have a say
in things that matter to us directly, instead of electing someone who
may or may not advocate on our behalf. Consensus decision- making is a
radical practice for building a new world not based on domination and
coercion.
It’s important to remember that no decision-making structure can prevent
all conflict or power dynamics, or guarantee that we will never be
frustrated or bored or decide to part ways. But consensus
decision-making at least helps us avoid the worst costs of hierarchies
and majority rule, which can include abuse of power, demo- bilization of
most people, and inefficiency. Consensus decision-making gives us the
best chance to hear from everyone concerned, address power dynamics, and
make decisions that represent the best wisdom of the group and that
people in the group will want to implement.
What Is Consensus Decision-Making?
Consensus decision-making is based on the idea that everyone should have
a say in decisions that affect them. If we are working on a project
together, we should all get to decide how we are going to do the work,
rather than someone telling us how to do it. We will honor people’s
different levels of experience and wisdom as we listen to each other’s
ideas, but we will not follow some- one just because they act bossy, got
here first, or have a higher social status in the dominant culture
because they are a professional, white, older, male, formally
educated, etc. Consensus decision-making happens when everyone in the
discussion hashes out possibilities and modifies a proposal until
everyone can live with it. Consensus is cooperative rather than
adversarial. When we use “majority rule,” the goal is to get as many
people as possible to prefer your approach to another, and to “win” by
getting things your way. That means that we disregard the needs and
concerns of anyone who cannot muster majority support. Consensus
encourages us to find out what each other’s concerns are and try to
create a path forward that addresses all the concerns as well as
possible. It is based on the belief that people can cooper- ate and care
about each other’s well-being, rather than the myth that we are
naturally competitive and greedy.
Consensus cultivates interest in the whole group’s purpose and wellness,
rather than cultivating a desire to have things exactly “my way.” In
consensus, any partici- pant can block a decision, so we take time to
actually talk through each member’s concerns because we cannot move
forward without each other. Because we are trying to build agreement by
modifying the proposal until it comes as close as possible to meeting
the full range of needs and concerns, we also build the skill of making
decisions with group members and community members in mind, not just
ourselves or our cliques, and being okay with something that is not our
most preferred version going forward. That is, we learn to imagine how
decisions affect all of us differently, and how to productively move
forward taking other people’s needs and desires into account. People can
“stand aside” in consensus processes, letting others know that while
they are not totally behind
this proposal, they agree it is best for the group to go forward with
the decision, given all the views that have been expressed and the
efforts made to address concerns. Here’s an example of what consensus
could ideally look like: Over a period of time, a group has hashed out a
proposal, heard concerns in collective discussions, and tweaked it until
it seems like everyone may be ready to agree. Someone then calls for
consensus and checks to see if there are any “stand asides”—those who
want to signify disagreement but don’t want to block the proposal from
moving forward—or “blocks”—those with disagreements significant enough
that they feel the proposal cannot be passed without modifica- tion. If
there are blocks, it means the proposal needs more work. The person or
people blocking can share their concerns, and the group can either work
further on modifying the proposal then and there, or have some people
work on it and come up with a way forward before the next meeting. If no
one blocks, but many people stand aside, the group may decide to discuss
the reasons for the stand asides for a bit longer and see if they can be
resolved by making the proposal better. If someone finds themselves
blocking a lot, it may be worth examining whether they are in the right
group—do they believe in the shared purpose?—or whether they are
withholding their views earlier in the process, or feeling not
listened to in the group. In general, blocking should be rare.
It is worth noting that this process often unfolds over multiple
meetings, with Step 1 happening at one meet- ing and a group of people
agreeing to come to the next meeting with a developed proposal to be
discussed.
Consensus decision-making does not mean that every decision is made by
the whole group. Decisions can still
be delegated to teams working on implementing part of the group’s larger
plan. For example, if the group does grocery deliveries, a specific team
can work on filling out the delivery schedule and assignments. Sorting
out what decisions are delegated to teams and what is a whole- group
decision will be discussed below.
This chart summarizes the consensus process:
Chart 5. Basic Steps to Consensus Decision-Making
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Step 5
Step 6
For consensus to work well, people need a common purpose; some degree of
trust in each other; an under- standing of the consensus process; a
willingness to put the best interests of the group at the center (which
does not mean people let themselves be harmed “for the good of the
group,” but may mean being okay not always getting their way); a
willingness to spend time preparing and discussing proposals; and
skillful facilitation and agenda preparation. These skills and qualities
can develop as any new group learns to work together—it is okay that we
don’t have all these in place at the start. The greatest area of
strength for most mutual aid groups is a common purpose.
Advantages of Consensus Decision-Making
Better Decisions
When more people get to talk through a decision openly, sharing their
insight without fear of reprisal from a boss, parent, or teacher, more
relevant information and wisdom about the topic is likely to surface. In
hierarchi- cal organizations, people are discouraged from sharing their
opinion either because no one is listening or because they could
experience negative consequences for disagreeing. Because hierarchy is
so ingrained in our culture, people on top often fall into dominance
behav- iors without meaning to, assuming the superiority of their ideas,
not taking other’s opinions seriously, or unilaterally making decisions
and telling others to implement them. If we are trying to build a world
where
people have collective self-determination, where we get to make
justice-centered decisions together about land, work, housing, water,
minerals, energy, food, and every- thing else that matters, we need to
practice new skills beyond dominance and submission in decision-making.
Better Implementation
When other people make decisions for us and we don’t get to raise
concerns or disagreements, we are less likely to want to implement them.
This happens all the time at workplaces. Bosses decide how things will
be done, and employees think the method is wrong or that the wrong
priorities were chosen, so they drag their feet doing the work, or do it
differently, or don’t do it at all. In volun- teer groups, people who
don’t get to have a say in deci- sions are likely to just leave,
because, unlike employees, they have no incentive to stay if the work
does not align with their principles or feel meaningful to them. When we
get to look at a proposal together and tell each other how it might be
improved, hashing out our best ideas until we have something that we all
like or at least can live with, we are more likely to vigorously do what
we all decided, instead of drifting apart or failing to follow through.
Bringing More People into the Work and Keeping Them Involved
When someone shows up to a mutual aid group for the first time, full of
urgency about something they care about, and they do not understand why
things are being
done the way they are, or do not understand how things are being done,
and do not have a way to share their opinions and influence what is
happening, they are likely to leave. People come to contribute, but they
stay because they feel needed, included, and a part of something.
Nonprofits often offer very limited ways for volunteers to participate.
You can donate money, or maybe stuff envelopes, phonebank, or hand
something out at a parade or event. Volunteers’ relationships to those
groups are usually thin—they don’t have much influence in the group, and
while they may get some satisfaction from feeling like they helped, they
are not doing the core of the work.
Mutual aid groups, on the other hand, give people a way to build a deep
relationship to the work and to feel the power of doing important, bold
survival work together. The relations between a mutual aid group and the
people in it, then, is thick—it includes shared stew- ardship of the
group, and a chance to consider and influ- ence the project as a whole,
even if the focus is on one specific task like delivering the groceries
or answering the hotline.
Helping to Prevent Co-optation
Co-optation of projects and groups often starts with the co-optation of
individual people, often charismatic leaders or founders of projects,
who get bought off by elites through access to increased funding,
influence, a job, or other forms of status. When a small number of
people have the power to shift the direction of a project,
it can be hard to resist the incentives that come with co-optation.
Often, leaders are not the most vulnerable of the group’s members,
because being regarded as “persuasive,” “important,” or “authoritative”
relates to race, gender, age, language, and educational attainment. As a
result, a single individual or small group running a project may not be
the same people who have the most to lose if the project veers toward
elite interests. It is the most vulnerable of the participants who are
most likely to have objections to the shifts that come with co-opta-
tion, such as new eligibility requirements that cut out stigmatized
groups, or a new cozy relationship with law enforcement or
philanthropists.
Given these dynamics, some mutual aid groups estab- lish explicit
criteria or guidelines designed to make sure certain perspectives that
are often otherwise left out or marginalized are heard, such as agreeing
that decisions that break down around identity lines (for example, most
of the group’s women or currently undocumented people oppose a certain
proposal) will be reevaluated to assess a proposal’s alignment with the
group’s core prin- ciples. Some groups establish quotas about members of
decision-making bodies within the group, ensuring that groups
particularly likely to be left out are well repre- sented in those
bodies.
We Learn to Value and Desire Other People’s Participation
In addition to avoiding the problem of having majorities vote down
minorities and silence vulnerable groups,
consensus decision-making establishes a culture of desiring others’
participation. Decision-making systems focused on competition—on getting
my idea to be the one that wins—cultivate disinterest in other people’s
participation. Consensus decision-making requires participants to bring
forward proposals to be discussed and modified until everyone is
sufficiently satisfied that no one will block the proposal. This means
participants get to practice wanting to hear other people’s concerns and
other people’s creative approaches to resolving them. If the goal of our
movements is to mobilize hundreds of millions of people, we need to
genuinely want others’ participation, even when others bring different
ideas or disagree with how we think things should be done. Most people
will not stay and commit to intense unpaid work if they get little say
in shaping that work. We need ways of practicing wanting one another’s
participation, not just going along with what charismatic or
authoritative people say. In our culture, we get a lot of practice
either going along with bossy people or trying to be the boss. It’s time
to learn some- thing different.
Making Consensus Decision- Making Efficient and Effective
Here are five practices that set up efficient, effective consensus
decision-making:
Creating Teams
Creating a Decision-Making Chart
Practicing Proposal-Making
Practicing Meeting Facilitation
Welcoming New People
Creating Teams
When mutual aid projects are just getting off the ground, they often
have only a few people in them. With a small number of people—five or
less—it can be relatively quick and easy to discuss everything together.
