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You never know what someone is going through

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This article and video explains how the Black Panther party has grown over the course of history and is now a huge source of mutual aid all across America.

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The Black Panther Party's Impact on Modern Day Activism

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The Black Panthers have long been vilified, but their impact on many prominent current activists is immeasurable

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This article from Amanda Arnold explains what mutual aid is and how you can get involved.

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The United States is a country of staggering disparities, many of which have been put in stark relief over the past year amid compounding crises. As the coronavirus pandemic has maintained an unrelenting grip on the country, Black and Latino people have been nearly three times as likely to contract COVID-19 than white people and twice as likely to die from the virus. Unemployment has soared to historic levels, rendering millions of people unable to afford food, rent, or other basic necessities.Meanwhile, more and more people are getting involved in organizing and activism amid a nationwide uprising sparked by racist police brutality.

Against this backdrop, where large swathes of the country feel abandoned by the government, the concept of mutual aid is quickly gaining mainstream recognition. Mutual aid is a form of solidarity-based support, in which communities unite against a common struggle, rather than leaving individuals to fend for themselves. While underserved communities have long organized mutual-aid networks, in the past year, the groups have proliferated across the country, and the concept has increasingly gained mainstream recognition. Neighborhood mutual-aid networks, such as Crown Heights Mutual Aid in Brooklyn, have cropped up to deliver groceries for people especially vulnerable to coronavirus. Meanwhile, existing mutual-aid groups like the For the Gworls, which supports the Black trans community, have received an influx of donations to provide rental assistance, funds for gender-affirming surgery, and more.

As mutual-aid groups have received increased attention,questions (and in some cases, confusion) have arisen: How do you get involved in mutual-aid efforts? And how does it differ from charity? Here's a quick guide to what mutual aid is - and isn't - plus steps to get involved.

What is mutual aid?

In mutual-aid systems, people work cooperatively to meet the needs of everyone in the community. It's different from charity, which features a one-way relationship between an organization and recipients, and often responds to the effects of inequality but not its causes.Mutual aid is an act of solidarity that builds sustained networks between neighbors. As prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba explained to the : "It's not community service - you're not doing service for service's sake. You're trying to address real material needs."

While many neighborhood networks cropped up in response to the pandemic, mutual aid is not just a response to a crisis, but instead, a more permanent alliance between people united against a common struggle. In short, people offer help - which could be resources, like food or money, or skills, like driving or picking up prescriptions - which are then redistributed to those in the community who are in need. Mutual-aid systems operate under the notion that everyone has something to contribute, and everyone has something they need.

How long has mutual aid been around?

The term "mutual aid" comes from 19th-century anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who formulated the theory after going to the Siberian wilderness. Expecting to observe competition in the natural world, he instead witnessed animals united against common struggle. He later outlined his theory in his 1902 essay collection, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, writing, "In the long run, the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations."

Throughout American history, wherever poor, marginalized communities have existed, often, so have mutual-aid networks. In the 19th and 20th centuries, " fraternal societies" within the labor movement - which were run by the poor and working class - provided access to health care, paid leave, and life insurance to people across the country. The Black Panther Party also organized a number of mutual-aid efforts in the 1960s, the most famous being its free-breakfast program, which provided meals to 20,000 children.

How do these systems operate?

Mutual-aid groups are made up of organizers and volunteers who respond to the needs of communities. How they achieve this logistically differs from group to group. Many of the mutual-aid groups that cropped up in response to the pandemic started in Google Docs and Slack channels, in which people came together to discuss how to support each other within the neighborhood.

Support comes in myriad forms. Bed-Stuy Strong in Brooklyn, which started in response to the pandemic, has recently been cleaning the neighborhood and posting flyers encouraging the community to fill out their census forms. During the Black Lives Matters demonstrations that erupted across the country this summer, networks provided snacks and supplies to protesters. Also this summer, the grassroots collective The Okra Project created emergency mutual-aid funds to help Black trans people pay for therapy sessions with licensed Black therapists.

