Dean Spade

Mutual aid is 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. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse. We see examples of mutual aid in every single social movement, whether it’s people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a ride-sharing system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow, raising money to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, or coordinating letter-writing to prisoners. These are mutual aid projects. They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust.

As a result of these efforts by a mobilized and coordinated movement, and no thanks to the government, Hong Kong had an immensely successful response to the first wave of COVID-19

Mutual aid is 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.

They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust

Three. Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors

Mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian

Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a willingness to defy illegitimate authority

Charity, aid, relief, and social services are terms that usually refer to rich people or the government making decisions about the provision of some kind of support to poor people—that is, rich people or the government deciding who gets the help, what the limits are to that help

the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements

COVID-19, for example, has generated right-wing wins like closing the border