Mutual aid impregnates our life at every level. It means organizing a large scale free food network, but also to help your neighbor to carry the bags. Or to maintain a constructive friendship. Or to do reproductive work at home. Most mutual aid relationships arise organically in our everyday life. However, in this webpage I will rather focus on talking about more organized forms of mutual aid.
A Mutual Aid Group or network is a group of people that, in an organized way, share their resources and their workforce with each other to cover their basic needs in a communal way. They are self-managed, horizontal, radically equitable, egalitarian, democratic, and non-profit organizations that address social problems from the perspective of mutual support and collective struggle. Their members find a way to solve their material needs, but also to create bonds of attachment and mutual aid and to find social reinforcement of their emotions and beliefs. In that sense, Mutual Aid Groups are a way of radicalizing care work.
What characterizes them, according to Dean Spade, is:
- An understanding that it is the system, not the people suffering under it, that creates poverty, crisis, and vulnerability
- Governance/control by people who are most affected
- Transparency about how they work, any money they use or manage
- Open meetings and open pathways for new people to join and participate
- Political education within the organization
- Willingness to accept feedback
- Long-term commitment to the project
- Connection to and solidarity with other mutual aid projects
- Consensus-based decision making
Mutua Aid Groups can be very diverse, specially regarding the need that each group aims to solve. There are thousand of needs to be solved, and each mutual aid group organizes differently. Mutual Aid Groups can coordinate themselves into a Mutual Aid Network, which allow them to extend their social labor.