Mutual aid is an organizational model where voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place amongst community members to overcome social, economic, and political barriers to meeting common needs. This 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 The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. Resources are shared unconditionally, contrasting this model from charity where conditions for gaining access to help are often set, such as means testing or grant stipulations. 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 the 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'', which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind

evolution Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...

, through biological mutualism. 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. 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. 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 Leadership, is defined as the ability of an individual, group, or organization to "", influence, or guide other individuals, teams, or organizations. "Leadership" is a contested term. Specialist literature debates various viewpoints on the co ...

, and consensus-based decision-making. Some challenges to the success of mutual aid groups include lack of technical experts, lack of funding, lack of public legitimacy, and institutionalization of social hierarchies.

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,

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...

craft guilds, the American " fraternity societies" that existed during the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

providing their members with

health Health has a variety of definitions, which have been used for different purposes over time. In general, it refers to physical and emotional well-being, especially that associated with normal functioning of the human body, absent of disease, p ...

and life insurance and funeral benefits, and the English working men's clubs of the 1930s that also provided health insurance. 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. 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. A Common Ground Relief mutual aid group organized to provide disaster relief for the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. During the

, mutual aid and grassroots solidarity groups around the world organized distribution networks for food and personal protective equipment. 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, offering civic connection during a time of isolation. Multiple online outlets ran stories on how to create a mutual aid group. Around the same time was the Black Lives Matter movement, which resulted in multiple protestors detained and arrested by police. Bail funds, which are community organizations that pays cash bail for people in need for free, is another example of a mutual aid organization.

References

Bibliography

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External links

Mutual Aid Societies
(lecture by Sheldon Richman)
Mutual aid and physical distancing is not new to the Black and racialized minorities in the Americas By Caroline S. Hossein.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mutual aid Collectivism Communism Left-wing politics Mutualism (movement) Organizational theory Social anarchism Socialism Syndicalism