The world is in crisis and people are suffering at the hands of oppressive systems: Cop Cities sprouting up nationwide and police budgets ballooning while library budgets are slashed; barriers to healthcare access facing all Americans, though especially low-income and trans people; mass arrests of peaceful student protests in solidarity with Palestine; unjust immigration enforcement that leaves families separated and without critical resources. When we need support, people must turn to one another. On social media, people put out calls for funds via colorful graphics or pool money together to pay someone else’s rent. Community members pack courtrooms to show defendants they are not alone. People with cars organize transportation.
These examples – and broadly, the act of protecting, caring and providing for one another when the government fails to do so – can be categorized as “mutual aid.”
In Asheville, North Carolina, where communities are still reeling from the impact of Hurricane Helene, mutual aid efforts have been essential for survival, residents say. “It’s really hard to overstate how damaged some parts of our community are,” Asheville-based climate organizer Alex Lines told Teen Vogue in mid-October, with communities underwater, massive power outages, destroyed water infrastructure and more at the time. For residents, it felt like “There wasn’t really any plan ahead of time…most of the city’s water was [off] because of the damage, and there was no plan for distributing water.” With residents across the city left without access to water for weeks, and without a timeline from the city on when it would be restored or drinkable (while power and water have largely been restored, it wasn’t drinkable, as of last week), mutual aid efforts were crucial.
“People sprung into action immediately after the storm passed…checking in on their neighbors, sharing camping stoves and water bottles and whatever they had,” they said. One group in particular, Be Well AVL, created a network of individuals with wells in the area to effectively distribute water to those in need. Others are working to distribute PPE and clean up toxic mud, or cook hot food in areas particularly impacted by the storms. [Mutual aid is] happening all over the place right now.”
“Government response is really, really slow,” Lines told Teen Vogue. Those engaging with mutual aid, helping each other with what they have, are “able to respond to needs a lot quicker and with less bureaucracy.”
What is mutual aid and where did it come from?
Mutual aid is an integral part of social justice movements, through which people work together to imagine a more just world.
“Mutual aid work is challenging,” Dean Spade, the author of the 2020 book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), tells Teen Vogue. Spade’s book was released towards the end of 2020, by which point the combination of the COVID pandemic and the uprisings for Black lives organically led to the creation of many new mutual aid networks, some of which still exist today.
“We're trying to build lives where we work for liberation our entire lives and care about all the overlapping ways that different struggles for liberation are connected,” Spade says. “Imagine, what would it be like to dedicate your life to the liberation of all people on the planet?”
The term “mutual aid” is thought to have been coined by Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution:
“[M]an is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love […] but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has had the leading part.”
In his book, Dean Spade defines mutual aid as “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.” There have been many times throughout history where communities have turned to mutual aid practices to support one another during crises. Narratives about social movements often focus on lawsuits, legislation and famous activists, rather than the ordinary people who actually make up these movements, Spade tells Teen Vogue. Many “ordinary people” are involved in mutual aid efforts, and “mutual aid is a central part of all social movements,” he says.
“The idea of mutual aid is that we’re all in this together,” says Tarah Stangler, a local organizer in Madison, Wisconsin and the harm reduction services director at OutReach LGBTQ+ Community Center. “We're all sharing what we have together and making resources more accessible to fight against the systems of oppression that tell us that we're so different from one another.”
Mutual aid acknowledges the systems of oppression in place that either cause or exacerbate crises. This is in contrast to charity, a more top-down, hierarchical approach which, Spade argues, can place blame on the person rather than the system, and tends to operate from a framework that only supporting “deserving” individuals. Mutual aid recognizes that people are in crisis and that crisis is not created by those people, he says. “Mutual aid is oppositional to the government,” Spade says. “It’s about autonomous projects that are recognizing needs the government will never fill.”
Despite the importance of mutual aid efforts, they are often written out of history, demobilizing people and preventing them from seeing how they could be part of a movement, Spade says.
Black mutual aid societies have existed in the U.S. for centuries. One of the U.S.’s first Black mutual aid societies, the Free African Society, was formed in Philadelphia 1787 by ministers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, among others. FAS members fed, housed, protected and cared for individuals in their community, and provided crucial relief to many during a yellow fever epidemic (sometimes to their own detriment, as it was based on an assumption that Black people were immune to yellow fever). Black mutual aid societies grew in popularity by the 1800s. According to Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, a City University of New York (CUNY) professor focused on community economics and Black political economy, by the 1800s over half of Black Americans were a part of “at least one mutual aid society.”