As things get off the ground and more people join, it can be very useful
to create teams working on short- or long-term projects that report back
to the larger group for input on proposals or to submit proposals for
the group to decide on. Teams or pairs can come together to do quick
tasks between meetings, or a team can form as a long-term body within
the group. For example, an emerging project doing neighborhood grocery
delivery for immuno- compromised people may break off a small research
team to find out about best practices for sanitizing groceries between
purchase and delivery and bring back those ideas to the big group
meeting. They may also create a standing team that manages the requests
for support coming in through the group’s social media platforms and
online request form, and a team that assigns the deliveries. Groups can
form teams as they go, then change them, meld them, or break them into
multi- ple teams as conditions change and experiences inform the group.
Having teams and knowing who is on them can help delegate work so that
it doesn’t fall on only a few people. It can help people who are new to
the group know how
to plug in and get started doing something useful because it makes the
process by which work happens more transparent. It can help work get
done between meetings because people can work out details and present
proposals based on information they gathered and discussed with their
team. It can also help prevent decision-making from getting bottlenecked
at the whole- group level, if teams are authorized to develop and
implement certain parts of the work according to the whole group’s plans
and principles. The larger and more complex groups get, the more it may
also make sense to do more in-depth planning, such as planning out the
next six months of work and getting the whole group’s approval of that
plan so that each team can then manage its part of the whole.
Creating a Decision-Making Chart
A great way to prevent conflict and gain the efficiency and productivity
that task-specific teams can provide is to have a decision-making chart
that lets people know which decisions can happen in teams and which are
whole-group decisions. No decision-making chart can anticipate every
single possible decision a group can make, but putting some big ones on
there—especially ones more likely to be sensitive or cause conflict—can
help groups make decisions according to their princi- ples.
Decision-making charts should always be consid- ered to be working
documents. As groups try them out, they find out what is working and
what isn’t, and make changes accordingly.
Below is a sample decision-making chart for our example group that
delivers groceries to immuno- compromised people in the neighborhood.
Mine looks like a table, but it could really look like anything, include
any categories, or be made in whatever way meets a group’s needs. It
could be designed as a flow chart, a flower chart, circles, an
ecosystem, or whatever makes sense to the group.
Chart 6. Sample Decision-Making Chart
<quote> Decision </quote>| <quote> Who initiates? </quote>| <quote> Who
needs to be consulted? </quote>| <quote> Who can finalize the decision?
</quote>| <quote> Who needs to be informed and how? </quote>|
<quote> Adding a </quote>| <quote> Delivery </quote>| <quote> Whole
</quote>| <quote> Delivery </quote>| <quote> Whole </quote>|
<quote> new week- day for deliveries </quote>| <quote> Team (or anyone
can propose to Delivery Team) </quote>| <quote> group at monthly meeting
</quote>| <quote> Team </quote>| <quote> group by email and again at
monthly meeting </quote>|
<quote> Respond- </quote>| <quote> Communi- </quote>| <quote> Communi-
</quote>| <quote> Communi- </quote>| <quote> Report </quote>|
<quote> ing to </quote>| <quote> cations </quote>| <quote> cations
</quote>| <quote> cations </quote>| <quote> what the </quote>|
<quote> media inquiry </quote>| <quote> Team </quote>| <quote> Team can
reach out to anyone they need for quotes or an interview </quote>|
<quote> Team </quote>|
request was and how it was met, and any results, to whole group by email
and at monthly
<quote> meeting </quote>|
One common problem that groups address in these charts is how to make
fast-paced decisions, such as responding to media requests or a
coalition request to sign on to a letter or event that needs an
immediate response. Having a team or subgroup that is authorized by the
group to do a quick turnaround in these situa- tions can help groups
stay responsive while being grounded in a clear process. A
quick-response group that has two or three people who are well-versed in
the group’s principles can tell if something is easy to respond to
quickly, or if it is more complex and needs to go to a larger group for
a decision. The quick-response group is also responsible for letting the
whole group know imme- diately what quick decision was made so that
others in the group are not surprised to find out, for example, the
group has offered an endorsement, and so that people can offer input if
they disagree with that particular call. It can be beneficial to have
the quick-response group be a rotating role so that everyone gains
experience and no person or team becomes the group’s default deciders.
Some other items that might go on a decision-making chart:
Decisions about applying for or taking money
Decisions about spending money
Decisions about increasing the work in some significant way (a new
location, a new program, a new curriculum, a strategy for reaching a new
population)
Decisions to end some part of the work
Decisions to add new people or join larger groups or coalitions
Decisions to ask people to leave or about the group leaving larger
groups or coalitions
Decisions about endorsing something or someone
Decision to create a new paid role, eliminate a paid role, hire someone,
or fire someone
These are all decisions that I have repeatedly seen produce conflict in
groups, when someone—often a char- ismatic leader or founder—has made
the decision with- out consulting others and without a clear process.
Not every decision a group makes will go on the chart, but having a
chart that lists some decisions can help orient new members to how
decision-making works, increase transparency and consistency, and
prevent conflict.
Practicing Proposal-Making
We all do the Proposal Discussion Modifications
Consensus process informally in social settings: I say I want to go
out for dinner. My friend suggests the place on the corner. I say it’s
too loud there, how about the old place? We agree. When dealing with
more complex deci- sions involving more people, it helps to actually
think of the decision as a proposal and develop it before the meeting.
For example, if our group has realized we need a database to track all
the people calling our hotline, and that we need it to be relatively
secure because our callers are undocumented and criminalized, and that
we need it
to be useable by people with a broad range of computer experience, we
might ask some group members to research existing options and come back
with a proposal that we can discuss. They will present what they
learned, tell us the pros and cons of various approaches, and propose
what they think is the best solution. Now the next conversation we have
can be based on good, well- researched information.
Treating something like a proposal rather than just an idea or a
preference means that group members take the time to think through and
research options, so that the whole group doesn’t become mired in
speculation or very small details. For example, if our group wants to
plan a fundraiser for someone’s transition from prison to life outside,
we might have a subgroup or team work on a plan for the party that
includes location, date, time, performances, outreach strategy,
accessibility, and other details, and bring that back to the next
meeting for everyone to discuss and modify. The process would be much
slower if as a large group we talked at length about all the details.
What happens when we discuss a proposal in our meeting and we do not
come to agreement? Usually, if the group thinks we eventually need to
figure this thing out (for example, we still need a database but we have
outstanding questions about the options, or we still want to have the
party but we realize we don’t know how much time our favorite performers
need on the program), the proposal can go back for further development.
It need not go back to the same people. Perhaps someone new wants to
take it on and address the outstanding
questions because they have access to helpful informa- tion, or they
have a good sense of the criteria that we are looking to meet, or they
have time between meetings to do this next step. Decision-making works
better if, rather than anyone seeing it as “my proposal,” we can see it
as the group’s proposal. That way we are less likely to become rigidly
attached to one outcome.
One helpful tool is for a group to have a proposal template. This can
especially help new people know how to get their ideas heard if they
have never been in a group that used a consensus process. Some groups
keep this kind of template in a shared folder (paper or elec- tronic) so
that everyone can access it. A proposal template could be as simple as
the following:
What problem does this proposal address?
What is the solution being proposed?
What teams might this proposal involve, and do you want to run it by any
of them before bringing it to the whole group?
Is there any research that could help flesh out this proposal before
people consider it?
You might also add a statement of the group’s shared purpose to the
proposal, since that guides group deci- sions. Some groups also add
questions that the group has decided should always be addressed when
moving forward, such as, “How will this proposal affect access to our
project for people with disabilities?” or “Does this proposal include
any financial costs, and if so what are they?”
Practicing Meeting Facilitation
How well or poorly we facilitate meetings will make or break our groups.
Skillful facilitation helps us make decisions together, feel heard and
included by each other, prevent and resolve conflict, celebrate our
accom- plishments and wins, grieve our losses, and become people who can
be together in new, more liberating rela- tionships. Bad facilitation
can make meetings boring, exhausting, oppressive, and damaging to
individuals and groups. Most of us have never been to well-facili- tated
meetings, so we don’t know how to create them without help from someone
who has more experience in how to do it. In other words, it’s worth
putting some attention to meeting facilitation in your group—and if no
one in your group has that experience, I hope the tools below and other
resources available online can help guide all of you as you decide what
works best for your group.
Some very basic elements of good meeting facilita- tion worth
considering are:
Start and end on time.
Write out an agenda (a list of what the group will talk about at the
meeting). If possible, circulate it to attendees ahead of time so they
can add items they want to discuss. At the beginning of the meeting, ask
again if there are missing items. If there are too many items for the
time allotted, work with the group to decide what can be discussed next
time or by a team in between regular meetings.
Assign a note-taker who will take notes that the group can refer back to
or share with people who couldn’t be at the meeting. Sometimes it is
nice to dedicate a space in the notes for a task list where, as we go,
we write down which tasks people have agreed to do. This can be a good
reference for group members between meetings and be reviewed at the
start of the next meeting to see if anything was left unfinished that
needs attention.
Assign each agenda item a time amount and have a time-keeper watch the
time so the group doesn’t end up running the meeting too long or not
getting to important items.
Provide food, beverages, poetry, a game, or music. Also consider opening
with a go-round check-in question that is funny or invites people’s
personalities to shine a little. We don’t want to be over-serious. We’re
here to work but also to know and enjoy each other!
To help the meeting be a participatory and supportive space, establish
group agreements. The group can agree, for example, that each person
will wait for three other people to speak before speaking again
(sometimes called “three before me”) or that they will respect people’s
pronouns, or whatever else the group decides will create a caring and
respectful space. Go over these agreements at the beginning of each
meet- ing and make sure newcomers understand them and get to ask
questions or suggest additions.
When talking about something important, if time allows, consider a
go-round so that the group hears from everyone. This is especially
important if the same people are usually talking and others are usually
quiet.
One way to establish some group norms about facili- tation is to have an
agenda template. This also helps people who are facilitating or making
an agenda for the first time. An agenda template may look like the
following:
Chart 7. Agenda Template
<quote> Date: </quote>| <quote> Note- Taker: </quote>| <quote> Time-
Keeper: </quote>| <quote> Meeting Facilitator: </quote>| <quote>
Attendees: </quote>|
|
<quote> Topic </quote>| <quote> Time </quote>| <quote> Facilitator or
Presenter </quote>|
<quote> Intros and Check-In Go-Around </quote>| <quote> 10 min.
