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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 can include physical resources like food, clothing, or medicine, as well as services like breakfast programs or education. These groups are often built for the daily needs of their communities, but mutual aid groups are also found throughout relief efforts, such as in natural disasters or pandemics like COVID-19.

Resources are shared unconditionally, contrasting this model from charity where conditions for gaining access to help are often set, such as means testing or grant stipulations. These groups often go beyond material or service exchange and are set up as a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions.

Mutual aid groups are distinct in their drive to flatten the hierarchy, searching for collective consensus decision-making across participating people rather than placing leadership within a closed executive team. With this joint decision-making, all participating members are empowered to enact change and take responsibility for the group.

History

The term "mutual aid" was popularized by the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution, through biological mutualism. Kropotkin argued that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of humans and animals and has been promoted through natural selection, and that mutual aid is arguably as ancient as human culture. This recognition of the widespread character and individual benefit of mutual aid stood in contrast to the theories of social Darwinism that emphasized individual competition and survival of the fittest, and against the ideas of liberals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love.

Practice

Mutual aid participants work together to figure out strategies and resources to meet each other's needs, such as food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief while organizing themselves against the system that created the shortage in the first place.

Typically, mutual-aid groups are member-led, member-organized, and open to all to participate in. They often have non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic structures, with members controlling all resources. They are egalitarian in nature and designed to support participatory democracy, equality of member status, power-shared leadership, and consensus-based decision-making.

Some challenges to the success of mutual aid groups include lack of technical experts, lack of funding, lack of public legitimacy, and institutionalization of social hierarchies.

Mutual aid vs. charity

As defined by radical activist and writer Dean Spade and explored in his University of Chicago course "Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization", mutual aid is distinct from charity. Radical activist, social welfare scholar, and social worker Benjamin Shepard defines mutual aid as "people giv what they can and get what they need." Mutual aid projects are often critical of the charity model, and may use the motto "solidarity, not charity" to differentiate themselves from charities.

Examples

In the 1800s and early 1900s, mutual aid organizations included unions, the friendly societies that were common throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medieval craft guilds, the American "fraternity societies" that existed during the Great Depression providing their members with health and life insurance and funeral benefits, and the English working men's clubs of the 1930s that also provided health insurance. In the United States, mutual aid has been practiced extensively in marginalized communities, notably in Black communities, working-class neighborhoods, migrant groups, LGBT communities, and others. The Black Panther Party's urban food programs in the 1960s were another prominent example of mutual aid. A Common Ground Relief mutual aid group organized to provide disaster relief for the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid and grassroots solidarity groups around the world organized networks distribution for food and personal protective equipment. The term "mutual aid", previously associated with anarchism, drifted into public parlance during the pandemic. Local mutual aid groups, sometimes as local as the street level, organized to help shop, deliver medicine, create games for kids, offering civic connection during a time of isolation. Multiple online outlets ran stories on how to create a mutual aid group.

See also

• Benefit society
• Communal work
• Community fridge
• Gift economy
• Little Free Pantries
• Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, by Peter Kropotkin
• Mutual credit
• Mutual organization
• Mutualism
• Solidarity
• Solidarity economy
• Sociability

References

1. Peter Kropotkin; Victor Robinson (26 May 2020). "Introduction". Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution: With an Excerpt from Comrade Kropotkin by Victor Robinson. Read Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-5287-9015-4.
2. ^ Kropotkin, Petr (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Retrieved 6 May 2020 – via The Anarchist Library.
3. Bertram, Christopher (2020), "Jean Jacques Rousseau", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, archived from the original on 2021-03-25, retrieved 2020-12-11
4. H, Katie (27 April 2020). "From Mutual Aid To Dual Power: How Do We Build A New World In The Shell Of The Old?". Plan C. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
5. Turner, Francis J. (2005). Canadian encyclopedia of social work. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. pp. 337–8. ISBN 0-88920-436-5.
6. Zola, I. K. (1972). "The problems and prospects of mutual aid groups". Rehabilitation Psychology. 19 (4): 180–183. doi:10.1037/h0091061. Archived from the original on September 20, 2023. Retrieved December 17, 2020.
7. Izlar, Joel (2019-11-01). "Radical social welfare and anti-authoritarian mutual aid". Critical and Radical Social Work. 7 (3): 349–366. doi:10.1332/204986019X15687131179624. ISSN 2049-8608. S2CID 211453572.
8. Spade, Dean (1 March 2020). "Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival". Social Text. 38 (1): 131–151. doi:10.1215/01642472-7971139. S2CID 216351581. Retrieved 10 May 2020.
9. Shepard, Benjamin (2015). Community practice as social activism: from direct action to direct services. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. p. 166. ISBN 978-1-4833-0937-8. OCLC 962305465.
10. Bacharach, Samuel B.; Bamberger, Peter; Sonnenstuhl, William J. (2001). Mutual aid and union renewal: cycles of logics of action. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University. p. 173. ISBN 0-8014-8734-X.
11. Kropotkin, Peter (2008). Mutual aid: a factor of evolution. : Forgotten Books. p. 117. ISBN 978-1-60680-071-3.
12. Beito, David T. (2000). From mutual aid to the welfare state: fraternal societies and social services, 1890–1967. Chapel Hill : Univ. of North Carolina Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN 0-8078-4841-7.
13. Shapely, Peter (2007). Borsay, Anne (ed.). Medicine, charity and mutual aid: the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, c. 1550–1950; ( ed.). Aldershot : Ashgate. pp. 7–8. ISBN 978-0-7546-5148-2.
14. NEMBHARD, JESSICA GORDON (2014). Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Penn State University Press. doi:10.5325/j.ctv14gpc5r. ISBN 978-0-271-06216-7. JSTOR 10.5325/j.ctv14gpc5r.
15. Bacon, Jacqueline; McClish, Glen (2000). "Reinventing the Master's Tools: Nineteenth-Century African-American Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education". Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 30 (4): 19–47. doi:10.1080/02773940009391187. ISSN 0277-3945. JSTOR 3886116. S2CID 144385631.
16. Williams, Colin C.; Windebank, Jan (2000). "Self-help and Mutual Aid in Deprived Urban Neighbourhoods: Some Lessons from Southampton". Urban Studies. 37 (1): 127–147. Bibcode:2000UrbSt..37..127W. doi:10.1080/0042098002320. ISSN 0042-0980. JSTOR 43084635. S2CID 155040089. Archived from the original on 2022-04-24. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
17. Hernández-Plaza, Sonia; Alonso-Morillejo, Enrique; Pozo-Muñoz, Carmen (2006). "Social Support Interventions in Migrant Populations". The British Journal of Social Work. 36 (7): 1151–1169. doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch396. ISSN 0045-3102. JSTOR 23721354.
18. ^ Solnit, Rebecca (2020-05-14). "'The way we get through this is together': mutual aid under coronavirus". the Guardian. Retrieved 2020-06-14.
19. Preston, John (March 22, 2022). "Rev. of Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During the COVID-19 Crisis". Anarchist Studies. 30 (1): 125–128. ISSN 0967-3393. Gale A708386016.
20. Tolentino, Jia (11 May 2020). "What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic". The New Yorker. Retrieved 28 July 2020.