In 1969, the Black Panther Party created the Free Breakfast for Children Program, one of the best-known historical examples of mutual aid projects. The Free Breakfast Program served breakfast to tens of thousands of kids around the country, with a federal official reportedly admitting in 1969 that the program was feeding more low-income children than the state of California was. The program had a profound impact – teachers noted that kids were having an easier time learning. Then FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, however, called the successful program a “threat” to the government’s attempts to neutralize the Black Panther Party. He ordered law enforcement to destroy the program, which they did through raids and other interference efforts. In Spade’s book, he calls these government attacks on the Black Panther Party – and the eventual co-opting of the program, via the expansion of a federal free breakfast program – “evidence of mutual aid’s power.”
The Young Lords, a Puerto Rican-centered human rights group, made history when they took matters into their own hands to fight for better health and living conditions. There was a severe lack of sanitation services in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood that left a major public health problem: too much garbage. In 1969, the Young Lords, who modeled themselves after and were contemporaries of the Black Panther Party, took brooms from the city’s Sanitation Department and swept trash into the streets. The “Garbage Offensive” made the needs of the community impossible to ignore, and eventually the local government established a more effective garbage collection strategy. The group continued to push for better health standards; in 1970 they occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, an action that led to one of the first known Patient’s Bill of Rights.
The COVID-19 pandemic and mutual aid
During the COVID-19 pandemic and political uprisings of 2020, mutual aid efforts became more visible and drew in new people as existing inequalities received more attention.
Stangler first heard of mutual aid in 2020 while in Minneapolis, the origin point of the George Floyd uprising; people were buying groceries for others and leaving them at gas stations for COVID-safe pickup. “We did marches where we asked people to bring food donations so that we could drop them off at pantries, we did posts where we were raising funds to help pay people’s electric bills,” Stangler says. “We were raising funds for just Black and brown folks generally.”
Stangler took everything she learned organizing in Minneapolis-St. Paul and brought it to Madison to share with their community there.
Mutual aid work allows organizers to identify vulnerable communities that may need support in future crises, and also helps communities build the skills and infrastructure needed to provide that support, Spade says: “Every existing project, every existing relationship makes us more prepared to deal with the next one.” When the pandemic hit, people who had already been doing work to support incarcerated people knew prisons were not providing proper personal protective equipment, Spade tells Teen Vogue. With this knowledge, he says, organizers were able to put pressure on prisons to provide masks and testing, getting the word out about this aspect of how the COVID crisis was impacting a vulnerable population.
Mutual aid in practice
Stangler believes everyone brings something to a movement: “There are so many ways to get involved,” she tells Teen Vogue. It can look like sharing a call on your social media, driving someone to a food bank, or texting as many friends as you can to come to a protest. “There is so much power in the power of your community, and mobilizing that for what folks need is one of the most incredible moments of getting involved in organizing.”
Stangler’s friends routinely support one another in the fight for liberation, engaging in small-scale interpersonal forms of mutual aid. In the wake of climate catastrophe, Stangler and a group of friends crowdfunded and traveled from Madison, WI to Asheville, NC to organize mutual aid supply drops for those impacted by Hurricane Helene.
Her friends, while a number of them live paycheck-to-paycheck, will take the day off to protest, make food for the community, watch someone’s kids, or pack the courts. “The reason why [mutual aid] is so important and so necessary…is because it gives everybody the ability to participate in fighting for the world that they want to see tomorrow without having to worry about how they’re going to live through the rest of that day.”
Social justice movements and mutual aid are inherently interconnected, as mutual aid not only attracts individuals to these movements but ensures their sustainability. The various initiatives that ensure the longevity of social movements, such as street medics, who provide crucial medical support during protests, and bail funds that assist arrested students, exemplify the vital role of mutual aid in fostering community resilience and empowerment. Even popular protest chants – “the people united will never be defeated” – embody the principles of mutual aid.
Last spring, pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses across the country fed both protesters and the public. When the City College of New York’s community food pantry was closed by the university, which they blamed on the campus’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, organizers reportedly opened their own; they had already been giving out meals to local residents regardless of affiliation with the college. Organizers of UC Berkeley’s encampment said they planned to donate all surplus goods to local unhoused people. The University of Wisconsin–Madison encampment organizers created a “People’s Kitchen” open to everyone, supplied by donations from local restaurants, community members, organizations and supportive UW faculty.
This carries through to how student organizing provided support for those arrested and injured during the police response to the encampments. Says Spade, “[Encampment mutual aid practices are] all things that provide immediate direct support to people who are facing some kind of crisis related to systemic harms, and they’re really, really vital to supporting political resistance.”
Mutual aid efforts can also offer innovative solutions to widespread problems, such as Stop the Sweeps in Seattle, who work to minimize the harm police sweeps cause houseless people, or Barter Up, an online platform that allows people to trade skills, services and goods.
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