</quote>|
|
<quote> Agenda Review </quote>| <quote> 3 min. </quote>|
|
<quote> Topic A </quote>| <quote> 20 min. </quote>|
|
<quote> Topic B </quote>| <quote> 15 min. </quote>|
|
<quote> Closing Go-Around </quote>| <quote> 10 min. </quote>|
|
Ahead of the meeting, facilitators are responsible for thinking through
how much time agenda items need, how to refresh the group on any
decision- making processes that the group has agreed to so everyone is
oriented, and how to create a warm and
participatory culture in the meeting. Facilitators often sort out these
questions in conversations with others, such as by asking people who
proposed things for the agenda how much time they need and how urgent it
is that the item be discussed at this meeting, by finding out if new
people are expected to come to this meeting, or by asking for help in
any aspect of agenda preparation.
Group dynamics are improved if facilitation rotates in the group along
with other roles like note- taking and time-keeping, so that people can
learn new skills and power dynamics don’t stagnate and rigidify. When
new people are asked to take on these roles, they should be given
support and guidance so they can have a satisfying experience of serving
the group in this way. Some groups find it beneficial to have all
meetings co-facilitated by two people.
People show up in groups to do important work, but we show up as our
whole selves, not work robots. We are social beings who evolved in
groups, and we have deep, ingrained desires for safety, dignity, and a
sense of belonging when we are with others. Good facilitation lets us
satisfy these desires, even in the presence of conflict and difference.
Welcoming New People
If we are going to win the big changes that we want and need so that
people can live with dignity and we can sustain human life on our
planet, we need to organize hundreds of millions of people who are not
yet politically active to take bold collective action together. We will
never have as much money and weapons as our opponents. All we have is
people power. We need to support people who have not been part of social
movement work to join social move- ments. They need to feel like they
can become part of a response to conditions that they find intolerable.
Mutual aid is the best onramp for getting people involved in
transformative action because they get to address things harming them
and their communities right away. To harness new people’s energy and
capac- ity for collective action, our groups need to be ready to welcome
them and, to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambara, make resistance irresistible.
We want them to join groups, have satisfying experiences of taking
action, build new skills, develop their own political understanding of
injustice, and stay in the resistance movement for the rest of their
lives. Movements grow because new people join groups and feel co-owner-
ship and co-stewardship of the work, and then recruit other people and
orient them so they get deep in too, and on and on.
Some things that help make groups and meetings accessible and
interesting to new people include:
Giving new people a chance to share why they care about the issues and
came to the group— many people are seeking to break their own isolation
and find a space where they can be heard and be part of a shared
understanding of the root causes of injustice.
Making meeting discussions as accessible as possible to new people by
providing a background of the problems the group is addressing and the
group’s activities so far; avoiding jargon, acro- nyms, and overly
technical theoretical language.
Giving new people a chance to share their ideas, even if the group has
thought about those ideas before.
Making the group’s facilitation process trans- parent to new people so
they don’t feel lost about what is going on or being discussed.
Making sure someone follows up with each new person after their first
meeting to find out if they have questions, how they want to plug into
the work, and if there is anything that would make the group more
welcoming to them.
Making careful decisions about agenda items and activities at meetings
focused on orienting new people, since some detailed group discus- sions
that need to happen about ongoing work might not be the most accessible
to newbies.
Helping new people plug into a clear role or task as soon as possible so
they feel a part of things.
One harsh reality in our currently under-developed, under-peopled,
under-resourced movements is that sometimes we are tired from doing all
the work, and sometimes we have feelings of resentment that more people
aren’t engaged. When we greet new people with exhaustion and resentment,
we rarely succeed in making
participation in our group irresistible. Making our meetings welcoming,
fun, warm, and energizing; making space for people to feel their rage
and grief about the issues we are organizing around; and cultivating
care and connection with one another strengthen the group and make the
work more sustainable, in addition to supporting the well-being of all
the participants.
One thing we need to do to create strong, sustainable mutual aid
projects is shed the baggage of what we are told “leadership” is in a
racist, colonial, patriarchal society. That model is usually about
individuality, competition, and domination. We often think of leaders as
people in the spotlight, holding the mic. To win big, we need to build
leaderless and leaderful groups. This means we want lots and lots of
people involved, all of whom are building skills that help them do the
work and bring new people into the work. We want transparency in our
groups, so that our opposition can’t mess up our work by just
neutralizing or co-opting one person. We want everyone to have the
strength and skills to lead. The chart on the following pages can be a
tool for indi- viduals and groups to reflect on what we’ve been taught
about leadership and how to redefine it for ourselves.
Chart 8. Leadership Qualities
“Success” defined by dominating others or being the decider
Supports the growth of decision- making processes that include everyone
affected by the decision
“My way or the highway” attitude
Wants to find out how others are doing, what they need or believe, what
they want
Self-promoting Eager to help many people develop leadership skills and
share the spotlight, able to assess when some things should be done
under the radar rather than seek- ing attention
Concerned with maintain- ing reputation, looking like “the best,”
looking “right”
Willing to admit mistakes
Arrogant and superior Humble and dignified
Good at talking and commanding
Good at communicating: sharing and listening
Wins others’ support through status, fear, or because others see them as
most powerful
Wins support by being supportive, consistent, trustworthy
Certain they are right Open to influence and changing
their opinion
Concerned about the repu- tation of group with media or elites
Concerned about the group’s material impact—does it alleviate suffering
and increase justice?
Fosters competition in the group
Fosters compassion and a desire that no one is left out of the group
Suspicious of new people Generous and open to newcomers
while holding clear principles and boundaries
Impulsive—plans change with their whims
Holds steady to the groups’ deci- sions and purpose; reliable
Judgmental and quick to exclude others who aren’t like them or who
disagree
Can tolerate people being differ- ent in a lot of ways; sees poten- tial
in people to become part of the work for change and helps them develop
skills and abilities
Gets their sense of self from status
Self-accepting and steady in sense of self, and so able to take risks or
hold unpopular opinions
Cares most about what elites think
Cares most about what those on the bottom of hierarchies think and know;
works to cultivate authenticity
Needs to be the center of attention
Can take the risk of being seen, can step back so others can be seen
Tells people what to do Avoids advice-giving unless asked,
interested in supporting people to make decisions that align with their
values
Seeks immediate gains, even if it means big compromises
Sees the long view and holds to values
Gives demeaning feedback or fails to give feedback; gossips instead of
giving direct feedback
Gives direct feedback in a compassionate way
Defensive, closed to feedback
Open to feedback, interested in how they impact others
Controlling, micromanaging
Can delegate, can ask for help, wants more people’s participation rather
than more control
Outcome-oriented Supports processes with integrity
that lead to more people partici- pating in decision-making
Seeks and demands to feel comfortable at the expense of others feeling
uncomfortable
Interested in what can be learned from discomfort, from changing roles
or being out of place, from conditions transforming
Ways to use this chart:
Write or talk in your group about what is miss- ing from these lists.
Circle qualities you see in yourself that you are working to cultivate
and grow. What might help them grow?
Circle qualities you see in yourself that are obstacles to you
practicing cooperative leader- ship or that don’t fit your values. Where
did you learn those qualities? How have they served you? How have they
gotten in the way of what you want or believe in? What helps you move
toward acting in greater alignment with your values?
Notice qualities that are prevalent in groups you are in. What could
help cultivate qualities you think are beneficial and reduce ones that
are harmful?
A Cautionary Note on Fame
Social media has encouraged our individualism and has enhanced the
desire to “brand” ourselves as radical or as having the “right”
politics. It is in the interest of corpo- rations like Facebook and
Twitter that we spend as much time as possible creating free content for
them, and that we feel compelled to get approval on their plat- forms.
All of this can motivate us to want to be perceived to be doing things,
rather than actually doing them. Much mutual aid work is very ordinary,
sometimes boring, and often difficult. To return to an earlier exam-
ple, everyone wants a selfie with Angela Davis to post,
but many people do not want to take the time to visit prisoners, go to
court with people, wait in long lines at welfare offices, write letters
to people in solitary confine- ment, deliver groceries to an elderly
neighbor, or spend many hours in meetings about how to coordinate care
for people in need.
When we get our sense of self from fame, status, or approval from a
bunch of strangers, we’re in trouble. It is hard to stick to our
principles and treat others well when we are seeking praise and
attention. If we are to redefine leadership away from individualism,
competi- tion, and social climbing, we have to become people who care
about ourselves as part of the greater whole. It means moving from
materialist self-love, which is often very self-critical (“I will be
okay and deserve love when I look right, when others approve of me, when
I am famous”) and toward a deep belief that everyone, includ- ing
ourselves, deserves dignity, belonging, and safety just because we are
alive. It means cultivating a desire to be beautifully, exquisitely
ordinary just like everyone else. It means practicing to be nobody
special. Rather than a fantasy of being rich and famous, which
capitalism tells us is the goal of our lives, we cultivate a fantasy of
every- one having what they need and being able to creatively express
the beauty of their lives.
This is a lifelong unlearning practice because we have all been shaped
by systems that make us insecure, approval-seeking, individualist, and
sometimes shallow. Yet we also all have the deeply human desire to
connect with others, to be of service in ways that reduce suffer- ing,
and to be seen and loved by those who truly know us
and whom we love. Mutual aid groups are a place where we can notice
these learned instincts and drives in ourselves and unlearn them—that
is, make choices to act out of mutuality and care on purpose.
Handling money can be one of the most contentious issues for mutual aid
groups. Because of this, it can be very useful for groups to consider
whether this is some- thing they want to do. Some groups can do their
work without raising money at all. Some groups can do their work just
raising money through grassroots fundraising in their communities,
taking small donations from many people. That kind of fundraising can
avoid the problem with grant-making foundations attaching strings to
grant money and trying to control the direction of the work. Grassroots
fundraising can help build a sense that the community controls the
organizations rather than an elite funder, and doing grassroots
fundraising can be a way of spreading the ideas of the group and raising
awareness about the problems the group works on. However, even if money
is raised in this way, managing money still comes with pitfalls.
