while they are not totally behind this proposal, they agree it isbest for the group to go forward with the decision, given all the
views that have been expressed and the efforts made to addressconcerns.
Here’s an example of what consensus could ideally look
like: Over a period of time, a group has hashed out a proposal,
heard concerns in collective discussions, and tweaked it
until it seems like everyone may be ready to agree. Someone
then calls for consensus and checks to see if there are any“stand asides”—those who want to signify disagreement but
don’t want to block the proposal from moving forward—or“blocks”—those with disagreements significant enough thatthey feel the proposal cannot be passed without modification.
If there are blocks, it means the proposal needs more work.
The person or people blocking can share their concerns, andthe group can either work further on modifying the proposal
then and there, or have some people work on it and come up
with a way forward before the next meeting. If no one blocks,
but many people stand aside, the group may decide to discuss
the reasons for the stand asides for a bit longer and see if they
can be resolved by making the proposal better. If someone
finds themselves blocking a lot, it may be worth examining
whether they are in the right group—do they believe in theshared purpose?—or whether they are withholding their views
earlier in the process, or feeling not listened to in the group.
In general, blocking should be rare.
It is worth noting that this process often unfolds over multiple meetings, with Step 1 happening at one meeting and agroup of people agreeing to come to the next meeting with adeveloped proposal to be discussed.
Consensus decision-making does not mean that every decision is made by the whole group. Decisions can still be delegated to teams working on implementing part of the group’s
larger plan. For example, if the group does grocery deliveries, aspecific team can work on filling out the delivery schedule and64

Mutual Aid
Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the
Next)

Dean Spade2020

working on a project together, we should all get to decide how
we are going to do the work, rather than someone telling us
how to do it. We will honor people’s different levels of experience and wisdom as we listen to each other’s ideas, but wewill not follow someone just because they act bossy, got here
first, or have a higher social status in the dominant culture because they are a professional, white, older, male, formally educated, etc. Consensus decision-making happens when everyone in the discussion hashes out possibilities and modifies a
proposal until everyone can live with it. Consensus is cooperative rather than adversarial. When we use “majority rule,”
the goal is to get as many people as possible to prefer your approach to another, and to “win” by getting things your way.
That means that we disregard the needs and concerns of anyone who cannot muster majority support. Consensus encourages us to find out what each other’s concerns are and try tocreate a path forward that addresses all the concerns as well as
possible. It is based on the belief that people can cooperate andcare about each other’s well-being, rather than the myth that
we are naturally competitive and greedy.
Consensus cultivates interest in the whole group’s purpose
and wellness, rather than cultivating a desire to have things
exactly “my way.” In consensus, any participant can block adecision, so we take time to actually talk through each member’s concerns because we cannot move forward without eachother. Because we are trying to build agreement by modifying the proposal until it comes as close as possible to meetingthe full range of needs and concerns, we also build the skill of
making decisions with group members and community members in mind, not just ourselves or our cliques, and being okaywith something that is not our most preferred version going
forward. That is, we learn to imagine how decisions affect allof us differently, and how to productively move forward taking other people’s needs and desires into account. People can“stand aside” in consensus processes, letting others know that63

creating, whether you believe in them or not, or risk exclusion,
stigma, starvation, or punishment. We do not get to consent
to the conditions we live under. Bosses, corporations, and government officials make decisions that impoverish most people,
pollute our planet, concentrate wealth, and start wars. We are
only practiced at being allowed to make decisions as individual
consumers, and rarely get practice making truly collective decisions. We are told we live in a system of “majority rule,” yetthere is rarely anyone to vote for who is not owned by—or partof— the 1 percent, and the decisions those leaders make do notbenefit the majority of people.
The opposite of this approach to decision-making is to makedecisions together, caring about every person’s consent. This
practice is called consensus decision-making. Unlike representative government, consensus decision-making lets us have a
say in things that matter to us directly, instead of electing someone who may or may not advocate on our behalf. Consensus
decision-making is a radical practice for building a new world
not based on domination and coercion.
It’s important to remember that no decision-making structure can prevent all conflict or power dynamics, or guaranteethat we will never be frustrated or bored or decide to partways. But consensus decision-making at least helps us avoid
the worst costs of hierarchies and majority rule, which can include abuse of power, demobilization of most people, and inefficiency. Consensus decision-making gives us the best chance tohear from everyone concerned, address power dynamics, andmake decisions that represent the best wisdom of the groupand that people in the group will want to implement.

What Is Consensus Decision-Making?
Consensus decision-making is based on the idea that everyone should have a say in decisions that affect them. If we are62

Contents
Introduction: Crisis Conditions Require Bold Tactics

5

PART I. What is mutual aid?

9

1. Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid

12

2. Solidarity Not Charity!

21

3. We get more when we demand more

28

PART II. Working Together on Purpose

37

4. Some dangers and pitfalls of mutual aid.
Deserving hierarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Saviorism and Paternalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Co-optation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Characteristics of Mutual Aid vs Charity . . . . . .

39
39
42
43
50

5. No masters, no flakes
Group culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making Decisions Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What Is Consensus Decision-Making? . . . . . . . . .
Advantages of Consensus Decision-Making . . . . .
Making Consensus Decision-Making Efficient and Effective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ways to use this chart: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Cautionary Note on Fame . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53
57
61
62
66
69
81
83
3

Handling money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Burnout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Signs of Overwork and Burnout . . . . . . . . . . .
How Mutual Aid Groups Can Prevent and Address
Overwork and Burnout . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What Individuals Experiencing Overwork andBurnout Need . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What Else Is True? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Use Direct Communication before Using Gossip andSocial Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Working with Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Perfectionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reflection Questions: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mad Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Signs of Difficulty under Pressure . . . . . . . . . .
Guidelines for Greater Wellness . . . . . . . . . . .
Bonus Activities That Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Unhelpful/Untrue Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

84
87
88
90
93
96
100
101
103
104
108
108
109
111
112
113

Making Decisions Together

Conclusion: Everything is at Stake and We’reFighting to Win

117

Resource List

122

4

we show up and do what we said we would? These tensions are
real. If we do not talk about them together, we run the risk offalling into automatic behaviors, driving out new people, andfalling apart. Creating a group culture intentionally, and having a shared vision about how we want it to be does not mean
we all need to be just like each other. We can acknowledge differences in our capacities, talents, desires, and difficulties andstill aim to create a culture where we support each other inthe work, learn new skills, and are connected and kind to eachother. The goal is not that everyone be similar, but that we allcomplement each other and build some shared practices basedin shared values.
MADR’s slogan is “No Masters, No Flakes,” and it’s a greatsummary of key principles for collective mutual aid work. This
dual focus on rejecting hierarchies inside the organization andcommitting to build accountability according to shared values
asks participants to keep showing up and working together not
because a boss is making you, but because you want to.

Perhaps the most central group activity that makes everything else possible is making decisions. When we do it well, we
make good decisions on the basis of the best information available, we feel heard by each other, and we are all motivated to
implement what we decided. When we do it poorly, our decisions are unwise, some people are left resentful or hurt ordisconnected from the group, and there is less motivation toproceed together on purpose.
Most of us have little experience in groups where everyone
gets to make decisions together, because our schools, homes,
workplaces, congregations, and other groups are mostly run
as hierarchies. Our society runs on coercion. You have to workor go to school and follow rules and laws that you had no say in61Helpful Qualities

PotentiallyHarmfulQualities
Reliable, responsible, punc- Flaky, late, no followtual, follows throughthrough
Welcoming to new people
Unwelcoming
Flexible, experimental
Rigid, bureaucratic, formulaic
Collaborative
Isolationist, competitive
Realistic workload, sustain- Overworking, perfectionist,able work flow, real culture martyrdomof wellness and care
Direct feedback and growth Silence and/or gossip andshit talk
Sticks to values
Sells out, easily bought off,pushover when faced with
political or financial pressure
HumbleSuperior (can include taking
credit for others’ work, refusing to hear feedback)
Sharing work well
A few people do most of thework
Fun, celebratory, apprecia- Serious, resentful, stressful
tive of each otherForgivingHolding grudges (between
people inside the project andtoward outside people andgroups)Able to have generative con- Being conflict-avoidant or
flict and learn, repair
letting conflicts explode but
never reach resolution
Clarity about procedures
Confusion
Human pace with clear pri- Rushed paceorities and realistic expectations
Transparency
Secrecy
Having a scarcity mind-set,
60Generous
penny-pinching

Introduction: Crisis
Conditions Require Bold
Tactics
The contemporary political moment is defined by emergency. Acute crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic and climatechange–induced fires, floods, and storms, as well as theongoing crises of racist criminalization, brutal immigration
enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealthinequality, threaten the survival of people around the globe.
Government policies actively produce and exacerbate theharm, inadequately respond to crises, and ensure that certain
populations bear the brunt of pollution, poverty, disease, andviolence. In the face of this, more and more ordinary people
are feeling called to respond in their communities, creatingbold and innovative ways to share resources and support
vulnerable neighbors. This survival work, when done in conjunction with social movements demanding transformativechange, is called mutual aid.
Mutual aid has been a part of all large, powerful social
movements, and it has a particularly important role to playright now, as we face unprecedented dangers and opportunities for mobilization. Mutual aid gives people a way to plug
into movements based on their immediate concerns, and it
produces social spaces where people grow new solidarities.
At its best, mutual aid actually produces new ways of living
where people get to create systems of care and generosity that
address harm and foster well-being.
5This book is about mutual aid: it explains why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid as well as concrete tools for addressing some of the most difficult questions facing mutual aid
groups, such as how to work in groups and make decisions together, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal
with burnout so that we can build a lasting mobilization thatcan win.
Left social movements have two big jobs right now. First,
we need to organize to help people survive the devastating
conditions unfolding every day. Second, we need to mobilize
hundreds of millions of people for resistance so we can tackle
the underlying causes of these crises. In this pivotal moment,
movements can strengthen, mobilizing new people to fightback against cops, immigration enforcement, welfare authorities, landlords, budget cuts, polluters, the defense industry,
prison profiteers, and right-wing groups. The way to tackle
these two big tasks—meeting people’s needs and mobilizingthem for resistance—is to create mutual aid projects and getlots of people to participate in them. Social movements thathave built power and won major change have all included
mutual aid, yet it is often a part of movement work that is lessvisible and less valued. In this moment, our ability to build
mutual aid will determine whether we win the world we longfor or dive further into crisis.
We can imagine what is possible when we come together
in this way by examining the response of Hong Kong’s protest
movement to COVID-19. In 2019, a massive anti-government
mobilization swept Hong Kong, with people opposing police
and seeking greater control over their lives. By the time the
COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Hong Kong’s chief executive,
Carrie Lam, had an 80 percent disapproval rating. Hong Kong’s
protest movement had escalated significantly, with protesters
coordinating sophisticated mass mobilizations, including theuse of bold tactics like fighting police with poles, projectiles,6

are different and we all bring different qualities, skills, andviewpoints. Ideally, we want a group culture that supports participants in doing the work they came together to do, to bewell, and to build generative relationships. In some groups thatmeans people will form sexual and romantic connections withpeople they meet in the group. In others, that would be inappropriate or harmful, and the group will create a culture that
discourages it. In some groups, people will love to sing anddance together, and in some groups people will want to engage in spiritual rituals together. In some groups, the natureof the work makes it essential to maintain certain forms of secrecy and security, to protect members who are taking bold
actions. In others, cultivating openness to new members willbe essential for bringing lots of people into the work.
The chart below is designed to provoke conversation aboutgroup culture among people already in a project or thoseabout to start one. For those already in a project, the chart
can be used to assess what the group culture is currently
like. And even if there has only been one conversation so far
about starting a project, the norms that the people in thatconversation may be likely to bring to the group’s emerging
culture will already be noticeable. This chart can be used
to talk about strengths and weaknesses participants haveexperienced before in other groups, including families, jobs,
schools, and congregations, and what they want to emulate or
avoid reproducing in this current group.
Chart 4. Qualities of Group cultures.
Real contradictions exist in the above chart. We want tobe flexible, and we also want to have a culture of responsiveness, reliability, and punctuality. How do we work to cultivate
both? Most of us, having received our concept of responsibility from dominant culture, associate it with being forced, lured,or shamed into being “good,” ignoring our needs, and fearing
punishment if we do wrong. How do we hold our values of flexibility, compassion, and justice while building a culture where59HarmfulTendencies

