Anti-Racist Libguide: Mutual Aid

Ground Game Los Angeles is a grassroots 501(c)(4) helping to build a progressive LA alongside organizers from the city’s most marginalized communities. Town Hall Project built Mutual Aid Hub in March 2020 to highlight the incredible work of mutual aid organizers around the country, and to facilitate connections and shared strategies in this growing movement of community support. We do not directly organize or coordinate any individual mutual aid effort. We do our best to curate and filter groups doing relevant, valuable work in their communities, but we cannot verify or vouch for any network or individual offerings. Please exercise all necessary judgment when interacting with community members not previously known to you.

In these difficult times, we need mutual aid for our shared well-being. The multiple challenges of the pandemic, economic uncertainty, and continuing white supremacist and state violence have catalyzed community members to come together and help each other when the government can’t or won’t. In recent years, we have seen many examples of people working together to keep their communities safe and healthy through mutual aid (read about efforts in Chicago and West Virginia). Here's some information on mutual aid networks and how you can get involved.

Our national network is made up of many eco-activists, social justice activists, global justice activists, street medics, herbalists, permaculturalists, mutual aid organizers, black liberation organizers, community organizers, and others who are actively organizing around supporting disaster survivors in a spirit of mutual aid and solidarity. It is a decentralized network across the so called United States, defined by the character and creativity of a multitude of communities and drawn together by our collective commitment to stand in solidarity with those impacted by disasters and turn the tide in favor of climate justice. We build our network through education and action, valuing both collective decision-making and autonomy. We are deeply moved by the Black Panther survival programs which served the aim of satisfying immediate needs while simultaneously raising people’s consciousness. We uplift and support the efforts of frontline communities leading their own recoveries in the wake of visible crisis moments, and the invisible, ongoing disasters of capitalism, colonization, resource extraction, gendered violence, and white supremacy among other forms of domination. Rooted in our history and experiences of social movement organizing we see our disaster relief work in the context of social struggle and believe that we must simultaneously address people’s immediate self-determined needs for survival and organize for fundamental shifts in the way we relate to each other and the earth.

As calls for solidarity and community organizing were answered through expansive mutual aid efforts, those efforts – and the history of mutual aid – were inevitably co-opted. White gentrifiers began what they called “mutual aid” networks without consulting the Black and brown communities whose lands and neighbourhoods they occupied; museums collected objects related to mutual aid without offering fiscal support or reciprocity; and non-profits stole the work of grassroots organizers to placate their funders. There was a lack of consultation with the communities most impacted by COVID-19. In response to that co-option, I wrote a zine called “Let’s Talk Mutual Aid” to help combat the misinformation around what mutual aid is and is not. Here, I expand on what I wrote in that zine, updating it for our current context more than a year into the pandemic;

During times of great crisis, the systems in America that fail Black people on a normal day become even less reliable and the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. From mutual aid efforts to disaster relief, Black communities know what’s best for Black people. Where we can, The Movement for Black Lives are providing for one another by developing mutual aid networks, organizing, and creating virtual spaces for connection and joy. Where we don’t have enough or where the systems meant to meet the needs of the people fail, we’re demanding more from our elected officials.