Handling money brings logistical issues that can cause stress and take
time, such as figuring out how to do it fairly and transparently and
figuring out how to avoid a problem with the IRS or otherwise expose
group members to legal problems. Because most people in our society have
a tangled, painful relationship with money that includes feelings and
behaviors of secrecy, shame,
and desperation, a lot of otherwise awesome people will misbehave when
money is around or get suspicious of others’ behavior.
Sometimes groups want funds so they can pay people to do the work. When
groups have no staff, it can be a challenge to do mutual aid work that
has to take place during typical workday times, such as accompanying
people to courts or social service offices. Staffing can increase
capacity to provide aid. But it is worth weighing some of the challenges
that paid staffing can bring. When groups that have operated on an
all-volunteer basis get money to pay staff, there is a greater danger of
institutionalization and pandering to funders, because someone’s
livelihood will be impacted if they lose the funders’ favor. Groups can
lose their autonomy, feeling pressured to direct their work toward
fundable projects or put time into measuring their work and reporting it
according to funders’ demands, rather than doing the work the way they
think is most effective.
To get funding, groups may want to become nonprof- its by applying to
the IRS, or get a nonprofit fiscal spon- sor so that they can receive
grants and/or tax-deductible donations. The downside is that this
requires financial tracking and administration skills. Becoming a
nonprofit sometimes concentrates power in the hands of people who have
had more access to these skills and systems, such as white people,
people with more formal educa- tion, and people with professional
experience, especially when having those skills becomes a prerequisite
for getting hired as staff. It also may bring government attention and
funder surveillance to the group and
cultivate a culture of timidity or risk aversion. In addi- tion, when
groups are dependent on funders, they have an incentive to declare false
victories or stick to strate- gies they have followed to win funding in
the past, even if those strategies are not working toward their purpose
anymore. We see this problem frequently in the nonprofit sector, where
an organization will purport to serve some population’s needs but in
reality serve only a small number of people—yet the public story is that
they have it covered. This can prevent new organizations from emerging
that can truly address more of the popula- tion’s need. When groups are
volunteer-based, people are more likely to admit their limitations and
scrap bad ideas, because they are motivated by purpose, not elite
approval.
Another pitfall of hiring paid staff is that when groups become staffed,
unpaid volunteers in the group sometimes expect that staff person or few
staff people to suddenly do all the work, and volunteers sometimes check
out (especially if they felt over- worked before the group started
paying staff). This can make the group vulnerable to a loss of capacity,
to becoming governed by just a few staffers, and to burn- out and
overwork of those staffers. It can also be a setup for new staffers to
be heavily criticized and considered to be “failures” because they are
over- loaded with responsibilities. In some groups, where people from
the most impacted communities are hired, and they are the same people
who have the least formal work experience in professional settings, this
can be a particularly cruel setup.
There can certainly be good reasons to seek funding and have paid staff
roles, but these steps should be taken with caution and with a focus on
building transparent and accountable systems regarding money and
decision- making. At least two people should always be working together
on tracking funds to help prevent theft. How money is earned and spent
should be clear to all group participants. The group’s values should
guide how money is spent—for example, the group should ensure that staff
are paid fairly and equally rather than on the basis of the privileged
status that comes with a profes- sional degree, and should ensure that
people are not pressured to overwork. Having clear and transparent
budgeting and planning processes that can be under- stood by all
participants, including people with no prior experience with such
processes, so everyone can weigh in and make decisions together will
help prevent the group from shrinking to become staff-centered, small,
and likely less mobilizing and relevant. The more that people in the
group can be aware of the dangers of insti- tutionalization and
philanthropic control, the more likely the group can stay committed to
its purpose and principles when handling money.
Burnout is a reason people often give for why they leave mutual aid
groups. Burnout is more than just exhaus- tion that comes from working
too hard. Most often, people I meet who describe themselves as burnt out
have been through painful conflict in a group they were
working with and quit because they were hurt and unsatisfied by how it
turned out. Burnout is the combi- nation of resentment, exhaustion,
shame, and frustra- tion that make us lose connection to pleasure and
passion in the work and instead encounter difficult feel- ings like
avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety. If it were just exhaustion,
we could take a break and rest and go back, but people who feel burnt
out often feel they cannot return to the work, or that the group or work
they were part of is toxic.
These feelings and behaviors are reasonable results of the conditions
under which we do our work. We are steeped in a capitalist, patriarchal,
white supremacist culture that encourages us to compete, distrust,
hoard, hide, disconnect, and confine our value to how others see us and
what we produce. Our work is under- resourced in important ways. Many of
us come to the work because of our own experiences of poverty or
violence, and doing this work can activate old wounds and survival
responses. We come to the work to heal ourselves and the world, but we
often do the work in ways that further harm ourselves and impede our
contri- bution to the resistance. When our groups are focused on getting
important things done “out there,” there is rarely room to process our
strong feelings or admit that we do not know how to navigate our roles
“in here.”
Burnout is created or worsened when we feel discon- nected from others,
mistreated, misunderstood, ashamed, overburdened, obsessed with
outcomes, perfectionist, or controlling. Burnout is prevented or
lessened when we feel connected to others, when there is
transparency in how we work together, when we can rest as needed, when
we feel appreciated by the group, and when we have skills for giving and
receiving feedback. There are several things that groups can do to
cultivate conditions that prevent, reduce, or respond to burnout, and
there are things that individuals experiencing burn- out can do. Before
people who are burnt out leave groups, they often cause a lot of
disruption and damage, so this section is also aimed at reducing the
harm that burnt-out or overworked people can cause. Figuring out how to
have a more balanced relationship to work and overwork is a matter of
both individual healing and collective stewardship of the group.
Signs of Overwork and Burnout
High stress when thinking about tasks being performed by someone else
who might do it differ- ently, or the group coming to a different
decision than we would make.
Feelings of resentment: “I’ve done the most for this group” or “I work
harder than anyone else.” This can include creating a damaging group
culture of competition about who works the hardest.
Not respecting group agreements or group process because we feel above
the process as the founder or the hardest worker.
Feelings of competition with other groups that are politically aligned
or with other issues or activists that we perceive as receiving more
support.
Feelings of martyrdom.
Desire to endlessly be given credit for our work.
A desire to take on tasks and responsibilities in order to “be
important” to the group or control outcomes.
Feeling overwhelmed or experiencing depression and/or anxiety.
Feeling like we “have to” do all these things, cannot see any way to do
less work or have less responsibility.
Inability to let others take on leadership roles.
Hoarding information or important contacts so that others cannot rise to
the same level of leader- ship (this behavior is usually rationalized in
some way).
A life-and-death feeling that “it must be done the way I do it.” An
extreme version of this can result in leaders sabotaging the group or
project rather than recognizing that it may be time to step back and
take a break from leadership.
Paranoia and distrust about others in the group or other people working
in this kind of work. Feelings of being alone. Feelings of “me against
[members of the group/other groups/everyone].”
Over-promising and under-delivering, which can lead to feeling
fraudulent and afraid of being caught so far behind.
Having feelings of scarcity drive decision-making: “There’s not enough
money/time/attention.”
Having no boundaries with work—working all the time, during meals, first
thing upon waking
and last before sleeping, during time that was supposed to be for
connecting with loved ones. Not knowing how to do anything besides work.
Not having fun or feeling relaxed on vacation or days off.
Dismissal of the significance of group process and overvaluation of how
the group is perceived by outsiders such as funders, elites, and others.
Being flaky or unreliable.
Being defensive about all of the above and unwill- ing to hear critique.
“I’m doing so much, I’m kill- ing myself with work. How can you critique
me? I can’t possibly do any better/more!”
Shame about experiencing all of the above.
We also carry around fallback attitudes and behav- iors that can
undermine our principles, especially when we are stressed out and over
capacity. These can be behaviors we learned from dominant culture and
also roles we learned in our families. When we are stressed and
overworked, these things can come out in damaging ways. It can mean we
misuse or obstruct group processes, disappear from the work, or act from
a place of superi- ority or dominance on the basis of gender, race,
ability, class, or educational attainment.
How Mutual Aid Groups Can Prevent and Address Overwork and Burnout
Overwork is pervasive in mutual aid groups, and if we can move away from
shaming and blaming ourselves and
others and toward acknowledging it, we can support change. It is hard to
confront another person about behavior that is harmful, and it is hard
to be confronted about harmful behavior and listen to what is being
said. The ideas below do not change that, but they may help individuals
or groups create concrete steps to address the problems.
Make internal problems a top priority. The group cannot do its important
work if it is falling apart inside, and it cannot do its work well if it
is promising to do work it does not have the capacity to do. The
internal concerns cannot wait until later, because the giant need the
group exists to fill is probably not going to be reduced in the
immediate future. This does not mean the group’s work needs to stop, but
it may mean calling a morato- rium on new projects and commitments so
that the situ- ation does not worsen, and so that people can carve out
time for working on internal problems.
Groups working on internal problems might seek any of the following
resources:
Training in meeting facilitation, decision-making, consensus process,
active listening, giving and receiving direct feedback.
Facilitated discussions and training about how racism, ableism, sexism,
homophobia, transpho- bia, classism, and other systems of meaning and
control affect group development and culture, and how to change that.
Collective planning of the group’s work so that
participants build shared clarity on what the priorities are and what
they have agreed to do and not to do together.
Creating work plans for teams and/or individuals to figure out how to
assign work fairly, assess workload, and plan out a reasonable pace of
work.
Conflict mediation between particular people or groups working with a
facilitator who under- stands the group’s values and whom the people in
conflict trust and/or see as relatively neutral.
Work on building transparency in the group so that people know what each
other are doing, and allied groups doing similar or related work know
what the group is doing.
Regularly scheduled conversations where people can hear from each other
about what is going well and what needs work in the group’s dynamics, or
can discuss issues or concerns about their own role and ask for the
group’s assistance.
Make sure that new people are welcomed and trained to co-lead. This
means new people are given a full back- ground on the group’s work,
understand that they are being asked to fully participate in all
decisions, and have space to ask any questions they need to in order to
participate. Ensuring that everyone is getting access to what it takes
to co-lead is essential to building leader- ship among more people.
Group members and the group as a whole will be better off if many people
are leading, not just one or two.
Establish mechanisms to assess the workload and scale back. How many
hours is each member working? Is it beyond what they can do and maintain
their own well- being? Did they actually track their hours for a week to
make sure they are aware of how much they are working? Assess the
workload and scale back projects until the workload is under control.
Create a moratorium on new projects until capacity expands. Enforce the
morato- rium—no one can unilaterally take on new work for the group or
for themselves as a member of the group.
Build a culture of connection. How can the group’s meeting culture
foster well-being, goodwill, connection between members? Eating
together, having check-ins with interesting questions about people’s
favorite foods, plants, movies, or politicizing moments may feel silly
at first but makes a big difference. Bringing attention to wellness into
the group’s culture means helping members be there as multi-dimensional
people, rather than just as work or activist machines. People need to
build deep enough relationships to actually be able to talk about
difficult dynamics that come up, or those dynamics will fester.
Make sure that the facilitation of meetings rotates, including
agenda-making and other key leadership tasks. Rotating tasks can help us
address unfair workloads and transparency concerns. Making sure everyone
is trained on how to facilitate meetings in ways that maximize the
participation of all members of the group can help. Whenever there is a
danger that just a few people
will dominate an important conversation, use a go-around rather than
having people volunteer to speak. Quieter members speaking up can really
change the dynamic.
As a group, recognize the conditions creating a culture of overwork. It
is not one person’s fault, and everyone may be feeling the different
forms of pressure. Have one or many facilitated discussions about the
pressures and dynamics that lead to overwork or to an individual’s
dominating or disappearing behavior. Create a shared language for the
pressures the members may be under so they are easier to identify and
address moving forward.
What Individuals Experiencing Overwork and Burnout Need
In addition to creating group approaches to burnout, we can take action
in our own lives when we recognize our own symptoms of overwork and
burnout. This requires us to work on changing our own behavior and that
we be willing to examine the root causes of our impulses to over-commit,
to control, to overwork, or to disconnect. This is healing work aimed at
helping us be well enough to enjoy our work, make sustained lifelong
contribu- tions to the movements we care about, and receive the love and
transformation that is possible in communities of resistance. Above all,
we must take a gentle approach to ourselves, avoid judgment, recognize
the role of social conditioning in producing these responses in us, and
patiently and humbly experiment with new ways of being.
The compulsive worker, over-worker, or control freak might come to
understand their needs in the following ways:
I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what is going on, who I
can ask for honest feedback about my behavior, and who can help support
me and soothe me when I feel afraid of doing some- thing in a new way.
For example, these people might remind me that even though someone else
in the project will do this task differently, it is better to let them
do it so they can build their own skills and I can use the time for
something healing that has been missing from my life. These people might
help remind me that it will be okay if I say no to a task or project.
These friends can help me give love to the wounds underneath my
compulsive, compet- itive, or controlling behavior, reminding me that I
am worthwhile and my value does not hang on what the group does, how
much work I do, or what other people think of me.
I need supportive people who can also point out
compulsive, competitive, or controlling behavior or ideas when they hear
them from me or see me engaging in them. It can be difficult to receive
such feedback, but it is truly a gift.
When I get feedback from friends or collaborators about concerns they
have, I need to resist the impulse to defend myself or critique the way
they delivered their message. This feedback, including any anger they
express while sharing it, is likely a
sign that others think I am a leader and that what I do matters. They
are doing the hard and uncom- fortable task of raising a concern because
they see me as a person with influence. I can remember that, no matter
how it is delivered, this feedback is an investment in me and in our
work, and an act of love. I can seek out a friend separately to process
the difficult feelings that receiving this feedback brings up. The need
to avoid acting out my defen- siveness, or taking on a victim narrative,
is espe- cially important when I am in a position of privi- lege of any
kind and/or have more developed leadership in the group or project.
If I hate everyone I’m working with or feel like I am going to die or
like I have to stay up all night working, this is probably about
something older or deeper in my life, not about the current
work/workplace/group/coworker. If my heart is racing, if I feel
threatened, if I feel like I can’t get out of bed, if I feel like I
can’t speak to my coworker or I’ll explode, I am probably experi- encing
pain deeply rooted in my life history. To get out of this reactive
space, I need to devote resources to uncovering the roots of my painful
reactions and building ways of being in those feelings that don’t
involve acting out harm to myself or others (including the harm of
overworking). The first step is recognizing that my strongest reactions
may not be entirely or primarily about the work-related situation
directly in front of me, and being willing to slow down to explore what
is underneath.
I need a healing path for myself if I want to be part of healing the
world. What that looks like is differ- ent for everyone, and could
include individual or group therapy, 12-step programs (includ- ing
Workaholics Anonymous), exercise, body- work, spiritual exploration, art
practice, garden- ing, and building meaningful relationships with family
or friends. Whatever it is, I have to engage in a gentle way and be
careful that it does not become another thing to perfect or to try to be
the leader of. Pursuing a healing path can be a way to practice doing
things because they feel good rather than because they accomplish
something.
I need to stick around. It may be tempting to disappear altogether from
a group if relationships have gotten difficult and I am experiencing
nega- tive feelings about myself and others. If I want move toward a
more balanced role in the group, or even transition out altogether, I
need to do so gradually and intentionally. I need to transfer rela-
tionships and knowledge and skills that I hold and make sure that my
transition is done in a way that ensures support for the people
continuing the work.
Working and living inside hierarchies does not teach us how to deal with
conflict. Most of us avoid conflict either by submitting to others’
wills and trying to numb out the impact on us, or by trying to dominate
others to
get our way and being numb to the impact on others. Our culture teaches
us that giving direct feedback is risky and that we should either
suppress our concerns or find ways to manipulate situations and get what
we want. We are trained to seek external validation, espe- cially from
people in authority, and often have few skills for hearing critical
feedback, considering it, and acting on what is useful. To survive our
various social posi- tions, we internalize specific instructions about
when and how to numb our feelings and perceptions, avoid giving
feedback, disappear, act defensively or offensively, demand appeasement,
or offer appeasement. As a result, we are mostly unprepared to engage
with conflict in generative ways and instead tend to avoid it until it
explodes or relationships disappear.
Conflict is a normal part of all groups and relation- ships. But many of
us still seem to think that if conflict happens, it means there is
something wrong—and then we seek out someone to blame. If we do work we
care deeply about with other people, we will experience conflict because
the stakes of the work feel very high to us, and that conflict is likely
to bring up wounds and reactions from earlier in our lives. This may
mean we revert to oppressive scripts and power dynamics from the
dominant culture.
The emergence of conflict does not have to mean that someone is bad or
to blame, and the more we can normalize conflict, the more likely we can
address it and come through it stronger, rather than burning out and
leaving the group or the movement, and/or causing damage to others. Some
of the reasons that conflict can
be so pitched in social movement groups include:
We have the strongest feelings about people who are closest to us. We
are more likely to be up at night stressing about a conflict with a
friend or collaborator than thinking about the mayor or some other
person whom we have a more distant relationship with.
When we come into movement spaces with high expectations and desires for
belonging and connection, disappointment is likely.
Sometimes we are so used to feeling excluded that we tune into that
familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously looking for evidence
that we are different or are being slighted or left out.
Even good experiences, like finding a space that breaks our isolation by
joining a group with others who share our values or identities, can
bring up our conditioned thinking and feeling. We might feel like we
don’t deserve it or like we are fraudu- lent. We might even
unconsciously make up stories about what other people are thinking about
us.
Mutual aid work, by definition, responds to intense unmet needs and
brings stress and pres- sures that can heighten feelings and provoke
reac- tive behavior.
Given that conflict and strong feelings are inevitable if we are working
on something we love with people we care about, what can we do to cause
less harm to each other and our groups? How do we hold the strong
feelings that come up, and how do we survive the conflict without being
our worst selves to one another?
Here are three ways to check in with ourselves, get perspective, and act
based on our principles when conflict is coming up:
One. Get away for a quiet moment to feel what is going on inside. This
inquiry could also include talking to a friend or writing things down.
A lot of times when we perceive some kind of threat, we go on autopilot.
That autopilot could take the form of a obsessive critical thinking
about another person, self- hating thoughts, disappearing, picking a
fight, getting lost in work, getting wasted, or obsessing all night and
not sleeping. Whatever it is, it can help to ask ourselves about what
kinds of feelings are coming up. Paying care- ful attention to ourselves
can stop us from going with the autopilot reaction that might not be
aligned with our intentions, purpose, or values and might damage our
relationships.
Two. Remember, no one made us feel this way, but we are having strong
feelings and they deserve our caring attention.
It can be easy when we are hurt or disappointed to decide that another
person caused our pain. Certainly, others’ actions and inactions
stimulate feelings in us, but what feelings get stimulated, and how
strong they are, has a lot to do with ourselves and our histories.
Often,
when something really riles us up, it is because it is touching an old
wound or raw spot.
Three. Get curious about our raw spots.
We all have raw spots—things that bother us because of the insecurities
we carry or the way we were treated as kids at school or by our families
at home. Other people do not know our raw spots—we sometimes do not know
them ourselves—so people are often surprised at the impact of their
actions on our feelings. We can become curious about our own raw spots,
finding origins in childhood experiences, the cumulative impact of
micro- aggressions and systemic harm, or other sources. When someone
brushes a raw spot, we can have a big reac- tion—sometimes acting
outward toward them, some- times harming ourselves. The trick is to
realize that our raw spots belong to us, rather than us being hostage to
them, and that we can experience the feelings, notice them, and decide
how to move forward, rather than having the feelings drive our behavior.
For example, imagine my feelings got hurt by a person in my mutual aid
group who did not follow through on something. If I then launched an
informal campaign to get other people in the group to perceive my flaky
collaborator as a person lacking integrity, and to get them pushed out
of the group, or if I refused to work with them anymore, we could lose a
lot. If I know their actions hit my raw spot, I can observe my feelings
coming up, being aware that they may not be propor- tional to what
happened, and that my feelings are not my flaky collaborator’s fault. I
can hold off on
campaigning against them and find right-sized action to address my
concerns for the good of all.
What Else Is True?
When we find ourselves obsessing over an opinion, story, or judgment, it
can often be helpful to ask, “What else is true?” For example, when
conflict is emerging and we have strong feelings, we might ask:
What else is true about this person/group/space? Can I think of any of
their positive qualities? Can I think of any way that I benefit from
their actions? In addition to what they did that I dislike, are there
also other experiences that show a more full picture, demonstrate good
intentions, or balance any vengeful feelings toward this person?
Might there be things I’m unaware of that are contributing to this
situation or behavior?
What else is true about my life that counterbal- ances this situation?
What else is in my life? What percentage of my time is spent in this
space or with this person? What else do I do and have? Does this
situation feel like it occupies 80 percent of my mind space, while this
group actually only takes up 5 percent of my week? If I am afraid of
what this person thinks of me, can I think of other people who I know
that admire, care about, and respect me?
Is this situation or person my responsibility? Is this something I can
control? If not, can I imagine
letting go, even just 5 percent or 10 percent, to gain some peace of
mind?
Are there ways that I am particularly activated by this that might have
to do with my own history and experiences? Are there ways to give myself
attention or care around these wounds?
Are there any ways that I am stepping into a famil- iar role with my
strong feelings about this person? In my inner reality, did I cast us
into roles that relate to my family of origin or other formative groups?
Use Direct Communication before Using Gossip and Social Media
Sometimes the first impulse we have when we are hurt is to make our hurt
known—through negative gossip or on social media platforms. Negative
gossip and accusa- tory posts can hurt the person doing the gossiping,
the target, the group, and the movement. It usually magni- fies
conflict. This doesn’t mean that we should not share difficult
experiences we are having so we can access support. We often need to
speak with a friend to help clarify what we are feeling, get affirmation
of our expe- rience, talk through possible responses, and get sympa-
thy. So, how can we tell if we are engaging in negative gossip that
might harm someone? Here are several ques- tions we can ask ourselves:
Who am I telling? If you are having strong feelings about someone in
your mutual aid group, talking about them negatively behind their back
with
other people in the group is likely to harm group dynamics and create a
culture that will drive some people away. Talking to a therapist or a
friend who is not part of the group is less likely to be harmful.
Telling the stories on social media is likely to have many harmful and
possibly unintended impacts on everyone involved.
Am I campaigning? What are my motivations in telling this? Am I trying
to get support and process my experience, or am I trying to get other
people to think badly about this person?
Am I mocking them, laughing at them, or other- wise being cruel? If the
content of what you are sharing is something you would not consider
compassionate or constructive feedback, some- thing you would never say
to their face, it may be malicious gossip. Any time we are feeling
justified dehumanizing people in our movements and social circles, it is
good to pause and ask, “What else is true?” We might be reacting to a
deep wound that needs our attention, and causing damage along the way.
Am I building my obsession with someone’s faults? Is the choice to talk
about this person’s behavior or qualities right now going to help me be
clear about my choices and feelings, or is it building a habit of
thinking too much about this person and cultivating hyper-criticism of
them?
Giving direct feedback is hard. Rather than saying, “It was difficult
for me when you did not follow through
with the tasks you took on at the meeting,” or “I wonder why you didn’t
ask me to join that team,” it is easier to project negative feelings and
malicious behaviors onto the other person and gossip about it. This is
likely to feel bad and damage relationships. When a lot of people in
groups or scenes are doing this, it can make for broad conditions of
distrust, anxiety, and betrayal, and can augment hierarchies of
valuation and devaluation, making groups unstable and more vulnerable to
disrup- tion by law enforcement.
We live in a society based on disposability. When we feel bad, we often
automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad.
Both of these moves cause damage and distort the truth, which is that we
are all navigating difficult conditions the best we can, and we all have
a lot to learn and unlearn. If we want to build a different way of being
together in groups, we have to look closely at the feelings and
behaviors that generate the desire to throw people away. Humility,
compassion for ourselves, and compassion for others are antidotes to
disposability culture. Examining where we project on others and where we
react strongly to others can give us more options when we are in
conflict. Every one of us is more complex and beautiful than our worst
actions and harshest judgments. Building compassion and accountability
requires us to take stock of our own actions and reactions in conflict,
and seek ways to treat each other with care even in the midst of strong
feelings.
It is not surprising that most of us have distorted relation- ships to
work, including work in mutual aid groups. The conditions and systems we
live under make work coercive, create severe imbalances in who does
which kind of work and for what kind of compensation and recognition,
and make it hard to feel like we have choices when it comes to work.
Working to change the world is extremely hard because the conditions we
are up against are severe. We cannot blame ourselves for having a
difficult relationship to our work, even though we understand that
learning to work differently is vital for our movements and for our own
well-being and survival. We must be compassionate to ourselves and each
other as we practice transforming our ways of working together.
We need each other badly to share what is hard about the overwhelming
suffering in the world and the challenge of doing work for change in
dangerous conditions. Even in the face of the pain that being awakened
to contemporary conditions causes, all of our work for change can be
rooted in the comfort and joy of being connected to one another,
accompanying one another, and sometimes being inspired by each other.
Reflecting deeply about our own orientations toward work—what it feels
like to participate in groups, what ideas we are carrying around about
lead- ership and productivity—is crucial to building a practice of
working from a place of connection, inspiration, and joy. This means
intentionally creating ways to practice a new relationship to work, and
diving into the psychic structures underlying our wounds from living and
working in brutal, coercive hiearchies. The following chart may be a
useful reflection tool for individuals and groups trying to change
harmful cultures and practices of work.
Chart 9. Workaholics Anonymous’s “Working Joyfully”
Very long hours Setting boundaries
Impossible standards Reasonable goals Insatiable, never done Content
with a day’s work Tightly scheduled Room for the unexpected
Adding more work No adding without subtracting Unable to estimate time
Realistic time allotment
Non-stop Pausing for change of pace, focus, new ideas
False deadlines Appropriate timing
Driven, adrenalized Feeling of being in flow
Sense of urgency Relaxed about time
Must complete work Can delay task
Confusing urgency with importance
Able to prioritize
Reacting to pressure Following inner guidance
Mentally scattered Focused
Inefficient Effective
Mistakes: misplace, drop, spill
Doing it right the first time
Rigid Flexible
Intolerant of new ideas Open-minded
Impatient Calm
Perfectionistic Learning from mistakes without blaming
Tense Relaxed
Loss of humor Keeping a humorous perspective
Loss of creativity Flow of novel solutions Overly serious and intense
Able to be playful
Not enjoyable Finding work pleasurable Abrupt with colleagues Responsive
to others Loss of spontaneity Open to the moment
Out of touch with feelings Aware of moods
Doing many things at once Doing one thing at a time Body/mind out of
sync Unity of thought and action Rushing Leisurely paced
Blurred perception Vivid impressions
Unaware, mechanical Mindful
Quantity-oriented Quality-oriented
Little delegation Trust in colleagues
Racing the clock In sync and respectful of time
Exhaustion Happy tiredness
Struggle Feeling of ease
Feeling of being a victim Feeling completed Neglecting health Nurturing
self Can’t hear body signals Knows when to rest Neglecting rest of life
Balanced life
Worry, overplanning Staying in the now
Perfectionism is an insidious and harmful force in our mutual aid groups
and in our own psyches. “I’m not a perfectionist, everything I do is so
imperfect!” we say to ourselves. Exactly. Nothing is good enough. We
live in a very materialist culture that tells us we need to have the
“perfect” body, sexuality, family, consumer goods, home, and job. Even
those of us who know those norms are bullshit still struggle with the
patterns of perfectionist thinking and behavior they can create. In our
personal lives this can give us anxiety and feed painful misperceptions
of ourselves.
Perfectionism can shrink our mutual aid groups, caus- ing them to be
exclusive, producing conflict, and feeding dynamics of overwork and
burnout. Perfectionism some- times appears as a fear of saying anything
that is politi- cally off-base and being judged, so that people don’t
share their opinions; or are wildly defensive if someone ques- tions
something they said; or quickly attack or exclude anyone who doesn’t use
the same jargon as them or is still learning something they already know
about. These tendencies can create cliquishness and make it hard to grow
our groups and movements. Perfectionism can also lead to people being
overly controlling of group work, which can mean work does not get
delegated and the same few people are doing everything. It can mean that
people who started the group are patronizing to people who come in later
and do things differently.
Whenever we see inflexibility in ourselves or in a group culture, there
are opportunities for healing from
social conditioning and cultivating new ways of being. The chart and
reflection questions below are tools to use by yourself or in a group to
begin to unlearn perfection- ism. Check anything that feels familiar.
Chart 10. Perfectionism Checklist
Doing well isn’t good enough, I have to do better.
If I don’t strive, I am a lazy and useless person.
Other people or groups are producing more, reaching further, or getting
more praise.
I must do things perfectly.
I must not fail.
I can’t have others think poorly of me.
If I try, then I will only fail.
If I put myself out there, then others will think badly of me, I should
keep quiet.
If I have conflict in this group, everything is ruined and I have to
quit.
My work is never good enough.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do things.
If some people are critiquing me, I should just leave this group.
I can’t make any mistakes or others will realize what I am really like.
I should already know everything about this topic.
I should already be able to do this the same or better than others.
Any mistake will expose me as a fraud.
I have to go over any work I do, several times, before I can show it to
anyone else.
I have to keep checking in with others to make sure I am liked, look
okay, didn’t say anything wrong, etc.