What
leadership
looks
like
Decisions
made byone personor
small
group;
Not clearto newcomers
how decisions are
made; No
clear procedures
about
decisions

What
Dangers
participation
looks
like
Secrecy,
Be or fol- New
Hierarlow the people
chy, Lackcharisneverof Clarity
maticable toleader;plug in;If
the Theft
leaderofredisapsources;
pears
Conflictor sells aboutout, the decisions;group
Cliquesdoes;
Confusion
about
roles anddecisions
OverOne or Participants Burnout;
Promising more
don’t get Conflict;andpeoplea say in Loss ofUndermaking
whetheralignDelivering, promises the group ment
Nonabouttakes on withresponsiveness,
what the moregroup
Elitismgroup
work;prinwill do Being
ciples;without
overCooptaconworked
tion bysultingand over elites
everyextended;one;
Conflict
58
Group
over
not
re- worksponsive loads andtothe unmetWhat
we want
insteadTransparency;
Sharedparticipatory
decisionmaking;
Leaderless andleaderfulwitheveryonecoleadingClear
planning
processes
andshareddecisionsaboutworkload;Accountability
to community
being
served,especially its
most vul-laser pointers, and petrol bombs. Lam was remarkably nonresponsive to the pandemic, despite the vulnerable positionof Hong Kong, a densely packed city with a history of epidemics and a high-speed railway connection to Wuhan, where
the COVID-19 pandemic started. Hong Kong residents criticized Lam for her delay in closing the city’s borders and herorder barring city workers from wearing masks. But, despite
the government’s failures, the people of Hong Kong, mobilized
by the protest movement, launched a response that suppressed
the original wave of COVID-19 and mitigated its resurgence.
On the day the first COVID-19 case in Hong Kong was
confirmed, people from the protest movement created a website that tracked cases, monitored hot spots, reported hospital wait times, and warned about places selling fake personal
protective equipment (PPE). The protesters defied the government’s ban on masks and countered misinformation from theWorld Health Organization discouraging their use. They set up
brigades that made and distributed masks, specially making
sure they reached poor people and old people. They created asystem of volunteers to set up hand sanitizer stations throughout crowded tenement housing and maintain the supply of sanitizer at the stations. They also created digital maps to identify
the station sites.
This essential mutual aid work was complemented bybolder strategies. When the government refused to close
the border with China, seven thousand medical workers, aspart of labor unions that had been formed during the protest
movement, went on strike demanding PPE and that the border
be closed. Members of the protest movement threatened thegovernment with stronger action if steps were not taken toaddress the epidemic, and explosives were found at the borderwith China, possibly for this purpose. The Hong Kong government then created quarantine centers in dense neighborhoods,
but never consulted the people in those neighborhoods, andthe protest movement responded by throwing explosives into7

the quarantine centers before they were used, causing thegovernment to change the location of the facilities to lessdensely populated holiday villages.
As a result of these efforts by a mobilized and coordinatedmovement, and no thanks to the government, Hong Kong had
an immensely successful response to the first wave of COVID19. Through the combination of mutual aid and direct action
to force concessions, the protesters did what the government
would not do on its own, saving untold numbers of lives.
This book provides a concrete guide for building mutual
aid groups and networks. Part I explores what mutual aid is,
why it is different than charity, and how it relates to other social movement tactics. Part II dives into the nitty-gritty of how
to work together in mutual aid groups and how to handle thechallenges of group decision-making, conflict, and burnout. It
includes charts and lists that can be brought to group meetings
to stimulate conversation and build shared analysis and grouppractices. Ultimately, helps imagine how we can coordinate tocollectively take care of ourselves—even in the face of disaster—and mobilize hundreds of millions of people to make deep andlasting change.

8much urgency about particular tasks that we don’t take thenecessary steps to do our task well, and we forget about being
kind to each other in our rush to get something done. This canlead to conflict or making mistakes that harm our communities.
Chart 3. Tendencies that Harm Groups
This section will provide tools for addressing these tendencies in our groups and in ourselves, so that we can cultivatetransparency, integrity, and generosity in our work and build
our capacities to avoid the pitfalls discussed in chapter 4. We
will look at what decision-making and leadership look likewhen these tendencies prevail, what alternatives to theseways of working look like, and what personal qualities andbehaviors we need to cultivate to address these tendencies.

Group cultureGroups have cultures. Group culture is built from thesignals we give people when they join or attend an event,norms the group follows, how we celebrate together, how weengage in small talk, what our meetings feel like, how we give
feedback to each other, and more. Group cultures often reflect
the personalities and ingrained behaviors and responses ofthe founders. If the founder is vague and loose with money,
or often late to meetings, the group may be that way; or if thefounder loves to sing at the end of meetings, the group may
keep that practice going for a long time. But group culture
also changes as new people come in and as conditions change.
We can make intentional decisions to change group culture byhaving conversations about a group’s tendencies and methods,
talking about what is working and what is not, reflecting on
how our own behavior can match what we want to see, andinfluencing each other.
There is no one correct or perfect group culture. Groups
should be different from each other because the people in them57

through it, and can help make sure that people are sharing responsibility.
This chapter will explore three organizational tendencies
that often emerge in mutual aid groups that can cause problems, and provide ideas for how to avoid them:One. Secrecy, hierarchy, and lack of clarity. Many groups thatfail to create clear decision-making methods and caring, emancipatory cultures end up with participants not knowing what
is going on or who is making decisions, having all the decisionmaking concentrate in one person or clique, and risk the group
being torn apart by conflict because of these dynamics.
Two. Over-promising and under-delivering, non-responsiveness,and elitism. Many groups bite off more than they can chew,
promising to help more people than they can help or making
it seem like they have a community need covered when they
don’t actually have the capacity to address it. This problem
seems to be exacerbated when groups receive grants for specific projects, so there is money at stake in falsely claiming to
be able to accomplish more than they are able. It also happens
when people are not making decisions together and someone
makes promises for the whole group without consulting
everyone else about whether that work is a priority or apossibility. This tendency can include being nonresponsive,
especially to community members in need, and sometimes
being over-responsive to elites. Many groups, especially whenmoney or ego is involved, answer calls from media or elected
officials, but not from the community members they aresupposed to serve.
Three. Scarcity, urgency, competition. Some groups also develop a culture of scarcity (of money, time, attention, and labor), which makes sense given the real scarcity that exists inmany of our lives under capitalism. However, when we do ourwork from a feeling that there is not enough money, time, or attention to go around, we sometimes get competitive with othergroups or with other people within our group, or we feel so
56

PART I. What is mutualaid?

Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s
needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we havein 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.
There is nothing new about mutual aid—people haveworked together to survive for all of human history. But capitalism and colonialism created structures that have disrupted
how people have historically connected with each other andshared everything they needed to survive. As people wereforced into systems of wage labor and private property, andwealth became increasingly concentrated, our ways of caring
for each other have become more and more tenuous.
Today, many of us live in the most atomized societies in human history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines
our ability to organize together to change unjust conditions
on a large scale. We are put in competition with each otherfor survival, and we are forced to rely on hostile systems—likehealth care systems designed around profit, not keeping people healthy, or food and transportation systems that pollutethe earth and poison people—for the things we need. More andmore people report that they have no one they can confide inwhen they are in trouble. This means many of us do not get
help with mental health, drug use, family violence, or abuse

10

Default
Prac- Dangers of Detices
fault Approach
Hierarchy
Abuse of power;
Burnout of a few
people and noway for others toplug in; Unprincipled behavior
by people at the
top; People atthe top can bebought off byattention, career
opportunities, ormoney
Vague decision- Individuals makemaking processdecisions without
consulting others;
Some decisions
don’t get madein time; Conflictover decisions
Leadership held New
peopleby people who drift away behave seniority or cause they doself-selectnot feel real
co-stewardship of
the group; White
people,men,
and others withsocial privilege
dominate

Alternatives
Horizontal
decision-making
structure basedonconsensus
that
prevents
decision-making
from being concentrated in one
person or a small
group, and that
can help tasks
and roles get
distributed
tomany people
Clear
decisionmaking processes
that everyone istrained in andthat includes all
members
Training
newpeople in how toparticipate fullyin decisions andin new skills androles;
Cultivating a culture ofgroup participation,
feminism,anti-racism

55

but many people are less interested in the months of meetings
where we coordinate how to pull off that event according toour values and handle the challenges of organizing.
But we must build strong structures for our projects if wewant this work to be effective at saving lives and mobilizing
people. This is essential to any effort to address injustice. Building efficient, participatory, transparent decision-making structures and cultures of care and principled action in our groups
takes intentional work, but it is crucial for allowing our groups
to flourish and win. If we do it right, it can help prevent the conflicts that tend to tear groups apart, divide participants fromeach other, and drive people away.
Groups are more effective and efficient when participants
know how to raise concerns, how to propose ideas, when a decision has been made and by whom, and how to put that decision
into practice. People who have gotten to participate in decisionmaking and feel co-ownership of the project stick around anddo the work. People who feel unclear about whether their opinion matters or how to be part of making decisions tend to drift
away. Strong structures also help us plug in new people, orient
them to the work, train them in skills they need to build, andgive them roles they want.
Chart 2. Default Approaches to Organizing Groups
Clear structures help us stick to our values under pressure—and we’ve already looked at many of the larger pitfalls thatmutual aid groups can fall into, so we know what’s at stake.
In groups that aren’t clear about decision-making, it is mucheasier for a leader to get seduced by money or prestige and sellout a group’s core values for a job, a grant, or a moment in the
spotlight. It is easier for law enforcement to infiltrate and destroy the group. It is also easier for participants to get burnt out
on organizing. As I’ll discuss below, burnout is often caused byconflict or by a failure to delegate decisions and tasks. A clear
structure can help prevent conflict or provide ways to move54

until the police or courts are involved, which tends to escalaterather than resolve harm.
In this context of social isolation and forced dependency
on hostile systems, mutual aid—where we choose to help eachother out, share things, and put time and resources into caring
for the most vulnerable—is a radical act.