How can I get involved in mutual-aid efforts?

Unfortunately, there isn't currently an extensive database that outlines all the mutual-aid efforts across the country. Instead, you'll likely have to spend some time digging around on Google or social-media platforms to find local efforts. You could also reach out to local community organizers for guidance. It's up to you how to support the efforts: You could give money, which is a great way to support national networks, or you could volunteer your time. Depending on your level of involvement, you might be instructed to attend a quick orientation or meeting. Crown Heights Mutual Aid, for example, offers twice-weekly trainings over Zoom, every week.

You could also take the initiative to create a new mutual-aid network to respond to an unmet need. In response to the pandemic, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Kaba compiled an incredibly useful, comprehensive guide to mutual aid, including information on how to start a network.

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So You Want to Get Involved in Mutual Aid

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The United States is a country of staggering disparities, many of which have been put in stark relief over the past year amid compounding crises. As the coronavirus pandemic has maintained an unrelenting grip on the country, Black and Latino people have been nearly three times as likely to contract COVID-19 than white people and twice as likely to die from the virus.

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Mutualism is a book by Sarah Horowitz that explains what mutual aid is, and how the cooperative spirit of America can help Americans in an age where it seems like no one can put aside their differences.

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Mutualism by Sara Horowitz: 9780593133521 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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"Horowitz gives us the model to build our next progressive institutions. Her vision provides a path forward to build the next safety net that will meet the needs of all workers in the next economy-an economy that is already here!"

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Here is an article about mutual aid and how it helped people that were impacted by the pandemic. Mutual aid was actually a backbone for a lot of people to get back to their regular lives after COVID.

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is not a substitute for the effective provision of social services, but policymakers can still from community aid networks. These groups, like Bed-Stuy Strong (BSS)-a Brooklyn-based mutual aid network-quickly organized and mobilized during the pandemic to generate flexible, far-reaching responses despite extremely limited time and resources.

From March 2020 to June 2021, BSS supported 28,000 people in Central Brooklyn by organizing a volunteer- and donation-driven grocery delivery mutual aid program. The group also raised about $1.2 million in grassroots, crowdsourced donations, redistributing it back into the community.

Lessons from the Field

In writing this piece, I interviewed Alyssa Dizon, a volunteer who managed BSS's automation system for its food access mutual aid program during the pandemic. She suggests four best practices for those involved in mutual aid based on her organizer perspective.

Drawing upon existing resources and iterating based on evolving needs can ensure effective, sustainable system design.

When it became clear that more organizational infrastructure was needed, BSS revamped its system to better serve volunteers and the needs of those requesting food deliveries. These reforms included:

Developing a script to address callbacks for neighbors in need

Providing guidance on conducting safe, sanitary no-contact deliveries

Splitting Bedford-Stuyvesant into quadrants to accommodate delivery volunteers without cars

Utilizing Zapier, a technology automation platform, to scrape text-based voicemails created by Google Voice, translating them into Airtable records that included a call back phone number, date, and actual message

Automating the tracking of basic metrics for incoming requests received or fulfilled in a day

However, delivery coordinators were still performing quite a bit of manual work, and the number of delivery requests were growing. This led to the development of the Automated System Plus , the system BSS uses today. As part of the redesign,, BSS switched from Google Voice to Twilio, introduced a standardized process for volunteer reimbursements using (a civic crowdfunding platform), and migrated away from a quadrant delivery system, instead posting a summary of urgent requests twice a day.

As the food access mutual aid system became more advanced, it required consistent upkeep by technical volunteers. Communication between those involved at all points of the process-delivery coordinators, technical volunteers, delivery volunteers, and those requesting food delivery-and an understanding of the need to automate processes allowed BSS to be flexible and adapt their systems over time.

Meet people where they are, even if that means going low-tech.

