What does mutual aid look like in the real world?
How do communities — especially marginalized ones — use mutual aid on a day to day basis?
This is part of a running course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here. Most of this article is paywalled, but I offer 7-day free trials, and this course will be offered for $10 total in ebook form at the end of its run!
Last week, we gave our definition of mutual aid, as taken from Wikipedia:
Mutual aid is an organizational model where voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place amongst community members to overcome social, economic, and political barriers to meeting common needs.
This week, we’re going to dive into what that means in practice.
Mutual aid vs. Charity
Most importantly, mutual aid is fundamentally different from charity. For one thing, charitable giving is one-way: when you give money or resources to the needy, you aren’t really expecting anything back from the needy in return. In mutual aid, the idea is that you are either doing something that will be mutually beneficial, or you are helping someone with the understanding that they would do the same for you if you were in need.
Which brings us to the second core difference: mutual aid is egalitarian1, charity is hierarchical2. This makes mutual aid a much more collaborative effort, and it means that the people receiving help get to ask for the type of help — money, time, resources, food, healthcare — they’d like to receive. In charity, the type of help given is usually determined by the giver. Because of this difference in power between the giver and the receiver, charities will often place conditions on the help they provide. For example:
You need to prove you’re needy enough to get this help.
We’ll give you money, but it can only be used for food or other approved expenditures.
We’ll help you, but only if you listen to our sermon.
We’ll help you, but only if you’re cisgendered/straight/have the correct immigration papers.
We’ll help you, but only if you’ve never broken any laws/aren’t doing any drugs.
Mutual aid places no such conditions, because mutual aid, by its nature, has to be rooted in trust. If you don’t trust the person you’re helping, then how can you expect them to help you when you need it? And if you do trust them and they’ve got some difficult stuff going on in their lives — they’re battling addiction3, they’re unhoused, they’re working through difficult legal battles — then it’s not really for you to judge them and tell them what to do, but to support them in the way that they say they need.
So what do real-life mutual aid programs look like?
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