11

1. Three Key Elements of
Mutual Aid
One. Mutual aid projects work to meet survival
needs and build shared understanding about why
people do not have what they need.
Mutual aid projects expose the reality that people do nothave what they need and propose that we can address thisinjustice together. The most famous example in the UnitedStates is the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, which
ran throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a free breakfast
program, free ambulance program, free medical clinics, aservice offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and aschool aimed at providing a rigorous liberation curriculum
to children. The Black Panther programs welcomed people
into the liberation struggle by creating spaces where they
could meet basic needs and build a shared analysis about theconditions they were facing. Instead of feeling ashamed about
not being able to feed their kids in a culture that blames poor
people, especially poor Black people, for their poverty, people
attending the Panthers’ free breakfast program got food and achance to build shared analysis about Black poverty. It broke
stigma and isolation, met material needs, and got people fired
up to work together for change.
Recognizing the program’s success, FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover famously wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all field offices that “the BCP [Breakfast for Children Program] represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP
12

5. No masters, no flakes
One downside to the urgency that we bring to our mutual
aid work can be that we dive right into the work, very concerned about how many people our project is helping, but failto create good internal practices for our group to be strong
and sustainable. It makes sense that we are not good at creating emancipatory group structures. Most of us have neverbeen in groups that had fair, participatory, transparent structures. We’ve been working at jobs where bosses tell us what todo, or been in schools, families, state institutions, or churches
where strong hierarchies rule and most people get no say in
how things will go. We do not have much practice imagining or being in groups where everyone can truly participate
in decision-making.
In addition, we are used to being part of groups that ignore
ordinary caring labor, much of which is seen as women’s work,
like cooking and cleaning and conflict mediation, while celebrating only the final, outward-looking evidence of production:
the big protest march, the finalized legislation, the release ofsomeone from prison, the media coverage. We have not beentaught to notice or care about how things went along the way
to a victory, whether people’s capacity for confronting the nextchallenge was improved, or whether it was destroyed throughburnout or damaging group dynamics. Capitalism makes us
think about short-term gains, not building the long-term capacity for all of our well-being. This can make it easy to go
for the quick fix and ignore the damage we might be doing toeach other along the way. Many of us think “process is boring.”
Everyone wants a selfie with Angela Davis at the big event,53

Mutual Aid
De-professionalized
survival work done by volunteers
Beg, borrow, and steal supplies

Charity
Service work staffed by professionals

Grant money for supplies/
philanthropic control of program
Survival work rooted in Siloed single-issue work,
principles of anti-capitalism, serving a particular popantiimperialism,
racial ulation or working on
justice,genderjustice, one area of policy reform,
disability justicedisconnected from otherissuesOpen meetings, with as Closed board meetings, govmany people making deci- ernance by professionals orsions and doing the work as people associated with big
possibleinstitutions or donors, program operated by staff, volunteers limited to stuffing
envelopes or other menial
tasks, volunteers not part ofhigh-level decision-making
Support people facing the Impose eligibility criteria formost dire conditions
services that divide people
into “deserving” and “undeserving” recipients
Give things away without Set conditions for getting
expectations
help—recipients have to fillout onerous paperwork, besober, have a certain family
status, have a certain immigration status, not have outstanding warrants, certain
convictions, etc.
People participate voluntar- People come looking for a
ily because of their passion job, wanting to climb a hier52about injustice and care for archy, build a career, or betheir community
come “important”
Efforts
toflatten Maintaining hierarchies ofhierarchies—e.g., flat wage pay, status, decision makscales if anyone is paid, ing power, influence that are[Black Panther Party] and, as such, is potentially the greatest
threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” The night before the Chicago program
was supposed to open, police broke into the church that was
hosting it and urinated on all of the food. The government’s attacks on the Black Panther Party are evidence of mutual aid’s
power, as is the government’s co-optation of the program: inthe early 1970s the US Department of Agriculture expanded
its federal free breakfast program—built on a charity, not a liberation, model—that still feeds millions of children today. The
Black Panthers provided a striking vision of liberation, asserting that Black people had to defend themselves against a violent and racist government, and that they could organize togive each other what a racist society withheld.
During the same period, the Young Lords Party undertook
similar and related mutual aid projects in their work toward
Puerto Rican liberation. The Young Lords brought people into
the movement by starting with the everyday needs of Puerto
Ricans in impoverished communities: they protested the lackof garbage pickups in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, hijacked
a city mobile x-ray truck to bring greater tuberculosis testingto Puerto Rican communities, took over part of a hospital toprovide health care, and provided food and youth programsfor Puerto Rican communities. Their vision—for decolonizing
Puerto Rico and liberating Puerto Ricans in the United Statesfrom racism, poverty, and police terror—was put into practicethrough mutual aid.
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, many overlapping movements undertook mutual aid efforts, such as feminist
health clinics and activist-run abortion providers, emerging volunteer-run gay health clinics, childcare collectives,
tenants’ unions, and community food projects. Although thismoment is an important reference point for the contemporary
left, mutual aid didn’t start in the ’60s, but is an ongoing
feature of movements seeking transformative change. Klee Be13

nally, project coordinator at Indigenous Media Action, argues
that mutual aid is an unbroken tradition among Indigenous
people across many cycles of colonialism, maintained throughtraditional teachings that contemporary Indigenous mutual
aid projects are working to restore and amplify. Settlers havelong worked to undermine Indigenous people’s self-sustaining
practices by first destroying food systems and then forcing
dependency on rations given at forts and missions and, now,by settler nonprofits. Indigenous mutual aid efforts are both amatter of survival and a powerful form of resistance to forced
dependence on settler systems.
The long tradition of mutual aid societies and other forms of“self-help” in Black communities, which, as early as the 1780ssought to pool resources to provide health and life insurance,
care for the sick, aid for burials, support for widows and orphans, and public education efforts, is another important example. These efforts have addressed Black exclusion from white
infrastructures by creating Black alternatives. Long traditionsof mutual aid are also visible in working-class communities
that have long supported workers on strike so that they could
pay rent and buy food while confronting their bosses. Perhaps
most of all, the pervasive presence of mutual aid during sudden
disasters of all kinds—storms, floods, fires, and earthquakes—
demonstrates how people come together to care for each otherand share resources when, inevitably, the government is notthere to help, offers relief that does not reach the most vulnerable people, and deploys law enforcement against displaceddisaster survivors. Mutual aid is a powerful force.

While there is no single correct model for a mutual aid
group, being aware of general tendencies that distinguish mutual aid from other projects can help groups make thoughtful decisions and maintain their integrity and effectiveness. To
help us think through where things can get slippery, the chart
below tracks characteristics within mutual aid groups against
those of groups working in the charity model. It may be a good
discussion prompt for a mutual aid group to clarify shared values or find areas of agreement and disagreement, or desire forfurther inquiry.
Chart 1. Characteristics of Mutual Aid vs. Charity

Two. Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand
solidarity, and build movements.
Mutual aid is essential to building social movements.
People often come to social movement groups because theyneed something: eviction defense, childcare, social connection,
14

51

Characteristics of Mutual Aid vs Charity
Mutual aid projects depart from the charity model in crucial ways. Most mutual aid projects are volunteer-based andavoid the careerism, business approach, and charity model ofnonprofits. Mutual aid projects strive to include lots of people,
rather than just a few people who have been declared “experts”
or “professionals.” If we want to provide survival support to as
many people as possible, and mobilize as many people as possible for root-causes change, we need to let a lot of people do
the work and make decisions about the work together, rather
than bottlenecking the process with hierarchies that let only afew people lead.
Despite these important goals, avoiding the pitfalls of
co-optation, deservingness hierarchies, saviorism, and disconnect from root-causes work requires constant vigilance.
The last half-century of social movement history is full of
examples of mutual aid groups that, under pressure from law
enforcement, funders, and culture, transformed into charity orsocial services groups and lost much of their transformative
capacity. Here are some guiding questions for mutual aid
groups trying to avoid these dangers and pitfalls:• Who controls our project?
• Who makes decisions about what we do?
• Does any of the funding we receive come with strings
attached that limit who we help or how we help?
• Do any of our guidelines about who can participate in
our work cut out stigmatized and vulnerable people?
• What is our relationship to law enforcement?
• How do we introduce new people in our group to ourapproach to law enforcement?
50

health care, or help in a fight with the government about something like welfare benefits, disability services, immigration
status, or custody of their children. Being able to get help in acrisis is often a condition for being politically active, because
it’s very difficult to organize when you are also struggling tosurvive. Getting support through a mutual aid project thathas a political analysis of the conditions that produced yourcrisis also helps to break stigma, shame, and isolation. Under
capitalism, social problems resulting from exploitation andthe maldistribution of resources are understood as individual
moral failings, not systemic problems. Getting support at aplace that sees the systems, not the people suffering in them,as the problem can help people move from shame to anger
and defiance. Mutual aid exposes the failures of the current
system and shows an alternative. This work is based in a belief
that those on the front lines of a crisis have the best wisdom
to solve the problems, and that collective action is the way
forward.
Mutual aid projects also build solidarity. I have seen thisat the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), a law collective thatprovides free legal help to trans and gender-nonconforming
people who are low income and/or people of color. I worked
with the group from 2002 to 2019. Again and again I saw people come to SRLP for help because something bad happened
to them in a shelter, in prison, or in interactions with cops,
immigration authorities, the foster care system, or publicschools. People seeking legal services for these problems
would be invited to participate in organizing and become partof SRLP, working on changing the conditions that had broughtthem to the group. As people joined, things were often bumpy.
Members may have had some things in common—being transor gender-nonconforming, for example—but also differedfrom one another in terms of race, immigration status, ability,
HIV status, age, housing access, sexual orientation, language,
and more. By working together and participating in shared15