Although BSS ended up with a relatively advanced back-end system run by technical volunteers, a substantial portion of BSS's outreach was analog. In mid-March, volunteers posted multi-lingual flyers throughout the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood with a link to their website and a Google Voice phone number that residents could call and leave a voicemail with their shopping lists.

"People were telling their neighbors to call this phone line; it was more of a home-grown, word-of-mouth thing that had more trust," said Dizon.

"The tech was helpful for sure, but there's an access issue when you rely on tech," Dizon added. "We've always been challenged by walking that line between having technology that makes us efficient and being grounded in making sure we're still really accessible."

Center people and relationships at every point in the process to build public trust.

Mutual aid inherently centers human connection . It requires cooperation to create networks of care and levels of generosity to meet the immediate needs of a given community. BSS strongly emphasized having conversations with neighbors -even at the expense of efficiency - as its organizational model necessitated mutual support and community involvement.

"The whole point is that it's not a service model with a group of people in service and a group of people being served. The entire paradigm shift of mutual aid is that it's peer-to-peer, in mutual support of each other. Everyone's a member. If you're receiving food, you're part of a community," said Dizon.

"Within our organizing groups, we wouldn't have been able to move as quickly as we did if we didn't trust each other or feel safe to take bets, make decisions, and try stuff out," said Dizon.

Integrate mutual aid into existing public service ecosystems.

Though mutual aid helped provide immediate relief to individuals during the pandemic when government could not, states cannot rely solely on community groups to fill the gaps in services.

Mutual aid networks can promote state-run services, and government agencies can also help foster a mutually synergistic relationship between aid groups and service agencies by actively funding and supporting mutual aid work.

"This structure kind of exists in NYC. There are community boards, local resident-level branches of city governments. Those groups get city funding to do local work," Dizon explains. "If there's a way we could tack mutual aid groups on - where a tranche of money gets set aside for a very local, on-the-ground group that's hyper-nimble, can be responsive to whatever the needs are--that kind of group can really understand hyperlocal needs and priorities and allocate funds maybe more efficiently or directly than that money going through a bunch of City bureaucracy."

Mutual aid work demonstrates the importance of dynamism, flexibility, and human-centered design in work that directly promotes community welfare. By actively working to center people at every point in the service provision process, organizations can build trust among their constituents and tap into the enormous wealth of communities' social infrastructure , ultimately better serving those in need.

"There's this infrastructure that already exists of peers being able to communicate with each other and distribute information across trusted networks of people and mobilize across the whole neighborhood," Dizon adds. "We ended up having people involved with Bed-Stuy Strong in every block in a neighborhood that has 250,000 people in it."
Haritha Kumar (SFS'24) was a student analyst on the Digital Benefits Network during summer of 2022.

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Four Key Takeaways from Mutual Aid Organizing During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Beeck Center

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is not a substitute for the effective provision of social services, but policymakers can still from community aid networks. These groups, like Bed-Stuy Strong (BSS)-a Brooklyn-based mutual aid network-quickly organized and mobilized during the pandemic to generate flexible, far-reaching responses despite extremely limited time and resources.

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This video is about the Okra Project, an example of mutual aid in NYC helping black transgender people get meals.

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The Okra Project Brings Free Meals to Black Trans People

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Help One Another and Make Someone Smile!!

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Help One Another and Make Someone Smile!!

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Mutual aid throws away the idea of regular people like us competing for resources. It's emphasis is working together for a better world. When the institutions and systems we rely on cannot meet our needs, mutual aid is needed for us to rely on one another to fix the wrongs of society that can cause us to struggle. Mutual aid can't be achieved without cooperation, and understanding one another. There is a difference between mutual aid and charity, mutual aid involves building social connection to help people live their lives to the fullest without government intervention. Some examples of mutual aid could be helping lower income citizens receive basic needs like food and medical supplies during COVID 19. Another example could be regular people helping rebuild neighborhoods and sheltering one another after natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes.