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Title: Mutual Aid Chart Author: Dean Spade Date: December 4, 2019 Language: en Topics: mutual aid Source: Retrieved on 7th August 2020 from https://www.deanspade.net/2019/12/04/mutual-aid-chart/
This fall, I taught a class about mutual aid where we talked a lot about
the differences between mutual aid projects that provide direct aid as
part of radical movements trying to get to the root causes of problems
and charity or social services organizations that provide direct aid in
ways that often supplement, stabilize, or sustain violent and coercive
hierarchies. We also talked and read about organizations that have
started out as mutual aid projects and become social service or charity
organizations. We talked about how organizations get de-fanged or
co-opted, and what kinds of efforts mutual aid participants make to
prevent this. As we read various texts about mutual aid projects from
different places and times, I tried to keep track on a chart of some of
the qualities and tendencies that seem to be present in mutual aid
projects, versus those that seem to define social service or charity
projects. I hope this might be a helpful tool for people within
organizations providing direct aid to talk to each other about. None of
the observations below are meant to be absolutes–many organizations have
a mix of these tendencies and qualities. The chart only hopes to suggest
that an overwhelming presence of qualities in the right-hand column or a
drift toward those tendencies and qualities sometimes undermines the
potential for mutual aid projects to build new social relations.
Other observations:
apart in conflict about that money and how to manage and use it. When
they get enough money to have staff, there is greater danger of
institutionalization and pandering to funders, because someone’s income
will be impacted if they lose the funders’ favor.
person or few people to suddenly do all the work or more than they can
do, and volunteers sometimes check out. This can make the group
vulnerable to loss of capacity, and also to becoming more solely
governed by a few staffers. It can also be a set up for initial staffers
to be heavily criticized and considered failures.
Burnout is less likely when there are transparent participatory
decision-making processes that let people feel like they are holding the
project together with lots of people instead of alone. Burnout is less
likely when there is a culture of feedback and humility that lets people
address harmful dynamics between people or ways that hierarchies of
valuation (racism, classism, sexism, etc) are showing up in the group.
Burnout is more likely when there are not clear feedback processes and
people stifle concerns, gossip about each other, and blow up at each
other as pressure mounts.
declare false victories, so that they can keep getting funding. This can
prevent innovation in the work, or realizing the work needs to be
scrapped because it is having an unintentional bad impact. When
organizations are volunteer-based, people are more likely to want to
scrap bad ideas because their time and energy is precious to them and
they want to direct it toward something effective.
aid work that takes place during typical workday times, such as
accompanying people to courts or social services offices. Unstaffed
organizations may want staffing because they want to increase their
capacity to provide aid.
fiscal sponsor so that they can receive grants and/or tax deductable
donations. The downside is that this requires financial tracking and
organization skills that can concentrate power in the hands of people
who have had more access to such skills and systems. It also may bring
government attention and cultivate a culture of less boldness and
risk-taking within the organization as it considers government and
funder surveillance.