I check my social media likes, my appearance, my bank account, my email
constantly.
I must work all the time or I will become a lazy slob.
I have to work extremely hard in order to deserve a treat or a rest.
I must know what is going to happen.
I must be prepared for possible outcomes.
I can’t let anyone else do a task in case it goes wrong.
I can’t start because I’m afraid I will do it wrong.
I feel dread and a sense of avoidance about my task because of my fear
of failure, exposure, humiliation.
I feel deadened by overwhelming shame or grief that I am suppressing.
Reflection Questions:
Where does perfectionism show up in my life? School work, job, family
interactions, how I regard my body, activism, social media interac-
tions, housework? What is the cost?
How might I be applying perfectionist standards to others? When am I
intolerant of others’ learn- ing processes or differences? Where did I
learn that? What emotions motivate that? What is the
cost of this intolerance to my relationships, to my work, to my
principles and purpose in the world?
Does our group culture enable or produce perfec- tionist behaviors? If
so, how? How does it impact our group work, relationships with each
other, and relationships to people who come to our project for help or
to volunteer? How could we add more flexibility, care, compassion, and
trust to our group culture?
Doing mutual aid work often brings some level of stress or pressure,
because we are meeting urgent needs, learn- ing new skills, working in
groups, and taking on new responsibilities. These are the same things
that make the work meaningful, satisfying, and pleasurable. But pres-
sure and stress can bring out patterned emotional responses and
autopilot reactions and behaviors. Learning to notice the patterns and
plan for them can help us make choices or get support at key moments so
that our actions can be as beneficial as possible to ourselves and the
people around us.
One technique to learn these patterns in ourselves is to use a “mad
map”—a guide we can make for ourselves that we can turn to when things
go sideways or we feel ourselves slipping into more difficult states. A
mad map can be like a gift to your future self, to help navigate the
potentially dangerous waters of stress or conflict. It can guide you
through the wild thinking, feeling, and behav- iors that emerge when
things are really rough, reminding
you what helps and what harms during such times. Your mad map can have
any content you want. It can be illus- trated, or include songs,
physical movements, or images—whatever feels best. Below are just some
starter ideas and examples of potential content. Some people share their
mad maps with friends and loved ones. You can include sections on how
other people can support you when you are in difficulty or crisis, and
what you do or do not want them to say or do if you are struggling. (I
learned about mad mapping from the Icarus Project, and you can find more
information in the resource list at the end of this book.)
Signs of Difficulty under Pressure
Some areas to think about when making this section might include:
Overly self-critical thoughts (about your contribu- tions to the group,
your appearance, personality, intelligence, etc.).
Overly critical thoughts about other people.
Feeling insecure in the group or like people are out to get you, don’t
like you, are talking about you, excluding you.
Obsessing over details.
Taking on too many tasks even though you know you’re already overloaded.
Feeling controlling about how things get done in the group, not wanting
to let other people do it differently.
Avoiding tasks, flaking, becoming vague.
Obsessively checking anything (social media, email, reflection in the
mirror, your work, other people’s work, your health, your money).
Overworking on anything (house cleaning, paid job, activist work, art
project).
Letting the physical space around you get chaotic.
Not eating or eating in ways that make you feel bad.
Not taking regular meds or supplements that are helpful to you.
Misusing alcohol, drugs, shopping, video games, TV, social media.
Avoiding people you love.
Avoiding work that is meaningful to you.
Avoiding work you need to do to survive.
Not taking care of bills, paperwork, other logisti- cal necessities.
Escaping through sex or romantic highs.
Lack of sleep or oversleeping.
Over-exercising or not moving enough for what your body/mind needs right
now.
Any other compulsive behavior that, in your expe- rience, suggests
imbalance.
Guidelines for Greater Wellness
In this section, try to set realistic expectations, not pie- in-the-sky
guidelines that will cause shame or feelings of inadequacy if they are
not met. You can always increase and adjust later. Be aware of harsh
“should” messages
that may show up here, which many of us have in areas of eating, work,
exercise, money, sex, and so on. Being mindful to avoid perfectionism,
focus on gentle realistic steps toward greater balance.
This section might include things like:
A limit on the number of times per day you check email, social media,
news, etc.
Limits on amount of or number of times of day you engage in particular
escapist or toxifying behaviors.
Goals for how often and in what ways you want to move your body.
Goals for making sure you feed yourself in nour- ishing ways.
Goals for meditation, spiritual practices, or anything else that would
help but might be falling away right now.
Types of media or apps you want to avoid or delete.
Limits on amount of or number of times you use social media (for
example, not upon waking or before bed).
Goals for getting outdoors or interacting with the natural world.
People you want to be connected to, how often and in what ways.
People you need to limit your exposure to and what those limits are.
Sleep schedules or other rest plans.
Limits on working hours, creating days off or
other limits on work, including unpaid activist or artistic work if you
are overworking in those areas.
Timelines for taking care of essential paperwork or logistics.
Baseline activities to maintain physical space and hygiene.
Bonus Activities That Help
The previous section is a baseline set of goals you are committing to.
This section can include things you may aspire to do, things you know
would feel good, things that are lovely extras to improve your state of
being.
Kinds of movement or exercise that are fun and feel good.
Cooking adventures.
Gardening.
Literature, music, art you want to make or read, listen to, look at.
Spiritual practices you want to try or return to.
Additional ways you want to connect with loved ones.
Additional activities that may boost your mood or sense of purpose,
connection, or self-worth.
Ways to beautify your space.
Ways you want to be generous to others.
Things you want to try to improve your sleep, reduce your pain, break
your isolation, generate a more structured routine, break up a
monotonous routine.
Unhelpful/Untrue Thoughts
Painful or difficult thinking increases when we are under pressure.
Often it will be familiar thinking that has appeared in other difficult
times, feeding harmful behav- iors that disconnect us from ourselves and
others. Noticing these thoughts and behaviors can give us a chance to
interrupt them and see if they can be reduced.
Scarcity thoughts (about anything—food, money, work, self-worth, sex,
health):
I’m not doing enough.
I’m doing everything and no one is helping.
I’m not going to have what I need.
I better get mine before everyone else takes it all.
There are not enough people in this group.
There is not enough time.
Hopeless thoughts like:
There is no point in trying.
I have lost everything.
I ruined everything.
Nothing every works out for me/us.
Self-hating thoughts like:
I’m a fraud.
I am undesirable.
I am the worst.
I don’t deserve help/care/support/love/admira- tion/survival.
I am a bad person.
Superiority thoughts like:
No one else can do this right.
No one else can see the truth like I can.
Everyone else is handling this incorrectly.
Any criticism or feedback about my behavior is incorrect/inappropriate.
Helpful Truths to Remember
In this section, call on your most centered self, your inner adult, your
inner kind parent, your highest spirit- ual self, or however you think
of that part of you that can offer a compassionate perspective. Go
through your unhelpful thoughts list, above, and explore what the part
of you thinking each thought needs to hear or remember to diffuse the
untrue thought’s power. The examples below may help you generate your
list.
The work I am doing in this group is difficult and the conditions we are
facing are severe. It is okay that we can’t meet everyone’s needs at
once or solve everything.
It is okay for me to place limits on what I can do for others and say no
to things.
Everyone deserves to exist, including me.
I don’t have to do anything perfectly. We are imperfect people doing
imperfect work.
It is okay to try new things. I can stop whenever I want.
I am neither the best nor the worst. I am learning just like everyone
else here. I have wisdom and experience to offer just like everyone
else.
I cannot read minds. If I think someone does not like me, ignored me, or
was mean to me, it may be a misinterpretation of their behavior.
I don’t have to like everyone in this group to care about them all. I
can stretch myself to be kind and caring to people even if we have
different styles of interaction. I can choose to notice what values we
have in common and what is beautiful about their contribution, rather
than focusing on criticizing them.
My contribution will be more sustainable and of greater service if it
comes from a sense of choos- ing to act on purpose than if it is
motivated by guilt or a sense of inadequacy. If I am choosing to do
things on the basis of those feelings, I can take a pause to reconnect
to my purpose and make intentional choices about what kinds of tasks and
responsibilities I can take on.
Controlling feelings are a normal response to social conditioning, but I
don’t have to act on them. I can remind myself to trust the wisdom of
the group, let others learn by doing, and offer my contributions with
generosity and flexibility.
Avoidant feelings are a normal response to social conditioning, but I
don’t have to act on them. I can remind myself of the feelings of
purpose that guide me and then make a practical, reasonable action plan
for following through with my commitments. I can ask friends to help
with accountability on tasks if needed.
All that I choose to do will be better for me and others if it doesn’t
come from a “must” and “should” feeling, but instead from sober discern-
ment of how I can care for myself and others.
Everyone experiences ego issues when doing work together, not just me.
But I don’t have to let those fears and insecurities guide me. I can
remember the true collective purpose of this work and have compassion
for the parts of me that want attention or credit.
I can remember the ways that I am loved and seen by friends and people
in my group.
Conclusion:
Everything Is at Stake and We’re Fighting to Win
The only thing that keeps those in power in that position is the
illusion of our powerlessness. A moment of freedom and connection can
undo a lifetime of social conditioning and scatter seeds in a thousand
directions.
—Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
In May 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic that exposed the
brutality of racist, capitalist health systems and the frailty of social
safety nets, Minneapolis police brutally murdered George Floyd, sparking
global protests against anti-Black racism and police violence. The
mutual aid projects that had been mobilizing during the first months of
the pandemic became vectors of participation in the growing protests.
Millions of people participated in new ways in this moment—providing
food, masks, hand sani- tizer, water, medical support, and protection to
each
other while fighting cops and white supremacists in the streets,
organizing and supporting funds for crimi- nalized people, pressuring
schools and other institu- tions to cancel contracts with the police,
and more. In the first two weeks of the protests alone, an unprece-
dented 3.5 million people donated to bail funds around the United
States. As organizers demanded the defund- ing and dismantling of police
departments, vibrant conversations about transformative justice emerged,
with more and more people learning about the possi- bilities of
addressing conflict and violence through mutual aid rather than
criminalization.
In Seattle, after days of confrontations police aban- doned the East
Precinct, and protesters established an autonomous zone around it,
taking up several blocks and a park. With the withdrawal of the police
and most businesses closed already because of COVID-19, the zone, like
earlier Occupy encampments and other similar spaces where protesters
have taken public space, became a site of experimentation where prac-
tices of governance, co-stewardship, leadership, deci- sion-making, and
collective care were being debated and innovated. Mutual aid projects
emerged in this space to provide mental health support, food, water,
medical care, masks, spiritual support, haircuts, cloth- ing, conflict
mediation, and more.
At the same time that the mobilizations against policing and for Black
lives were growing, scientists announced that May 2020 had been the
hottest May on record and that 2020, like the ten preceding years, would
likely be another record-breakingly hot year;
the Trump administration announced it intended to open the Atlantic
Maritime Monument to commer- cial fishing and waive environmental review
for infra- structure projects; the EPA slashed clean water protec-
tions; climate change–induced permafrost melt caused the largest oil
spill in Russia’s history; and scientists announced that carbon dioxide
levels were at a record high despite reduced emissions during the
pandemic. Everywhere we look, we see signs that the systems we have been
living under are collapsing, and something new must emerge if we are to
survive.
As the world faces the ongoing crises of the COVID-
19 pandemic, a worsening economic depression, climate change, and
domination by illegitimate and racist policing, criminalization, and
border enforce- ment systems and militaries, it is clear that mutual aid
projects are essential to the broader ecosystem of polit- ical action.
Mutual aid helps people survive disasters of all kinds, mobilizes and
politicizes new people, and builds the new systems and ways of being
together that we need. The stronger we build our mutual aid projects,
the more lasting our mobilizations can be.
Mutual aid is essential to the other tactics that make up our movements,
not only because it is the way to onboard millions of new people into
lasting movement participation, but also because it supports all the
other strategies. Decades of work developing transformative justice
projects provide an alternative vision for community support as we push
to end police budgets and redirect resources toward human need. Bail
funds, legal defense campaigns, and prison
letter-writing projects support those criminalized for bold actions
against the police and corporations. Street medics treating tear gas and
rubber bullet inju- ries make street battles with police for days on end
possible. Healing justice projects and conflict media- tion projects
help us live together in police-free zones. Mutual aid is essential to
all of our resistance work.
Moments of crisis and transformative organizing empower increasingly
bold actions of mutual support. On June 1, 2020, Washington, DC, police
surrounded protesters on a residential street intending to arrest them
for violating the 6 p.m. curfew imposed by the city to quell uprisings
over George Floyd’s murder. As police began making their arrests, people
living on the street opened their doors to let protesters take shelter
in their homes. Police tried to remove the protesters, even throw- ing
tear gas into the windows. But the residents kept the protesters inside
overnight, feeding them and meeting their needs. This open refusal of
police authority and willingness to take risks for one another
illustrates the vibrant possibilities of solidarity and mutual aid.
The same week that residents were defending protesters in DC, bus
drivers around the United States refused to allow police to commandeer
public buses for making mass arrests. Despite offers of overtime pay to
drive buses for this purpose, bus drivers organ- ized a shared
resistance to cooperating with police. The bus drivers’ union in
Minneapolis issued a state- ment declaring that their drivers have the
right to refuse to transport arrested protesters and refuse to transport
police to protests.
Ideally, our experiments with mutual aid and soli- darity become bolder
and bolder as experiences with our shared authority emancipate us from
the illegiti- mate authority of dominant systems. This has been visible
in increasing actions to protect immigrants from ICE arrests. In July of
2019, community members in Nashville, Tennessee, surrounded a man in his
car to protect him from ICE agents who had come for him. At the same
time, mutual aid groups all over the country were organizing to hide
immigrants, to warn immi- grants of coming ICE raids, to care for the
families of detainees and deportees, and to block buses leaving
immigration prisons to bring people to airports for deportation. These
same groups were also often tied in with campaigns to shut down the
immigration prison in their region or stop the building or expansion of
an immigration prison, to get local ordinances to ban ICE from using
local airports for deportation, to block collaboration between ICE and
local law enforcement in various ways, or to withdraw the business
license of a private prison used to cage immigrants.
These anti-ICE efforts provide a picture of how mutual aid ties in with
strategies aimed at beating back the explosive growth of racist state
violence, and build- ing courage among participants to take more and
more direct action to protect each other. As crises mount, our
organizing could inspire people to greater daring, using our people
power to block ICE and the police from arresting people, block marshals
attempting to evict tenants, and even to prevent military forces from
occu- pying territory. We might reach a level of mobilization
where we free our own people from prison, rather than asking that their
captors free them, and where we redis- tribute stolen wealth rather than
asking that it be taxed and spent differently. Our movements must
contend with the structures in place in order to dismantle the weapons
they use against our communities, and simul- taneously build new ways of
surviving that are based in our principles of liberation and collective
self-determi- nation. We must imagine and build ways of eating,
communicating, sheltering, moving, healing, and caring for each other
that are not profit-centered, hierarchical, and destructive to our
planet. We must practice co-governing, creating participatory,
consent-based ways of cooperating that are not based in militarism.
Mutual aid work plays an immediate role in help- ing us get through
crises, but it also has the potential to build the skills and capacities
we need for an entirely new way of living at a moment when we must
transform our society or face intensive, uneven suffer- ing followed by
species extinction. As we deliver groceries, participate in meetings,
sew masks, write letters to prisoners, apply bandages, facilitate rela-
tionship skills classes, learn how to protect our work from
surveillance, plant gardens, and change diapers, we are strengthening
our ability to outnumber the police and military, protect our
communities, and build systems that make sure everyone can have food,
housing, medicine, dignity, connection, belonging, and creativity in
their lives. That is the world we are fighting for. That is the world we
can win.
Resource List
This book expands upon the author’s previous writ- ing and worksheets
published in Social Text and Medium
. A teaching guide to accompany this book is available online at <http://v
.versobooks.com/Mutual_ Aid_Teaching_Guide.pdf>. Below are more
resources, some cited in this book.
Barnard Center for Research on Women. “Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues”
video series. bcrw.barnard.edu.
Batza, Katie. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Beam, Myrl. Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
bergman, carla, and Nick Montgomery. Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving
Resistance in Toxic Times. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.
Big Door Brigade. bigdoorbrigade.com.
Butler, C.T. Lawrence, and Amy Rothstein. On Conflict and Consensus: A
Handbook on Formal Consensus Decisionmaking. theanarchistlibrary.org.
“Consensus: Direct Democracy @ Occupy Wall Street.” October 13, 2011.
youtube.com/watch?v=6dtD8RnGaRQ.
Creative Interventions Toolkit. creative-interventions.org.
Critical Resistance. “Oakland Power Projects.” critical- resistance.org.
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories, 2003.
Dixon, Ejeris, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Beyond Survival:
Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Chico,
CA: AK Press 2019.
Enck-Wanzer, Darrel. The Young Lords: A Reader. New York: NYU Press,
2010.
Flaherty, Jordan. No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior
Mentality. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016.
Gelderloos, Peter. The Failure of Nonviolence. Seattle: Left Bank Books,
2015.
———. Anarchy Works: Examples of Anarchist Ideas in Practice. 2nd ed.
London: Active Distribution / Sto Citas, 2015. First published 2010 by
Ardent Press (San Francisco).
GenerationFIVE. Transformative Justice Handbook. gener-
ationfive.org/the-issue/transformative-justice.
The Icarus Project. Madness & Oppression: Paths to Personal
Transformation and Collective Liberation. fire- weedcollective.org,
2015.
INCITE!, ed. Color of Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
———. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2017.
It’s Going Down. itsgoingdown.org.
Morales, Iris. ¡Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords.
Video. New York: Third World Newsreel, 1996.
Klein, Naomi. The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster
Capitalists. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.
———. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York:
Metropolitan, 2008.
Klein, Naomi, and Avi Lewis. The Take. Brooklyn, NY:
First Run / Icarus, 2004.
Koyama, Emi. “Disloyal to Feminism: Abuse of Survivors within the
Domestic Violence Shelter System.” eminism. org.
Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
Manchester, NH: Extending Horizon Books, 1976.
McGuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and
Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to
the Rise of Black Power. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. “From Banks and Tanks
to Cooperation and Caring: A Strategic Framework for a Just Transition.”
November 2016. movementgeneration.org.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. mutualaiddisasterrelief.org. Mutual Aid Hub.
mutualaidhub.org.
Nelson, Alondra. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight
against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011.
Neubeck, Kenneth J., and Noel A. Cazenave. Welfare Racism: Playing the
Race Card against America’s Poor. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Regulating the Poor: The
Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Random House, 1993.
Smith, Easton. “The State, Occupy, and Disaster: What Radical Movement
Builders Can Learn from the Case of Occupy Sandy.” 2014.
thetempworker.wordpress.com.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities
That Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin, 2010.
South End Press Collective, ed. What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and
the State of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: South End, 2007.
Spade, Dean, and Roberto Sirvent. “Abolition and Mutual Aid Spotlight”
interview series. blackagendareport.org.
Strike Debt. Shouldering the Costs: Who Pays in the Aftermath of
Hurricane Sandy? 2012. strikedebt.org.
Storytelling & Organizing Project. stopviolenceeveryday. org.
Survived & Punished. survivedandpunished.org.
Sylvia Rivera Law Project. From the Bottom Up: Strategies and Practices
for Membership-Based Organizations. May 2013. srlp.org.
Thuma, Emily. All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight
to End Violence. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Transformharm.org.
Tufekci, Zeynep. “How Hong Kong Did It: With the Government Flailing,
the City’s Citizens Decided to Organize Their Own Coronavirus Response.”
The Atlantic, May 12, 2020. theatlantic.com.
Walia, Harsha. Undoing Border Imperialism. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2013.