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Title: Mutual Aid Author: Dean Spade Date: 2020 Language: en Topics: Mutual Aid, COVID-19, crisis, solidarity Source: https://1lib.us/book/6119675/99b812
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 innovative ways to share resources and support
vulnerable neighbors. This survival work, when done in conjunction with
social movements demanding transformative 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 generosity 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
difficult 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—meeting people’s needs and mobilizing them for resistance—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 movement work that is
less visible and less valued. In this moment, our ability to build
mutual aid will determine 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
sophisticated mass mobilizations, including the use of bold tactics like
fighting police with poles, projectiles, laser pointers, and petrol
bombs. Lam was remarkably 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 railway 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 sanitizer 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 demanding 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 coordinated 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 imagine 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 lasting change.
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
understanding 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 historically connected
with each other and shared everything 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 societies 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
keeping 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
vulnerable—is a radical act.
One. Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared
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
creating 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 government’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 feminist 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 reference point for the contemporary left, mutual
aid didn’t start in the ’60s, but is an ongoing feature of movements
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 contemporary Indigenous mutual aid
projects are working to restore and amplify. Settlers have long worked
to undermine Indigenous people’s self-sustaining practices by first
destroying food systems and then forcing dependency 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
resistance 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 example. These efforts have addressed
Black exclusion from white infrastructures by creating Black
alternatives. 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.
Two. Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build
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 problems
resulting from exploitation and the maldistribution 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 interactions with cops,
immigration authorities, the foster care system, or public schools.
People seeking legal services for these problems would be invited to
participate in organizing and become part of SRLP, working 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 targeting of those more stigmatized people is okay.
This pattern of anti-solidarity incentives and practices has been
devastating for movements as non-profitization has taken hold, as I’ll
discuss further in the next chapter. Solidarity across issues and
populations is what makes movements big and powerful. Without that
connection, we end up with disconnected groups, working in their issue
silos, undermining 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
experiences 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 serving 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.
Three. Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through
collective action rather than waiting 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 schedules 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, demonstrating 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 participation, so even in volunteer groups we
often find ourselves in conflicts stemming from learned dominance
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 resistance 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 antiracism
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 willingness 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 neglecting
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 whatever they needed. After being let in once, aid workers were
able to return repeatedly. They made more badges for local organizers,
and this source continued 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
existence 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 disaster, 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
microgrids 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 extractive and unjust energy, food, health care, and
transportation 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.
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 government 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
immorality 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, participation in job training or parenting
courses, cooperation 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 receiving
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 ineligible, 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 government 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 corporations look generous while
upholding and legitimizing 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 homelessness 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, homelessness 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
housing 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 undocumented
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 directors (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. Non-profitization was designed to demobilize us,
legitimizing unjust systems and hiding the reality that real change
comes from movements made of millions of ordinary people, not small
groups of paid professionals. These days, the nonprofits 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 problems. 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 colonialism, 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,
exploitation 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 philanthropists 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 encouraged 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
feminist 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 opposing 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 liberation 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 solutions, 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 enlivens 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 iteration 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 analysis 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 hierarchical 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.
Disasters are ruptures—existing systems break down and then are either
repaired, replaced, or scrapped. Disasters exacerbate and expose
inequalities, showing the preexisting crises that elites strive to
ignore and hide from view. When disasters emerge, governments and
corporations quickly move to downplay them, hoping to get back to the
status quo of extraction 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 generated
right-wing wins like closing the border; suspending environmental
regulations; giving the FBI, DEA, and local police hundreds of millions
of dollars; and expanding the capacity of police to harass and
criminalize 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 landlords, 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 proliferated
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 capacity to support
people and keep building pressure for bigger wins.
As mobilization builds, governments, corporations, 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 government 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 redistribute.
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 associating 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 autonomy 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 confronting 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 resistance—as with the
rebellion against racist police violence in the summer of 2020—or
fearing another destabilizing disaster, governments and the corporations
they represent will sometimes grant concessions, 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, creating
resources for people being released from prison, and more. Concessions
like these, where the government provides something previously only
offered by mutual aid groups, can be celebrated as limited victories 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 children 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
instability 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 consistently 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 agricultural workers (disproportionately Black and Latinx) were
excluded from the benefits created. By tying many benefits to work, the
New Deal also perpetuated 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
populations those systems were designed to support: white people, rich
people, straight people, and men. Often, the concessions are never
delivered at all, only promised 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 possible, we get more when we demand more and
build bolder, bigger pressure. It took mass movements threatening
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 unsatisfying 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 fixable. We have to refuse to limit
our visions to the concessions 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 concentration of wealth, the most imprisonment in human
history, the most military bases and high-tech weapons, and the most
advanced mechanisms of propaganda, 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 government is so compelling is
that it is hard for us to imagine 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 disaster’s significance and abandons people to its devastations or a
government that responds with inadequate aid that comes with enhanced
policing, surveillance, militarization, and wealth transfers to the top.
This is no choice at all. Because of how capitalism 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 commitments 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 participate in the
solutions to our problems. They let us realize 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 dominance 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
coordination, 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 movement 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
solidarity-based co-stewardship in all areas of collective life. The
climate crisis will continue to bring worsening 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.
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
movements 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 obstacles 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.
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 discernment.
Mutual aid groups face four dangerous tendencies: 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 enterprise 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 evacuated, 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 homeless and
itinerant people who were “undeserving” of help, rather than as
sympathetic fire survivors. The hierarchy of deservingness is built into
FEMA’s eligibility process, which excludes people who cannot confirm an
address before the disaster, such as homeless people or people living in
poor communities where individual dwellings are sometimes not given an
individual mailing address.
The distinction between deserving and undeserving 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 especially 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 criminalized 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 department. When mutual aid projects make more stigmatized people
ineligible for what they are offering, they replicate the charity model.
The charity model often ties aid and criminalization 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 conditioning 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
superiority 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,
non-profiteers, celebrity philanthropists, and corporations conspired to
remake the city of New Orleans and the people in it by implementing
devastating “innovations” that eliminated 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 benefits 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
marginalization 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 participants 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 destruction 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 entrepreneurship” has also
emerged in recent decades, suggesting 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
coordinate 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 counselor 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 developed 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 endangered. 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, passing 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-optation 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
redistribute care and well-being, as part of larger movements that work
to dismantle the systems that concentrate wealth in the hands of the 1
percent.
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 inadequate and are facing further cuts, all in the midst of climate
change–induced fires. Meanwhile, the private firefighting business is
growing, with wealthy homeowners 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 diabetes, 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
criminalization, 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 profiting 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, supporting new laws that
increased punishment for gender-based violence and providing money for
groups willing 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 increasingly 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 accessible to the most
vulnerable survivors of violence, and provided good public relations for
police, prosecutors, 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 survivors, 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 legitimizing 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 feminists, and
feminists with disabilities have powerfully resisted this shift toward
criminalization in the movement 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 accountability” 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 addressing 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 survivors 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 harmdoers 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 likelihood 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 developed 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 situations, 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 antipolice, 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 “professionals.” 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:
limit who we help or how we help?
stigmatized and vulnerable people?
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.
Chart 1. Characteristics of Mutual Aid vs. Charity
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 helping, 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 structures. Most of us have never
been in groups that had fair, participatory, transparent structures.
We’ve been working 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
meetings 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, transparent 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 participants 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
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 spotlight. 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 nonresponsive, 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 sometimes 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
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, cultivating 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.
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, associate
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, driving 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, demobilization 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.
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 someone 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 cooperate 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 participant 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 modification. 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 meeting 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 wholegroup decision will be discussed
below.
This chart summarizes the consensus process:
Chart 5. Basic Steps to Consensus Decision-Making
[] For consensus to work well, people need a common purpose; some degree
of trust in each other; an understanding 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.
1. 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
hierarchical 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
behaviors 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 everything else that matters, we need to
practice new skills beyond dominance and submission in decision-making.
2. 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 volunteer groups, people who
don’t get to have a say in decisions 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.
3. 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 stewardship of the
group, and a chance to consider and influence the project as a whole,
even if the focus is on one specific task like delivering the groceries
or answering the hotline.
4. 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-optation, 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 establish 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 principles. Some groups establish quotas about members of
decision-making bodies within the group, ensuring that groups
particularly likely to be left out are well represented in those bodies.
5. 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 something different.
Here are five practices that set up efficient, effective consensus
decision-making:
1. 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 immunocompromised 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
multiple 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.
2. 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 principles.
Decision-making charts should always be considered 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 immunocompromised 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.
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 situations 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 immediately 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:
location, a new program, a new curriculum, a strategy for reaching a new
population)
groups or coalitions
someone, or fire someone
These are all decisions that I have repeatedly seen produce conflict in
groups, when someone—often a charismatic leader or founder—has made the
decision without 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.
3. 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 decisions
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 information, 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 electronic) so
that everyone can access it. A proposal template could be as simple as
the following:
any of them before bringing it to the whole group?
people consider it?
You might also add a statement of the group’s shared purpose to the
proposal, since that guides group decisions. 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?”
4. 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
accomplishments and wins, grieve our losses, and become people who can
be together in new, more liberating relationships. Bad facilitation can
make meetings boring, exhausting, oppressive, and damaging to
individuals and groups. Most of us have never been to well-facilitated
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 facilitation worth considering
are:
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.
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.
time so the group doesn’t end up running the meeting too long or not
getting to important items.
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!
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
meeting and make sure newcomers understand them and get to ask questions
or suggest additions.
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 facilitation 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.
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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 notetaking 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.
5. 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 movements. 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
capacity 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-ownership 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:
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.
providing a background of the problems the group is addressing and the
group’s activities so far; avoiding jargon, acronyms, and overly
technical theoretical language.
thought about those ideas before.
they don’t feel lost about what is going on or being discussed.
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.
focused on orienting new people, since some detailed group discussions
that need to happen about ongoing work might not be the most accessible
to newbies.
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.
Leadership Qualities That Support Mutuality and Collaboration
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 individuals and groups to reflect on what we’ve been taught
about leadership and how to redefine it for ourselves.
Chart 8. Leadership Qualities
1. Write or talk in your group about what is missing from these lists.
2. Circle qualities you see in yourself that you are working to
cultivate and grow. What might help them grow?
3. Circle qualities you see in yourself that are obstacles to you
practicing cooperative leadership 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?
4. 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?
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 corporations 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 platforms. 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 example,
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 confinement, 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,
competition, 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, including
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
everyone 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 suffering, 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 something 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 nonprofits by applying to the
IRS, or get a nonprofit fiscal sponsor 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 education, 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 addition, when groups are dependent on funders, they have
an incentive to declare false victories or stick to strategies 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 population’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 overworked 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 burnout 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 overloaded
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 professional degree, and should ensure that
people are not pressured to overwork. Having clear and transparent
budgeting and planning processes that can be understood 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 institutionalization 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 exhaustion 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 combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and
frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion in the
work and instead encounter difficult feelings 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
contribution 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 disconnected 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 burnout 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.
who might do it differently, or the group coming to a different decision
than we would make.
harder than anyone else.” This can include creating a damaging group
culture of competition about who works the hardest.
the process as the founder or the hardest worker.
or with other issues or activists that we perceive as receiving more
support.
important” to the group or control outcomes.
do less work or have less responsibility.
to the same level of leadership (this behavior is usually rationalized
in some way).
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.
working in this kind of work. Feelings of being alone. Feelings of “me
against [members of the group/other groups/everyone].”
fraudulent and afraid of being caught so far behind.
money/time/attention.”
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.
how the group is perceived by outsiders such as funders, elites, and
others.
“I’m doing so much, I’m killing myself with work. How can you critique
me? I can’t possibly do any better/more!”
We also carry around fallback attitudes and behaviors 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
superiority or dominance on the basis of gender, race, ability, class,
or educational attainment.
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.
1. 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 moratorium on new projects and commitments so that
the situation 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:
active listening, giving and receiving direct feedback.
sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and other systems of meaning
and control affect group development and culture, and how to change
that.
shared clarity on what the priorities are and what they have agreed to
do and not to do together.
assign work fairly, assess workload, and plan out a reasonable pace of
work.
facilitator who understands the group’s values and whom the people in
conflict trust and/or see as relatively neutral.
each other are doing, and allied groups doing similar or related work
know what the group is doing.
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.
2. Make sure that new people are welcomed and trained to co-lead. This
means new people are given a full background 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 leadership 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.
3. 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 wellbeing? 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
moratorium—no one can unilaterally take on new work for the group or for
themselves as a member of the group.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
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
contributions 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:
can ask for honest feedback about my behavior, and who can help support
me and soothe me when I feel afraid of doing something 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, competitive, 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.
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.
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
uncomfortable 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
defensiveness, or taking on a victim narrative, is especially important
when I am in a position of privilege of any kind and/or have more
developed leadership in the group or project.
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 experiencing
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.
world. What that looks like is different for everyone, and could include
individual or group therapy, 12-step programs (including Workaholics
Anonymous), exercise, bodywork, spiritual exploration, art practice,
gardening, 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.
from a group if relationships have gotten difficult and I am
experiencing negative 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 relationships 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, especially 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 positions, 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 relationships. 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:
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.
for belonging and connection, disappointment is likely.
familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously looking for evidence
that we are different or are being slighted or left out.
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 fraudulent. We might even unconsciously
make up stories about what other people are thinking about us.
brings stress and pressures that can heighten feelings and provoke
reactive 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 careful 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
microaggressions and systemic harm, or other sources. When someone
brushes a raw spot, we can have a big reaction—sometimes acting outward
toward them, sometimes 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 proportional 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.
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:
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?
situation or behavior?
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?
control? If not, can I imagine letting go, even just 5 percent or 10
percent, to gain some peace of mind?
have to do with my own history and experiences? Are there ways to give
myself attention or care around these wounds?
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?
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 accusatory posts can hurt the person doing the gossiping, the
target, the group, and the movement. It usually magnifies 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 experience,
talk through possible responses, and get sympathy. So, how can we tell
if we are engaging in negative gossip that might harm someone? Here are
several questions we can ask ourselves:
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.
to get support and process my experience, or am I trying to get other
people to think badly about this person?
content of what you are sharing is something you would not consider
compassionate or constructive feedback, something 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.
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 disruption 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 relationships 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
leadership 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”
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, causing them to be
exclusive, producing conflict, and feeding dynamics of overwork and
burnout. Perfectionism sometimes appears as a fear of saying anything
that is politically off-base and being judged, so that people don’t
share their opinions; or are wildly defensive if someone questions
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 perfectionism. Check
anything that feels familiar.
Chart 10. Perfectionism Checklist
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
have to work extremely hard in order to deserve a treat or a rest.
prepared for possible outcomes.I can’t let anyone else do a task in case
it goes wrong.
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.
interactions, how I regard my body, activism, social media interactions,
housework? What is the cost?
intolerant of others’ learning 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?
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, learning new skills, working in
groups, and taking on new responsibilities. These are the same things
that make the work meaningful, satisfying, and pleasurable. But pressure
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 behaviors 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
illustrated, 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.)
Some areas to think about when making this section might include:
your appearance, personality, intelligence, etc.).
like you, are talking about you, excluding you.
overloaded.
wanting to let other people do it differently.
mirror, your work, other people’s work, your health, your money).
project).
right now.
imbalance.
In this section, try to set realistic expectations, not piein-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:
news, etc.
escapist or toxifying behaviors.
help but might be falling away right now.
example, not upon waking or before bed).
-Goals for getting outdoors or interacting with the natural world.
including unpaid activist or artistic work if you are overworking in
those areas.
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.
connection, or self-worth.
your isolation, generate a more structured routine, break up a
monotonous routine.
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 behaviors 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.
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.
everything.I ruined everything.Nothing every works out for me/us.
worst.I don’t deserve help/care/support/love/admiration/survival.I am a
bad person.
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 spiritual 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.
are facing are severe. It is okay that we can’t meet everyone’s needs at
once or solve everything.
no to things.
imperfect work.
else here. I have wisdom and experience to offer just like everyone
else.
or was mean to me, it may be a misinterpretation of their behavior.
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.
comes from a sense of choosing 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.
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.
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 discernment of how I can care
for myself and others.
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.
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 sanitizer, water, medical support, and protection to
each other while fighting cops and white supremacists in the streets,
organizing and supporting funds for criminalized people, pressuring
schools and other institutions to cancel contracts with the police, and
more. In the first two weeks of the protests alone, an unprecedented 3.5
million people donated to bail funds around the United States. As
organizers demanded the defunding and dismantling of police departments,
vibrant conversations about transformative justice emerged, with more
and more people learning about the possibilities of addressing conflict
and violence through mutual aid rather than criminalization.
In Seattle, after days of confrontations police abandoned 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
practices of governance, co-stewardship, leadership, decision-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, clothing,
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
commercial fishing and waive environmental review for infrastructure
projects; the EPA slashed clean water protections; 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
enforcement systems and militaries, it is clear that mutual aid projects
are essential to the broader ecosystem of political 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 injuries
make street battles with police for days on end possible. Healing
justice projects and conflict mediation 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 throwing
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 organized a shared resistance
to cooperating with police. The bus drivers’ union in Minneapolis issued
a statement 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 solidarity become bolder
and bolder as experiences with our shared authority emancipate us from
the illegitimate 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 immigrants 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 building 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 occupying
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 redistribute 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 simultaneously build new ways of surviving that are
based in our principles of liberation and collective self-determination.
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 helping 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 suffering followed by
species extinction. As we deliver groceries, participate in meetings,
sew masks, write letters to prisoners, apply bandages, facilitate
relationship 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.
This book expands upon the author’s previous writing 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.
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Batza, Katie. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s.
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Beam, Myrl. Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics.
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bergman, carla, and Nick Montgomery. Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving
Resistance in Toxic Times. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.
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Butler, C.T. Lawrence, and Amy Rothstein. On Conflict and Consensus: A
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———. Anarchy Works: Examples of Anarchist Ideas in Practice. 2nd ed.
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———. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Durham, NC: Duke University
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Spade, Dean, and Roberto Sirvent. “Abolition and Mutual Aid Spotlight”
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Walia, Harsha. Undoing Border Imperialism. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2013.