For other uses, see Mutual aid (disambiguation).
A mutual-aid soup kitchen Conder Street Mission Hall, 1881

Mutual aid traditionally refers to an organizational model where community members partake in voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services to overcome social, economic, and political barriers and meet common needs while mobilizing to fight injustice.[1] Mutual aid 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 the COVID-19 pandemic.

Definition

Dean Spade identifies three key elements of mutual aid: (1) addressing material needs while analyzing why these needs aren't already met; (2) building solidarity and strengthening social movements; (3) participatory.[2] In contract to charity, which often requires benefit recipients to meet certain conditions (e.g., means testing, grant stipulations), mutual aid does not discriminate between those "deserving" and "undeserving" of care. 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 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, originally published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[3] Kropotkin argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution, through biological mutualism.[4] 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.[4] 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.

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.[5]

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.[6]

Some challenges to the success of mutual aid groups include lack of technical experts, lack of funding, lack of public legitimacy,[7] and institutionalization of social hierarchies.[8]

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,[9] medieval craft guilds,[10] the American "fraternity societies" that existed during the Great Depression providing their members with health and life insurance and funeral benefits,[11] and the English working men's clubs of the 1930s that also provided health insurance.[12] 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.[13][14][15][16] The Black Panther Party's urban food programs in the 1960s were another prominent example of mutual aid. During the AIDS crisis in the United States, many LGBT+ groups started mutual aid networks to provide medical care, support groups, and political activism when the government chose to ignore the community.[17] A Common Ground Relief mutual aid group organized to provide disaster relief for the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.[18]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid and grassroots solidarity groups around the world organized distribution networks for food and personal protective equipment.[19] 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,[18] offering civic connection during a time of isolation. Multiple online outlets ran stories on how to create a mutual aid group.[20]

Around the same time was the Black Lives Matter movement, which resulted in multiple protestors detained and arrested by police.[21] Bail funds, which are community organizations that pays cash bail for people in need for free, is another example of a mutual aid organization.[22]

See also

References

  1. ^ Collins, Liv (2023-08-22). "Mutual Aid 101: History, Politics, and Organizational Structures of Community Care". CUFPI. Retrieved 2026-09-29.
  2. ^ Spade, Dean (2026). Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (And the Next) (New and Expanded ed.). Verso. pp. 11–22. ISBN 9781836742555.
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ a b Kropotkin, Petr (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Retrieved 6 May 2020 – via The Anarchist Library.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ Turner, Francis J. (2005). Canadian encyclopedia of social work. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. pp. 337–8. ISBN 0-88920-436-5.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ 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.
  10. ^ Kropotkin, Peter (2008). Mutual aid: a factor of evolution. [Charleston, SC]: Forgotten Books. p. 117. ISBN 978-1-60680-071-3.
  11. ^ Beito, David T. (2000). From mutual aid to the welfare state: fraternal societies and social services, 1890–1967. Chapel Hill [u.a.]: Univ. of North Carolina Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN 0-8078-4841-7.
  12. ^ Shapely, Peter (2007). Borsay, Anne (ed.). Medicine, charity and mutual aid: the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, c. 1550–1950; [5th international conference of the European Association of Urban Historians, which was held in Berlin in summer 2000] ([Online-Ausg.] ed.). Aldershot [u.a.]: Ashgate. pp. 7–8. ISBN 978-0-7546-5148-2.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ 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.
  15. ^ 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.
  16. ^ 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.
  17. ^ Graceffo, Loretta (2020-10-06). "What activists who fought the AIDS crisis can teach us about organizing during a pandemic". Waging Nonviolence. Archived from the original on 2024-12-16. Retrieved 2025-04-05.
  18. ^ a b 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.
  21. ^ "AP tally: Arrests at widespread US protests hit 10,000". AP News. 2020-06-04. Retrieved 2025-04-05.
  22. ^ Gaspar, David (2024-12-26). "Why Mutual Aid Is Vital to Criminal Justice Reform's Next Chapter". The Bail Project. Retrieved 2025-04-05.

Bibliography

Further reading