Bibliography

• Amaro Hernández, José (1983). Mutual Aid for Survival: The Case of the Mexican American. Krieger. ISBN 9780898745467.
• Awry, Wren, ed. (2023). Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid. PM Press. ISBN 978-1-62963-996-3. LCCN 2022943234.
• Bacharach, Samuel B.; Bamberger, Peter; Sonnenstuhl, William J. (2001). Mutual Aid and Union Renewal: Cycles of Logics of Action. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8734-X. LCCN 00-012151. Archived from the original on 2023-02-06. Retrieved 2023-02-06.
• Baylouny, Anne Marie (2010). Privatizing Welfare in the Middle East: Kin Mutual Aid Associations in Jordan and Lebanon. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-22195-7. LCCN 2009045228.
• Beito, David T. (2000). From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-4841-7. LCCN 99-41895.
• Borkman, Thomasina (1999). Understanding Self-help/mutual Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2630-2. LCCN 98-50649. Archived from the original on 2023-02-06. Retrieved 2023-02-06.
• Borsay, Anne (2016) . Borsay, Anne; Shapely, Pete (eds.). Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid: The Consumption of Health and Welfare in Britain, c.1550–1950. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315594699. ISBN 978-0-7546-5148-2. LCCN 2006030263.
• Bridgen, Paul; Harris, Bernard, eds. (2007). Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-93240-7. LCCN 2007031877.
• Delalande, Nicolas (2023). Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity. Other Press. ISBN 9781635420111. LCCN 2022027364.
• Firth, Rhiannon (2022). Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-4046-3. OCLC 1288196115.
• Gitterman, Alex; Shulman, Lawrence, eds. (2005). Mutual Aid Groups, Vulnerable and Resilient Populations, and the Life Cycle. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-12885-1. LCCN 2005056035.
• Grubačić, Andrej; O'Hearn, Denis (2016). Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520962484. LCCN 2015036704.
• Midgley, James; Hosaka, Mitsuhiko, eds. (2011). Grassroots Social Security in Asia: Mutual Aid, Microinsurance and Social Welfare. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-83178-6. LCCN 2010031554.
• Moyse Steinberg, Dominique (2009) . The Mutual-aid Approach to Working with Groups: Helping People Help One Another (2nd ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7890-1462-7. LCCN 2004007025.
• Preston, John; Firth, Rhiannon (2020). Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom. Springer. ISBN 9783030577131.
• Servigne, Pablo; Chapelle, Gauthier (2022). Mutual Aid: The Other Law of the Jungle. Wiley. ISBN 978-1509547920.
• Rebecca, Solnit (2020). Sitrin, Marina; Sembrar, Colectiva (eds.). Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During the Covid-19 Crisis. Pluto Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv12sdx5v. ISBN 978-0-7453-4320-4. JSTOR j.ctv12sdx5v. S2CID 240768553.
• Swain, Dan; Urban, Petr; Malabou, Catherine; Kouba, Petr, eds. (2021). Unchaining Solidarity: On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781538157961. LCCN 2021034081.
• Winfield Fretz, Joseph (2020). Christian Mutual Aid: A Handbook of Brotherhood Economics. Wipf and Stock. ISBN 9781725283695.

Further reading

• Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Peter Kropotkin, 1902
• Hossein, Caroline Shenaz. 2018. The Black Social Economy. NY:Palgrave Macmillan
• Syllabus, "Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization" course at University of Chicago with professor Dean Spade
• What Is Mutual Aid, and How Can It Help With Coronavirus?
• For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, PM Press, by John Curl, 2009
• "Help! Gegenseitig behindern oder helfen. Eine politische Skizze zur Wahrnehmung heute", Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012

External links

• Mutual Aid Societies (lecture by Sheldon Richman)
• Mutual aid and physical distancing is not new to the Black and racialized minorities in the Americas By Caroline S. Hossein.

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