political education programs, members could learn about
experiences different from theirs and build solidarity acrossthose differences. This changed—and continues to change—not
only the individuals in the group, but the kind of politics thegroup practices.
Solidarity is what builds and connects large-scale movements. In the context of professionalized nonprofit organizations, groups are urged to be single-issue oriented,
framing their message around “deserving” people within the
population they serve, and using tactics palatable to elites.
Prison-oriented groups are supposed to fight only for “theinnocent” or “the nonviolent,” for example, and to do theirwork by lobbying politicians about how some people—not all
people—don’t belong in prison. This is the opposite of solidarity, because it means the most vulnerable people are left
behind: those who were up-charged by cops and prosecutors,
those who do not have the means to prove their innocence,
those who do not match cultural tropes of innocence anddeservingness. This narrow focus actually strengthens thesystem’s legitimacy by advocating that the targeting of thosemore stigmatized people is okay.
This pattern of anti-solidarity incentives and practices has
been devastating for movements as non-profitization has taken
hold, as I’ll discuss further in the next chapter. Solidarity acrossissues and populations is what makes movements big and powerful. Without that connection, we end up with disconnectedgroups, working in their issue silos, undermining each other,
competing for attention and funding, not backing each otherup and not building power. Mutual aid projects, by creating
spaces where people come together on the basis of some shared
need or concern in spite of their different lived experience, cultivate solidarity.
Groups doing mutual aid to directly address real problems in real people’s lives tend to develop a multi-issue andsolidarity-based approach because their members’ lives are
16

gaged a variety of tactics to address violence against queer andtrans people of color, including police violence. One strategy it
developed was building relationships with people working inbusinesses in a Brooklyn neighborhood where violence often
occurred, asking those bodega cashiers, restaurant staff, andother workers to provide a place for people to run for help
if something is happening on the street, a place that pledges
to not call the police. This community-wide work of building
long-term relationships increased those people’s preparedness
for helping people in need and de-escalating situations, which
increased safety in the neighborhood.
Some transformative justice work is focused on prevention,and some is focused on providing support after something happens. Both are mutual aid approaches, since they address immediate survival needs with a recognition that the systems thatare supposed to guarantee safety—the cops, prosecutors, andcourts—fail to do so and actually make things worse. Thesemutual aid projects work to build a new world, where people
create safety through community building and support eachother to stop harmful behavior through connection rather than
through caging.
These feminist activists and groups with an antipolice,anti-violence politics also developed much of the analysis
that informs this book. They identified how the system ofnonprofitization and pressure from funders were pushinganti-violence work toward criminalization, how mutual aid
approaches were undermined when domestic violence sheltersand hotlines became more like social services, and how theco-optation of anti-violence work undermined solidarity,
further endangering communities most targeted by police.
Their wisdom can guide us in building successful groups andmovements and in resisting co-optation.

49

aid work that resists co-optation. Women of color, workingclass and immigrant feminists, and feminists with disabilities
have powerfully resisted this shift toward criminalization in
the movement against gender violence. They have created mutual aid projects to address harm and violence that refuse tocollaborate with police.
This work is often called “community accountability” or“transformative justice.” It includes many innovative strategies developed in mutual aid groups. Drawing on lessons
from years of experience, Creative Interventions authored a
six-hundred-page guide on how to address sexual violence
and family violence through community support and problem
solving. GenerationFIVE and the Bay Area Transformative
Justice Collective have designed approaches to addressing
child sexual abuse that aim to get to the root causes and stop it,
rather than just criminalizing the small percentage of people
who get caught. Hundreds of local groups like Philly Stands
Up and For Crying Out Loud have developed processes forsupporting survivors of violence and confronting harm-doers,
working with them to figure out what they need to neverinflict the harm again. These processes sometimes last several
years, with community members providing harmdoers withsupport for their sobriety, mental health, and housing needs,
deepening understanding of their behaviors and their beliefs
about gender and sexuality, and doing whatever else theyneed to stop the behavior.
The goal of this kind of work is to do the things that thecriminal punishment approaches fail to do: give the survivor
support to heal, give the harm-doer what they need to stop
the behavior, and assess how community norms can change todecrease the likelihood of harm in general, such as by providing healthy relationship skills training, addressing a culture of
substance misuse, and changing community ideas about sexuality and gender. The Safe OUTside the System Collective,
a part of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City, has en48

cross-cut by many different experiences of vulnerability.
Sometimes even groups that start out with a narrow goal
adopt a wider horizon of solidarity and a wider vision ofpolitical possibility if they use the mutual aid model. An initial
goal of serving people impacted by homelessness quickly
reveals that racism, colonialism, immigration enforcement,
ableism, police violence, the foster care system, the health caresystem, transphobia, and more are all causes of homelessness
or causes of further harm to homeless people. Solidarity
and an ever-expanding commitment to justice emerge fromcontact with the complex realities of injustice. This is exactly
how movements are built, as people become connected toeach other and as one urgent issue unspools into a broader
vision of social transformation.
Three. Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving
problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors.
Mutual aid projects help people develop skills for collaboration, participation, and decision-making. For example, people
engaged in a project to help one another through housing court
proceedings will learn the details of how the system harms people and how to fight it, but they will also learn about meeting
facilitation, working across differences, retaining volunteers,
addressing conflict, giving and receiving feedback, following
through, and coordinating schedules and transportation. They
may also learn that it is not just lawyers who can do this kindof work, and that many people—including themselves!—havesomething to offer. This departs from expertise-based social
services that tell us we need to have a social worker, licensed
therapist, lawyer, or some other person with an advanced degree to get things done.
Mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian, demonstrating
how we can do things together in ways we were told not to17

imagine, and that we can organize human activity without coercion. Most people have never been to a meeting where there
was not a boss or authority figure with decision-making power.
Most people work or go to school inside hierarchies where
disobedience leads to punishment or exclusion. We bring ourlearned practices of hierarchy with us even when no paycheckor punishment enforces our participation, so even in volunteer groups we often find ourselves in conflicts stemming fromlearned dominance behaviors. But collective spaces, like mutual aid organizing, can give us opportunities to unlearn conditioning and build new skills and capacities. By participatingin groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming
the kind of people who could live in such a world together.
For example, in the Occupy encampments that emergedin 2011 to protest economic inequality, people shared ideas
about how to resolve conflict without calling the police.
Occupy brought out many people who had never participatedin political resistance before, introducing them to practices
like consensus decision-making, occupying public space,
distributing free food, and engaging in free political education
workshops. Many who joined Occupy did not yet have a developed critique of policing. Participants committed to policeabolition and antiracism cultivated conversations about why
activists should not call the police on each other. This process
was inconsistent and imperfect, but it introduced many people
to new skills and ideas that they took with them, long after
Occupy encampments were dismantled by the police.
Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a willingness
to defy illegitimate authority. Taking risks with a group for ashared purpose can be a reparative experience when we havebeen trained to follow rules. Organizers from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) share the following story in their 2018
workshop facilitation guide to illustrate their argument that“audacity is our capacity”:
18of legitimacy to policing, with Black liberation, anti-racist, feminist, queer, and Indigenous movements protesting and exposing police violence. In response, US law enforcement worked
hard to repair its public image, doing things like hiring copsof color, creating new police roles in schools through initiatives like the D.A.R.E. program, and creating programs andcampaigns to portray the police as the protectors of womenand children. Toward this end, law enforcement sought out alliances with the emerging anti–domestic violence movement,
supporting new laws that increased punishment for genderbased violence and providing money for groups willing to cooperate with police.
This drastically changed the anti–domestic violence movement. It shifted from centering volunteer-based, grassroots mutual aid projects to emphasizing larger nonprofits, often run
by white people with advanced degrees. These groups increasingly towed the line of a pro-police message and advocated forincreased criminalization, meanwhile taking on charity-model
approaches that treated people seeking help in punitive andpaternalizing ways. This shift increased the criminalization ofcommunities of color, made the services less accessible to themost vulnerable survivors of violence, and provided good public relations for police, prosecutors, and courts.
Notably, these co-optive approaches also failed to reduce gender-based violence. Research has shown thatpro-criminalization policy reforms that became popular inthis period, like mandatory arrest laws requiring police tomake arrests during domestic violence calls, resulted in thearrests of abuse survivors, especially if they were queer, trans,
disabled, or people of color. This is a sobering story of how
co-optation can undermine our efforts to meet survival needs
and cause us to contribute to legitimizing or expanding thevery systems that are harming us.
At the same time, these events also produced a vibrant resistance from which we can learn much in developing mutual
47

vices to come seal their homes, spray fire retardants on thepremises, and put owners in five-star hotels while less affluent
people watch their homes burn, struggle in shelters, and fightFEMA for basic benefits. Fire profiteers aim to create a context
in which only those who can pay get help or protection in thecase of a fire, which means fires will be more deadly, the rich
will get richer, and the poor will get poorer.
In contrast, the OPP emerged out of anti-police and antiprison movement groups who observed that when people call
911 for emergency medical help, the police also come, hurtingand sometimes killing those who called for help. In response,
the OPP works to train people in communities impacted bypolice violence to provide emergency medical care for gunshot wounds, chronic health problems like diabetes, and mental health crises. If people can take care of each other, they
can avoid calling 911 and avoid a confrontation with the police. This strategy is part of broader work to dismantle policing and criminalization, and it works to both meet immediateneeds and mobilize people to build an alternative infrastructure
for crisis response guided by a shared commitment to ending
racist police violence and medical neglect. Note that, although
the OPP and private firefighting both provide an alternative to
inadequate public services, they are not the same at all: insteadof profiting and only serving those who can pay, the OPP’s programs build new ways of responding that allow those on thebottom to work together to meet survival needs while dismantling racist infrastructure.
Many powerful lessons about co-optation come out of thefeminist movement against domestic violence. That movement
started with mutual aid projects, such as volunteer-run sheltersfor violence survivors and defense campaigns for women criminalized for killing their abuser or attacker. Unfortunately, theanti– domestic violence movement emerged at the same timethat criminalization was about to balloon in the United States.
The mass uprisings of the 1960s and ’70s brought a huge crisis
46

When a crew of MADR organizers [after Hurricane Maria]
travelled to Puerto Rico (some visiting their families, others
bringing medical skills), they found out about a government
warehouse that was neglecting to distribute huge stockpiles ofsupplies. They showed their MADR badges to the guards andsaid, “We are here for the 8am pickup.” When guards repliedthat their names were not on the list, they just insisted again,“We are here for the 8am pickup.” They were eventually allowed
in, told to take whatever they needed. After being let in once,
aid workers were able to return repeatedly. They made morebadges for local organizers, and this source continued to benefit local communities for months.
MADR asserts that by taking bold actions together, “we canimagine new ways of interacting with the world.” When dominant ways of living have been suspended, people discover thatthey can break norms—and even laws—that enable individualism, passivity, and respect for private property. MADR asserts that “saving lives, homes, and communities in the event
and aftermath of disaster may require taking bold action without waiting for permission from authorities. Disaster survivors
themselves are the most important authority on just action.”
Mutual aid projects providing relief to survivors of storms,
floods, earthquakes, and fires, as well as those developed tosupport people living through the crises caused by poverty,
racism, criminalization, gender violence, and other “ordinary”
conditions, produce new systems that can prevent harm andimprove preparedness for the coming disasters. When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, it was the existenceof food justice efforts that made it possible for many people toeat when the corporate food system, which brings 90 percentof the island’s food from off-island sources, was halted by thestorm. Similarly, it was local solar panels that allowed people
to charge medical devices when the electrical grid went down.
By looking at what still works in the face of disaster, we
can learn what we want to build to prepare for the next storm19

or fire. In The Battle for Paradise, Naomi Klein argues that locally controlled microgrids are more desirable for delivering
sustainable energy, given the failures of the energy monopolies that currently dominate energy delivery. In the wake ofthe devastating 2018 California fires, the public learned that thefires were caused by Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s mismanagement, and then watched as California’s government immediately offered the company a bailout, meanwhile failing tosupport people displaced by the disaster. Klein describes how
large energy companies work to prevent local and sustainableenergy efforts, and argues that in energy, as in other areas ofsurvival, we should be working toward locally controlled, participatory, transparent structures to replace our crumbling andharmful infrastructure.
Doing so helps us imagine getting rid of the undemocratic
infrastructure of our lives—the extractive and unjust energy,
food, health care, and transportation systems—and replacing
it with people’s infrastructure. For social movements working
to imagine and build a transition from “dig, burn, dump”
economies to sustainable, regenerative ways of living, mutual
aid offers a way forward.

20

primarily by people of color—which receive minimal amountsof public funding—as cover to argue that King County has
already addressed concerns about youth incarceration throughprogressive work with community partners. They have goneso far as to co-opt the ideas of the youth jail opponents,
passing legislation stating that the city and county are committed to “zero youth detention.” Meanwhile, the County built
a youth jail for hundreds of millions of dollars. This storyof a local government co-opting the message of the radical
opposition, and showcasing grassroots, community-initiatedprograms to legitimize expansion of the racist infrastructureof state violence is chilling and highlights the thorny terrainof co-optation that mutual aid projects must navigate.
Mutual aid projects may appear to overlap with privatization and volunteerism in that participants critique certain social service models and believe that voluntary participation incare and crisis work is necessary. But the critiques of public
safety nets made by mutual aid project participants are not thesame as those of neoliberal politicians and corporations who
tout volunteerism. Mutual aid projects emerge because public
services are exclusive, insufficient, punitive, and criminalizing.
Neoliberals take aim at public services in order to further concentrate wealth and, in doing so, exacerbate material inequality
and violence. Mutual aid projects seek to radically redistributecare and well-being, as part of larger movements that work to
dismantle the systems that concentrate wealth in the hands ofthe 1 percent.
The difference between neoliberal projects and mutual aid
approaches is well illustrated when we compare the privatization of fire services with the work of the Oakland Power
Projects (OPP), which seeks to build an alternative to calling
911. Increasingly, public firefighting services are inadequate
and are facing further cuts, all in the midst of climate change–
induced fires. Meanwhile, the private firefighting business is
growing, with wealthy homeowners paying for private fire ser45

justice entrepreneurship model celebrates—it embraces ideasof paternalism central to the charity model, focuses aid on
making donors “feel good,” and has no connection to workthat aims to get to the root causes of the problem. In fact, it isbeing developed by the same tech industry that has gentrified
cities and increased housing insecurity.
In this atmosphere, mutual aid projects have to work hard
to remain oppositional to the status quo and cultivate resistance, rather than becoming complementary to privatization.
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, corporate media
news stories of boat owners volunteering to make rescues
followed this script, neither criticizing government failures
to rescue people nor interrogating the cause of worsening
hurricanes and whom they most endangered. That is, themedia stories of individual heroes hid the social and politicalconditions producing the crisis. Politicians and CEOs, who
fantasize about a world where nothing is guaranteed andmost people are desperate and easily exploited, love the ideaof volunteerism replacing a social safety net. If we don’t
design mutual aid projects with care, we can fit right into thisconservative dream, becoming the people who can barely holdthe threads of a survivable world together while the 1 percent
extracts more and more while heroizing individual volunteers.
We can see this struggle to resist co-optation in the workof mutual aid projects that support people who have been
criminalized. Programs that divert some arrestees from thecriminal system to social services or drug treatment, or thatprovide mediation between people who have done harm andthose they have harmed as an alternative to the criminal legal
process, can keep people out of jail or prison. However, they
can also become non-disruptive adjuncts to carceral control, as
they professionalize and become funded and shaped by policeand courts. In Seattle, for example, throughout a seven-year
fight to stop the building of a new youth jail, public officials
have relentlessly used the small diversion programs run
44

2. Solidarity Not Charity!
Mainstream understanding of how to support people in crisis relies on the frameworks of charity and social services. We
should be very clear: mutual aid is not charity. Charity, aid, relief, and social services are terms that usually refer to rich people or the government making decisions about the provision ofsome kind of support to poor people—that is, rich people or thegovernment deciding who gets the help, what the limits are tothat help, and what strings are attached. You can be sure that
help like that is not designed to get to the root causes of poverty
and violence. It is designed to help improve the image of theelites who are funding it and put a tiny, inadequate Band-Aid
on the massive social wound that their greed creates.
The charity model we live with today has origins in Christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor
to buy their own way into heaven. It is based on a moral hierarchy of wealth—the idea that rich people are inherently betterand more moral than poor people, which is why they deserve
to be on top. Not surprisingly, the charity model promotes theidea that most poverty is a result of laziness or immorality andthat only the poor people who can prove their moral worth
deserve help.
Contemporary charity comes with eligibility requirements
such as sobriety, piety, curfews, participation in job trainingor parenting courses, cooperation with the police, a lawful immigration status, or identifying the paternity of children. In
charity programs, social workers, health care providers, teachers, clergy, lawyers, and government workers determine whichpoor people deserve help. Their methods of deciding who is de21

serving, and even the rules they enforce, usually promote racist
and sexist tropes, such as the idea that poor women of colorand immigrant women have too many children, or that Black
families are dysfunctional, or that Indigenous children are better off separated from their families and communities, or thatpeople are poor because of drug use.
We can see examples in government policy, like the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programs (TANF), which impose “family caps” in fourteen states. These laws restrict poorfamilies from receiving additional benefits when they have a
new child. For example, in Massachusetts, a single parent withtwo children receives a measly $578 in TANF benefits eachmonth. But if a second child is born while the family is alreadyreceiving TANF, that child is ineligible, and the family receives$100 less per month, for a grant of $478. This policy emerges
from the racist, sexist idea that poor women, especially womenof color and immigrant women, should be discouraged fromhaving children, and the faulty assumption that their poverty
is somehow a result of being overly reproductive. We can also
see harmful, moralizing eligibility requirements when people
have to prove they are sober or under psychiatric care to qualify for housing programs.
Charity programs, both those run by the government andthose run by nonprofits, are also set up in ways that make itstigmatizing and miserable to receive help. The humiliation anddegradation of doing required work assignments to get benefits
too small to live off of, or answering endless personal questions
that treat the recipient like a fraud and a crook, are designed tomake sure that people will accept any work at any exploitative
wage or condition to avoid relying on public benefits. Charity
makes rich people and corporations look generous while upholding and legitimizing the systems that concentrate wealth.
Charity is increasingly privatized and contracted out to themassive nonprofit sector, which benefits rich people more thanpoor people in two big ways. First, elite donors get to run the22

benefit from an explicit ongoing effort to build shared analysis among participants about the harms of saviorism and thenecessity of self-determination for people in crisis.

Co-optation
For decades, politicians have combined attacks on public
infrastructure and public services with an endorsement of privatization and volunteerism. As public services are cut, politicians push for already inadequate social safety nets to be replaced by family and church, implying that those who fail to belong to either deserve abandonment. Alongside the destructionof public welfare, public-private partnerships are celebrated
and bolstered by the fiction that everything from hospitals toprisons to city governments should be “run like a business.” Theprevailing myth is that business models are more “efficient.”
The truth is that making everything profit-centered, as we’veseen with our health care system, actually degrades the carethat people receive, as businesses seek short-term gains at any
expense.
A cultural narrative about “social justice entrepreneurship”
has also emerged in recent decades, suggesting that people
should not fight for justice but rather invent (and patent)
new ways of managing poor people and social problems.
One example of this kind of “entrepreneurship” that hasreceived media fanfare is Samaritan and other smartphone
apps that coordinate digital donations to homeless people inways that ensure restrictions on how they can use the cash.
These apps are more focused on the experience of the giverthan on the person in need of aid, and are designed to makethe giver more comfortable by knowing their donation can
only be used at local partner businesses, or if the homelessperson’s counselor authorizes it for a specific purpose like
rent. This is typical of the kind of “innovation” that the social
43

dehydrated child without access to electricity or air conditioning in the blazing Florida or Texas or Puerto Rico sun, needs
somebody carrying Pedialyte, not an M16.

Saviorism and Paternalism
Mutual aid projects must also be wary of saviorism, selfcongratulation, and paternalism. Populations facing crisis arecast as in need of saving, and their saviors are encouraged
to use their presumed superiority to make over these people
and places, replacing old, dysfunctional ways of being withsmarter, more profitable, and more moral ones. In the wakeof Hurricane Katrina, politicians, non-profiteers, celebrity philanthropists, and corporations conspired to remake the city of
New Orleans and the people in it by implementing devastating“innovations” that eliminated public housing, permanently displaced Black residents, privatized schools, and destroyed public health infrastructure. After storms, floods, and fires, there
is often this kind of push to “rebuild” in ways that center theplans and dreams of elites and do real harm to the populations
who have lost the most.
Paternalism is also visible in programs within welfare andcriminal punishment systems that force criminalized people
and people seeking welfare benefits to take parenting classes,
budgeting classes, and anger management seminars. The ideathat those giving aid need to “fix” people who are in need isbased on the notion that people’s poverty and marginalization
is not a systemic problem but is caused by their own personal
shortcomings. This also implies that those who provide aid aresuperior.
Mutual aid projects and their individual participants must
actively resist savior narratives. These ideas are so pervasivethat even those who have a systemic analysis of vulnerability still sometimes fall into the trap. Most mutual aid projects
42

show. They decide what gets funded and what doesn’t. Nonprofits compete to show that they are the best organization
to win a grant. To win, nonprofits want to make their work
look legitimate to the funder, which means working according to the funder’s beliefs about the causes of and solutions
for a particular problem rather than challenging those beliefs.
For example, the funder may favor nonprofits that make sobriety a condition of receiving a spot in a homeless shelter,because rich people would rather believe that homelessness iscaused by poor people’s drug use than that it is caused by a capitalist housing market. To win grants, nonprofits also seek tomake themselves look “successful” and “impactful,” regardlessof whether their work is actually getting to the root causes ofthe problem. For example, social service nonprofits will often
claim they have worked with large numbers of people, eventhough most of those people did not become less vulnerable
or get what they needed from their contact with the nonprofit.
Similarly, homelessness service groups sometimes claim thatthey reduced shelter use, but the people who stopped using
the shelter are still unhoused and simply not using the shelter
for various reasons.
In this way, poverty-focused and homelessness-focused
nonprofits are essentially encouraged to merely manage poor
people: provide limited and conditional access to prison-likeshelters and make people take budgeting classes or provetheir sobriety. They do not do the more threatening and effective work that grassroots mutual aid groups do for housing
justice, like defending encampments against raids, providing
immediate no-strings health care and food to poor and unhoused people, fighting real estate developers, slumlords, andgentrification, or fighting for and providing access to actual
long-term housing. Rich people’s control of nonprofit funding
keeps nonprofits from doing work that is threatening to thestatus quo, or from admitting the limits of their strategies. In
worst-case scenarios, nonprofits are integrated into programs
23that make vulnerable people even more vulnerable. An example of this is the Homeless Management Information System,
a federal computerized information management tool that
requires homeless services and charities to record the names
and information of their clients in order to receive federal aid,
putting criminalized and undocumented people at further risk.
Second, the nonprofit system creates a tax shelter for richpeople. They can put a bunch of their money in a charitablefoundation, allowing them to avoid paying taxes on it and instead getting to direct it to their favorite pet projects. Most
foundation money goes to things the board members and executive directors (who, in the case of US foundations, are over 90
percent white) value, such as their alma maters, the opera, andmuseums. Foundations are not even required to give much of
their wealth away: they give out only 5 percent a year and stillreap the benefits of a tax haven for their money and the social
cachet of being a philanthropist. And that 5 percent can also
be used to pay their friends and family hundreds of thousandsof dollars per year to be “trustees” of their foundation.
The creation of the nonprofit sector that has ballooned in
the last half-century was a direct response to the threat posedby mass mutual aid work in anti-racist, anti-colonial andfeminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Non-profitization
was designed to demobilize us, legitimizing unjust systems
and hiding the reality that real change comes from movements
made of millions of ordinary people, not small groups ofpaid professionals. These days, the nonprofits that purport
to address poverty are mostly run by white elites. The idea
promoted by nonprofits and universities is that people withadvanced degrees are best suited to figure out the solutions
to social problems. It mystifies the causes of poverty, making
it seem like some kind of mysterious math problem that
only people with advanced degrees can figure out. But any
poor person knows that poverty is caused by the greed of
their bosses, landlords, and health insurance companies, by
24

to uphold and worsen inequalities. Deservingness narratives
justify those designs.
Even though mutual aid projects often emerge because of
an awareness of how relief programs exclude people marked“undeserving” or “ineligible,” mutual aid groups still sometimes
set up their own problematic deservingness hierarchies. For
example, mutual aid projects replicate moralizing eligibility
frameworks when they require sobriety, exclude people
with certain types of convictions, only include families withchildren, or stigmatize and exclude people with psychiatricdisabilities for not fitting behavioral norms.
In his book Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics,
Myrl Beam tells the story of a Minneapolis group foundedby queer and trans youth to support their community. As
the group formalized and got funding, it diverged from its
initial mission and commitment to youth governance andbecame dominated by adults. The group began to work withthe local police to check warrants for youth who came tothe drop-in space. This functionally excluded criminalized
youth—disproportionately youth of color—from the space andendangered people who came seeking help, turning what had
been a mutual aid group into an extension of the local police
department. When mutual aid projects make more stigmatizedpeople ineligible for what they are offering, they replicate thecharity model.
The charity model often ties aid and criminalization together, determining who gets help and who gets put away, as
we can see in this account from a Mutual Aid Disaster Relief(MADR) participant:After Hurricane Irma, a local sheriff announced that, “If you
go to a shelter for Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly
escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County
Jail.” [This] … essentially weaponizes aid against the most vulnerable and put[s] numerous lives in danger … There is always
a shocking number of guns that show up after a disaster. A
41

family or friends, city officials and media portrayed the people
that remained as ordinary homeless and itinerant people who
were “undeserving” of help, rather than as sympathetic fire survivors. The hierarchy of deservingness is built into FEMA’s eligibility process, which excludes people who cannot confirm
an address before the disaster, such as homeless people or people living in poor communities where individual dwellings are
sometimes not given an individual mailing address.
The distinction between deserving and undeserving disaster survivors rests on the idea that suddenly displaced rentersand homeowners are sympathetic victims, while people who
were already displaced by the ordinary disasters of capitalism—
and are especially vulnerable after an acute disaster like astorm or fire—are blameworthy and do not deserve aid. As
I argued above, state and nonprofit disaster recovery andsocial services models generally work to stabilize the existing
distribution of wealth, not transform it, so it makes sense thatthey provide little or nothing to the poorest people.
After disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, the federal government offered loans to homeowners and businessowners, and smaller loans to renters for replacing personal
property. Only those who were deemed to be “creditworthy”
could qualify, and many of those who qualified still never saw
a penny. People in crisis are unlikely to be helped by having
more debt—but putting them in debt does make money forbanks reaping the interest. Similarly, during the initial COVID19 outbreak in the United States, the federal government offered loans for businesses suffering economic losses. Almost
immediately, stories broke about how giant corporations like
Shake Shack and Potbelly received millions while small businesses owned by people of color received the least. Among individual workers, those with the most precarious jobs were cut
out of unemployment benefits and the stimulus checks thatwere supposed to provide relief. Undocumented people wereineligible for relief. Disaster relief and poor relief are designed
40systems of white supremacy and colonialism, and by wars andforced migrations. Elite solutions to poverty are always about
managing poor people and never about redistributing wealth.
The nonprofit sector not only fails to fix injustice but also
replicates it within the groups themselves. Nonprofits are usually run like businesses, with a boss (executive director) at the
top deciding things for the people underneath. Nonprofits havethe same kinds of problems as other businesses that rely on
hierarchical models: drastically unequal pay, race and genderwage gaps, sexual harassment in the workplace, exploitationof workers, and burnout. Despite the fact that they pitch themselves as the solution for fixing the problems of the current system, nonprofits mostly replicate, legitimize, and stabilize thatsystem.
One way the charity model is manifested is in the idea of“having a cause.” Celebrities and philanthropists show us thatpicking an issue to care about and giving or raising money for
it is part of their brand, in a similar vein as their fashion choices.
This idea of a charitable cause that is disconnected from otheraspects of life keeps us in our places. We are encouraged tobe mostly numbed-out consumers, but ones who perhaps volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, post videos aboutanimal rights on our social media accounts, or wear a T-shirt
with a feminist slogan now and again. Only those few experts
or specialists who work in nonprofits are supposed to makeconcern for justice a larger part of their lives by turning it intoa career, but even they are supposed to still be obedient consumers.
The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary
life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit. Robust social movements offer an opposing view. We argue that all the aspects of
our lives—where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, and get by are sites of injustice and potential
25resistance. At our best, social movements create vibrant social
networks in which we not only do work in a group, but also
have friendships, make art, have sex, mentor and parent kids,
feed ourselves and each other, build radical land and housing
experiments, and inspire each other about how we can cultivate liberation in all aspects of our lives. Activism and mutual
aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should
feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world andwith our passions. It should enliven us.
The charity model encourages us to feel good about
ourselves by “giving back.” Convincing us that we have done
enough if we do a little volunteering or posting online is agreat way to keep us in our place. Keeping people numb to thesuffering in the world—and their own suffering—is essential to
keeping things as they are. In fact, things are really terrifying
and enraging right now, and feeling more rage, fear, sadness,grief, and despair may be appropriate. Those feelings may help
us be less appeased by false solutions, and stir us to pursue
ongoing collective action for change.
That doesn’t mean that mutual aid work never feels good.
In fact, it is often deeply satisfying and connective, creating caring relationships, raucous celebrations, and an enduring senseof purpose. In my experience, it is more engagement that actually enlivens us—more curiosity, more willingness to see theharm that surrounds us, and ask how we can relate to it differently. Being more engaged with the complex and painful
realities we face, and with thoughtful, committed action alongside others for justice, feels much better than numbing out or
making token, self-consoling charity gestures. It feels good tolet our values guide every part of our lives.
Mutual aid projects, in many ways, are defined in opposition to the charity model and its current iteration in the nonprofit sector. Mutual aid projects mobilize lots of people rather
than a few experts; resist the use of eligibility criteria that cutout more stigmatized people; are an integrated part of our lives
26

4. Some dangers and pitfallsof mutual aid.
Even while they explicitly work to reject the charity model,
mutual aid projects can slip into some of the well-worn groovesof that model if we don’t root deeply in our principles and practice careful discernment. Mutual aid groups face four dangerous tendencies: dividing people into those who are deserving
and undeserving of help, practicing saviorism, being co-opted,
and collaborating with efforts to eliminate public infrastructure and replace it with private enterprise and volunteerism.

Deserving hierarchies
People start mutual aid projects because existing programs
or other services are not meeting people’s needs, and often are
leaving out particular groups of vulnerable people. The notorious failures of the Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA) in the face of disaster are a good example. The 2018
Camp Fire in California was the deadliest and most destructive
wildfire in the state’s history, the worst wildfire in the UnitedStates in a century, and the most expensive natural disaster inthe world that year. At least 85 people were killed in the fire,over 18,800 structures were destroyed, 52,000 people were evacuated, and the total damage was estimated at $16.5 billion. A
tent city of people displaced by the fire emerged in a Walmart
parking lot in Chico, California. In the days following the fire,as displaced people with more resources began to leave the tent
city because they could afford to find new housing or stay with39

Mutual aid work is important for meeting people’s survival
needs right now, and for mobilizing hundreds of millions ofpeople to join struggles for justice and liberation. Most people
newly fired up about injustice are eager to work on the conditions happening to them or to people they care about. Mutual
aid projects are the on-ramp for people to get to work rightaway on things they feel urgent about, plug into social movements where they can learn more about things they are not yet
mad about, and build new solidarities.
This section of this book is for people who want to startmutual aid projects or who are already in them and want tointentionally build group cultures and structures that will help
the work flourish. Chapter 4 describes some of the larger political pitfalls of mutual aid groups, and chapter 5 turns to thenitty-gritty, providing tools for addressing common obstacles
in mutual aid work. This section includes things groups can
do to address conflict and avoid slipping into charity-modelor business-model practices, as well as ideas for things individuals within groups can do to expand their own capacity to
do this work with as much compassion and care as possible—
according to our principles.

38

rather than a pet cause; and cultivate a shared analysis of theroot causes of the problem and connect people to social movements that can address these causes. Part II of this book focuseson how we can build our mutual aid groups in ways that canmost successfully accomplish these goals, avoiding the pitfallsof the charity model and the learned hierarchical behaviors
that can reproduce injustice even in activist group settings.
What we build now, and whether we can sustain it, will
determine how prepared we are for the next pandemic, theclimate-induced disasters to come, the ongoing disasters ofwhite supremacy and capitalism, and the beautifully disruptive
rebellions that will transform them.

27

3. We get more when we
demand more
Disasters are ruptures—existing systems break down andthen are either repaired, replaced, or scrapped. Disasters exacerbate and expose inequalities, showing the preexisting crisesthat elites strive to ignore and hide from view. When disasters
emerge, governments and corporations quickly move to downplay them, hoping to get back to the status quo of extraction
and profit-making as soon as possible, to take credit for having
resolved them, and to silence demands for relief. Governments
and the 1 percent also use disasters as opportunities to pushtheir favored reforms. COVID-19, for example, has generated
right-wing wins like closing the border; suspending environmental regulations; giving the FBI, DEA, and local police hundreds of millions of dollars; and expanding the capacity of police to harass and criminalize the poor for allegedly violating
public health regulations.
At the same time, disasters are opportunities for exposing
injustice and pushing forward left-wing demands. COVID-19
has also been an opportunity for mobilizing people to resist
injustice. As more people are laid off or forced to work dangerous jobs, we are increasingly standing together against landlords, bosses, police, prisons, and a profit-driven health caresystem. In seeking to curb the worst effects of the pandemic,
some forms of government relief have emerged that give us
hope for another way of life: eviction moratoriums, increased
unemployment benefits and income support, free public transit, suspension of student loan payments, and more. While this28

PART II. Working
Together on Purpose

on coercion and domination, we have to shed the capitalist
propaganda that tells us people are naturally greedy, and thatwithout police keeping us in our places we would all hoard andharm. Instead, we can notice, as is particularly clear in timesof disaster, that people are naturally connective and generous,
though we often have cultural baggage to shed from being
conditioned by white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.
Again and again we see people sharing what little they haveafter storms, floods, and fires, saving each other. Throughmutual aid projects, many of us get a chance to deepen thosepractices of generosity, and make them long-term support
systems that we co-govern to help us all survive and mobilize
for change.
Mutual aid is only one tactic in the social movement ecosystem. It operates alongside direct action, political education, andmany other tactics. But it is the one that most successfully
helps us grow our movements and build our people power, because it brings people into coordinated action to change things
right now. As mutual aid expands in the context of the COVID19 crisis, in climate change– caused disaster zones, and during
economic crises, we have a chance to cultivate millions of new
resistance fighters, to teach ourselves to work together in longterm ways, and to develop our ability to practice solidaritybased co-stewardship in all areas of collective life. The climate
crisis will continue to bring worsening disasters into our communities in the coming years and decades. The stronger webuild our networks of mutual aid now, the more prepared wewill be to help each other survive those disasters and transform
our ways of living together toward liberation.

36

relief has been far from universal or adequate, it has demonstrated that many of the things our movements have fought
for are entirely possible.
Disasters are pivotal times in the competition between political programs, moments when much can be lost or won. Winning the world we want is far from guaranteed. Our opponents,
those who currently control the most of the land, work, food,housing, transportation, weapons, water, energy, and media,
are feverishly working to maintain the status quo of maldistribution and targeted violence, and worsen it to increase profits and power for themselves. Our capacity to win is possible to the extent that we can collectively realize what they do
not control—us—and collectively disobey and disrupt their systems, retaking control of our ways of sustaining life. If we wantas many people as possible to survive, and to win in the shortand long term, we have to use moments of disaster to help andmobilize people. Mutual aid is the way to do that. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid groups have proliferated andmore people are learning how to organize mutual aid than havein decades. This is a big chance for us to make a lot of change.
We need mutual aid groups and networks capable of bringing millions of new people into work that deepens their understanding of the root causes of the crises and inequalities they
are fired up about and that builds their capacity for bold collective action. We need groups and networks that do not disappear after the peak of the crisis, but instead become part of an
ongoing, sustained mobilization with the capacity to support
people and keep building pressure for bigger wins.
As mobilization builds, governments, corporations, andcorporate media will approach mutual aid in three ways, allof which, as I write this, are already visible in regard to the
COVID-19 pandemic. These three responses often happen
simultaneously, among different agencies, elected officials,
and levels of government: Some will ignore proliferating
mutual aid efforts. Some will try to fold them into a narrative
29

about volunteerism, labeling mutual aid efforts “heroic” andportraying them as complementary to government efforts andexisting systems rather than as oppositional to those systems.
And some police and spy agencies will surveil and criminalize
mutual aid efforts.
This was visible in the response to Hurricane Sandy in2012. Occupy Sandy, a volunteer-based mutual aid networkthat emerged from Occupy Wall Street, organized over sixty
thousand volunteers to provide food, water, medicine, andother necessities to people left without power and in direconditions by a government utterly unprepared to help them.
The Department of Homeland Security extended its spying
from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Sandy at the same timethat some New York City government agencies helped Occupy
Sandy get supplies to redistribute. Governor Andrew Cuomo
and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg mostly ignored
Occupy Sandy’s frontline work as they focused on managing
their own reputations.
The fundamental goal of all three of these responses is toensure the legitimacy and stability of the current systems anddelegitimize alternative ways of meeting human needs. At best,
mutual aid projects get framed as non-threatening temporary
adjuncts to existing systems. Elected officials and government
agencies sometimes even seek legitimacy by associating themselves with mutual aid projects if those projects are more successful at meeting needs than the government. At worst, mutual aid projects are portrayed as unlawful, dangerous, andcriminal. As we saw with the police attacks on the Black Panther Party breakfast programs, or more recent Trump administration raids on the medical camps of No More Deaths (which
offers support to migrants at the southern US border), whenmutual aid efforts truly build and legitimize coordinated action
and autonomy against existing systems, governments typicallycrack down on them.

30

brutal and exploitive workforce, insurance scheme, or housing
market, or risk being left in the cold.
How do we imagine “scaling up” mutual aid to a point
where everyone has what they need, and gets to meaningfully
co-govern and co-steward the structures and conditionsof their lives? Because of the dominance of corporate andnonprofit models, people often think that “scaling up” means
centralizing and standardizing projects, but this runs directly
counter to the wisdom of mutual aid. “Scaling up” doesn’tmean making groups bigger or merging them into one organization across a region, state, or country. Locally operated
mutual aid works better for meeting people’s needs in all
kinds of situations, including disasters, because our needs are
best met by those with the most local knowledge, and when
we are the ones making the decisions affecting us. Scaling up
our mutual aid work means building more and more mutual
aid groups, copying each other’s best practices, and adapting
them to work for particular neighborhoods, subcultures, andenclaves. It means intergroup coordination, the sharing ofresources and information, having each other’s backs, andcoming together in coalitions to take bigger actions like rent
strikes, labor strikes, or the toppling of corrupt governments
and industries. Factory takeovers, where workers push out
owners and take control of the factory, deciding together how
it will run and making fair systems for all, are good examplesof this type of shift: a labor strike that becomes a factorytakeover is “scaling up.” Similarly, we might imagine people
working to create local energy grids using solar power. The
grids would be cultivated and cared for by the people using
them, but they might be sharing practices and resources withother groups building and maintaining local grids. Governanceand innovation remain local, but knowledge, support, andsolidarity are networked and shared.
To imagine a society where we share everything, cogovern everything, have everything we need and don’t rely
35

nologies, the most severe concentration of wealth, the mostimprisonment in human history, the most military bases andhigh-tech weapons, and the most advanced mechanisms of propaganda, it can be hard to imagine other ways of living. Disasters often stimulate fantasies of a benevolent government as
we face brutal government failure and wish that things weredifferent.
Part of the reason our dream of a savior government is socompelling is that it is hard for us to imagine a world where
we meet core human needs through systems that are based onprinciples of collective self-determination rather than coercion.
We are accustomed to a situation where the choice is between
a government that either denies the disaster’s significance andabandons people to its devastations or a government that responds with inadequate aid that comes with enhanced policing, surveillance, militarization, and wealth transfers to the top.
This is no choice at all. Because of how capitalism controls themeans for getting by—food, health, housing, communications,transportation—and how dependent we are on systems we do
not control, it can be hard to imagine that we could survive another way. But for most of human history, we did, and mutual
aid projects let us relearn that it’s possible and emancipatory.
Mutual aid projects let us practice meeting our own andeach other’s needs, based in shared commitments to dignity,
care, and justice. They let us practice coordinating our actions
together with the belief that all of us matter and that we should
all get to participate in the solutions to our problems. They let
us realize that we know best how to address the crises we face.
We don’t need to be saved by professionals, government agents,
or people elites consider “experts.” Mutual aid cultivates thepractices and structures that move us toward our goal: a society
organized by collective self-determination, where people get asay in all parts of their lives rather than just facing the coercive
non-choice between sinking or swimming; between joining a

34

The criminalization of mutual aid work has been ongoing
throughout social movement history precisely because mutual
aid directly confronts unjust systems and offer alternatives.
Groups doing frontline mutual aid work that is particularly
risky today, such as those helping with access to abortion
drugs or procedures illegal in the jurisdiction where they are
working, providing clean needles and safe consumption spaces
to drug users where that is illegal, supporting the well-beingof people in the criminalized sex trades, and helping homelesspeople occupy vacant homes, have useful knowledge andexperience for all of us about navigating safety risks. Studying
those groups’ experiences and methods for evading and/or
confronting police, securing electronic communications, andsheltering the most vulnerable people from exposure canbenefit all mutual aid groups as we prepare for our work to(hopefully) become threatening to the status quo.
In the face of increased mobilization and resistance—aswith the rebellion against racist police violence in the summerof 2020—or fearing another destabilizing disaster, governments and the corporations they represent will sometimes
grant concessions, many of which look similar to what mutual
aid projects provide. In moments of deep social and economic
turmoil—such as during COVID-19—governments expand
income support, usually in the form of welfare benefits,
unemployment benefits, or a one-time stimulus check. But
government aid can also take the form of legalizing squatted
property, providing mobile clinics, offering meals at public schools, creating restorative justice programs, creating
resources for people being released from prison, and more.
Concessions like these, where the government provides something previously only offered by mutual aid groups, can becelebrated as limited victories by movements: Our organizing
was so strong they had to co-opt us! These concessions mightalso provide vital support to many more people than mutual
aid groups can reach, as with the USDA’s free breakfast
31

program in schools, which fed more children than the Black
Panther Party breakfast program that prompted its expansion.
However, it’s crucial to remember that these concessions
are necessarily limited. First, they can be shrunk or taken backwhenever the moment of instability passes. This has been thehistorical pattern for poor relief in the United States: it gets expanded during a crisis, and then contracted and stigmatized assoon as the crisis has lessened, quickly making people once
again desperate and exploitable by their employers. Second,
while government provisions sometimes reach more people
than local mutual aid can, they usually exclude particularly vulnerable people, like people who are criminalized, working inunderground economies, homeless, or undocumented. The welfare and income support programs in the United States, ranging from old age and disability benefits to support for families
in poverty, are consistently designed to ensure that women,
people of color, and Indigenous people get left out or get less.
For example, the New Deal, which emerged to quiet the anticapitalist rebellions brought on by the Great Depression andstabilize the capitalist system, was designed so that women anddomestic and agricultural workers (disproportionately Blackand Latinx) were excluded from the benefits created. By tying
many benefits to work, the New Deal also perpetuated a statusquo of grinding poverty for people with disabilities.
Whenever we rely on a capitalist, imperialist system to provide vital necessities, we can guess that the provisions will
be fragile and inadequate, and designed to transfer far more
wealth toward the populations those systems were designed tosupport: white people, rich people, straight people, and men.
Often, the concessions are never delivered at all, only promisedin an effort to quell resistance.
One pattern that is clear in regard to concessions is that,
because the aim of elites is to concede as little as possible andmaintain the status quo as much as possible, we get morewhen we demand more and build bolder, bigger pressure. It
32

took mass movements threatening capitalism’s very existence,
like those seen during the Great Depression and the 1960s
uprisings against racism, just to get stigmatizing, ungenerous
welfare benefits. Decades of uprisings against police brutality
yielded only surface police reforms, many of which expanded
police budgets and numbers. Even unsatisfying concessions,in other words, only come with big, sustained, disruptive
mobilizations. Nonprofit leaders and politicians frequently
encourage “pragmatism” and peaceful incremental change, but
the most radical imagination of what we want, and the escalation of direct action to get it, is what is truly pragmatic if we
seek to win real change. Concessions won in crises—crises ofsudden disaster and crises created by powerful social protest—
will be as strong and lasting as the mobilizations that madethem necessary. Elites and their nonprofit gatekeepers encourage us to make small, “reasonable,” or “winnable” demands,
and they try to redirect our action to official channels thatare non-disruptive, with narratives about “peaceful protest”
and “coming to the table.” They encourage reforms premisedon the assumption that the systems we seek to dismantle arefundamentally fair and fixable. We have to refuse to limit our
visions to the concessions they want to give—what we want
is a radically different world that eliminates the systems thatput our lives under their control.
If concessions are signs of our impact, at best providing
some relief to some people but ultimately stabilizing existing
systems, what would winning look like? As we build mutual
aid groups, what do we hope for if not that the government,
instead of us, will someday provide what we are providing?
If our current systems are based on illegitimate authority anduse coercion and violence to keep us tied to them, and if thosesystems primarily pursue the aim of concentrating wealth anddecision-making power, what is the alternative?
From our current vantage point, living in a world with themost militarized borders, the most expansive surveillance tech33

The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyrightassignments. Sorting out what decisions are delegated to teams
and what is a wholegroup decision will be discussed below.
This chart summarizes the consensus process:Chart 5. Basic Steps to Consensus Decision-Making

Dean Spade
Mutual Aid
Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
2020
https://1lib.us/book/6119675/99b812
theanarchistlibrary.org

For consensus to work well, people need a common purpose; some degree of trust in each other; an understanding of65

the consensus process; a willingness to put the best interests ofthe group at the center (which does not mean people let themselves be harmed “for the good of the group,” but may mean being okay not always getting their way); a willingness to spend
time preparing and discussing proposals; and skillful facilitation and agenda preparation. These skills and qualities can develop as any new group learns to work together—it is okay that
we don’t have all these in place at the start. The greatest areaof strength for most mutual aid groups is a common purpose.

Advantages of Consensus
Decision-Making
1. Better Decisions
When more people get to talk through a decision openly,
sharing their insight without fear of reprisal from a boss,
parent, or teacher, more relevant information and wisdom
about the topic is likely to surface. In hierarchical organizations, people are discouraged from sharing their opinion
either because no one is listening or because they could
experience negative consequences for disagreeing. Because
hierarchy is so ingrained in our culture, people on top often
fall into dominance behaviors without meaning to, assuming
the superiority of their ideas, not taking other’s opinions
seriously, or unilaterally making decisions and telling others
to implement them. If we are trying to build a world where
people have collective self-determination, where we get tomake justice-centered decisions together about land, work,
housing, water, minerals, energy, food, and everything elsethat matters, we need to practice new skills beyond dominanceand submission in decision-making.
2. Better Implementation
When other people make decisions for us and we don’t get
to raise concerns or disagreements, we are less likely to want66

to implement them. This happens all the time at workplaces.
Bosses decide how things will be done, and employees think
the method is wrong or that the wrong priorities were chosen,so they drag their feet doing the work, or do it differently, or
don’t do it at all. In volunteer groups, people who don’t get tohave a say in decisions are likely to just leave, because, unlike
employees, they have no incentive to stay if the work does notalign with their principles or feel meaningful to them. When
we get to look at a proposal together and tell each other how
it might be improved, hashing out our best ideas until we havesomething that we all like or at least can live with, we are more
likely to vigorously do what we all decided, instead of drifting
apart or failing to follow through.
3. Bringing More People into the Work and Keeping Them Involved
When someone shows up to a mutual aid group for the
first time, full of urgency about something they care about,and they do not understand why things are being done theway they are, or do not understand how things are being done,
and do not have a way to share their opinions and influence
what is happening, they are likely to leave. People come to contribute, but they stay because they feel needed, included, anda part of something. Nonprofits often offer very limited ways
for volunteers to participate. You can donate money, or maybe
stuff envelopes, phonebank, or hand something out at a parade
or event. Volunteers’ relationships to those groups are usuallythin—they don’t have much influence in the group, and while
they may get some satisfaction from feeling like they helped,
they are not doing the core of the work.
Mutual aid groups, on the other hand, give people a way tobuild a deep relationship to the work and to feel the power ofdoing important, bold survival work together. The relations between a mutual aid group and the people in it, then, is thick—it
includes shared stewardship of the group, and a chance to consider and influence the project as a whole, even if the focus is67

on one specific task like delivering the groceries or answering
the hotline.
4. Helping to Prevent Co-optation
Co-optation of projects and groups often starts with theco-optation of individual people, often charismatic leaders or
founders of projects, who get bought off by elites through access to increased funding, influence, a job, or other forms of status. When a small number of people have the power to shift thedirection of a project, it can be hard to resist the incentives thatcome with co-optation. Often, leaders are not the most vulnerable of the group’s members, because being regarded as “persuasive,” “important,” or “authoritative” relates to race, gender,
age, language, and educational attainment. As a result, a single individual or small group running a project may not be thesame people who have the most to lose if the project veers toward elite interests. It is the most vulnerable of the participants
who are most likely to have objections to the shifts that comewith co-optation, such as new eligibility requirements that cut
out stigmatized groups, or a new cozy relationship with law
enforcement or philanthropists.
Given these dynamics, some mutual aid groups establish
explicit criteria or guidelines designed to make sure certain
perspectives that are often otherwise left out or marginalized
are heard, such as agreeing that decisions that break downaround identity lines (for example, most of the group’s womenor currently undocumented people oppose a certain proposal)
will be reevaluated to assess a proposal’s alignment with thegroup’s core principles. Some groups establish quotas about
members of decision-making bodies within the group, ensuring that groups particularly likely to be left out are well represented in those bodies.
5. We Learn to Value and Desire Other People’s Participation
In addition to avoiding the problem of having majorities
vote down minorities and silence vulnerable groups, consensus
decision-making establishes a culture of desiring others’ partic68

Sylvia Rivera Law Project. From the Bottom Up: Strategies andPractices for Membership-Based Organizations. May 2013.
srlp.org.
Thuma, Emily. All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence. Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2019.
Transformharm.org.
Tufekci, Zeynep. “How Hong Kong Did It: With the Government Flailing, the City’s Citizens Decided to Organize Their
Own Coronavirus Response.” The Atlantic, May 12, 2020.
theatlantic.com.
Walia, Harsha. Undoing Border Imperialism. Chico, CA: AK
Press, 2013.

125

McGuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women,
Rape and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York:
Vintage, 2011.
Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. “FromBanks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring: A Strategic Framework for a Just Transition.” November 2016.
movementgeneration.org.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. mutualaiddisasterrelief.org.
Mutual Aid Hub. mutualaidhub.org.
Nelson, Alondra. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party andthe Fight against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Neubeck, Kenneth J., and Noel A. Cazenave. Welfare Racism:
Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor. New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Regulating the
Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Random
House, 1993.
Smith, Easton. “The State, Occupy, and Disaster: What Radical Movement Builders Can Learn from the Case of Occupy
Sandy.” 2014. thetempworker.wordpress.com.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin, 2010.
South End Press Collective, ed. What Lies Beneath: Katrina,
Race, and the State of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: SouthEnd, 2007.
Spade, Dean, and Roberto Sirvent. “Abolition and Mutual Aid
Spotlight” interview series. blackagendareport.org.
Strike Debt. Shouldering the Costs: Who Pays in the Aftermathof Hurricane Sandy? 2012. strikedebt.org.
Storytelling & Organizing Project. stopviolenceeveryday.org.
Survived & Punished. survivedandpunished.org.

ipation. Decision-making systems focused on competition—on
getting my idea to be the one that wins—cultivate disinterest
in other people’s participation. Consensus decision-making requires participants to bring forward proposals to be discussed
and modified until everyone is sufficiently satisfied that no one
will block the proposal. This means participants get to practicewanting to hear other people’s concerns and other people’s
creative approaches to resolving them. If the goal of our movements is to mobilize hundreds of millions of people, we need togenuinely want others’ participation, even when others bringdifferent ideas or disagree with how we think things should be
done. Most people will not stay and commit to intense unpaid
work if they get little say in shaping that work. We need waysof practicing wanting one another’s participation, not just going along with what charismatic or authoritative people say.
In our culture, we get a lot of practice either going along withbossy people or trying to be the boss. It’s time to learn something different.

Making Consensus Decision-Making
Efficient and Effective
Here are five practices that set up efficient, effective consensus decision-making:
1. Creating Teams
2. Creating a Decision-Making Chart
3. Practicing Proposal-Making
4. Practicing Meeting Facilitation
5. Welcoming New People
1. Creating teams

124

69

When mutual aid projects are just getting off the ground,they often have only a few people in them. With a small number of people—five or less—it can be relatively quick and easy
to discuss everything together. As things get off the groundand more people join, it can be very useful to create teams
working on short- or long-term projects that report back to
the larger group for input on proposals or to submit proposals
for the group to decide on. Teams or pairs can come together
to do quick tasks between meetings, or a team can form as along-term body within the group. For example, an emerging
project doing neighborhood grocery delivery for immunocompromised people may break off a small research team to findout about best practices for sanitizing groceries between purchase and delivery and bring back those ideas to the big groupmeeting. They may also create a standing team that manages
the requests for support coming in through the group’s social
media platforms and online request form, and a team that assigns the deliveries. Groups can form teams as they go, thenchange them, meld them, or break them into multiple teams as
conditions change and experiences inform the group.
Having teams and knowing who is on them can help delegate work so that it doesn’t fall on only a few people. It can help
people who are new to the group know how to plug in and get
started doing something useful because it makes the process bywhich work happens more transparent. It can help work getdone between meetings because people can work out details
and present proposals based on information they gathered anddiscussed with their team. It can also help prevent decisionmaking from getting bottlenecked at the whole group level, if
teams are authorized to develop and implement certain parts of
the work according to the whole group’s plans and principles.
The larger and more complex groups get, the more it may also
make sense to do more in-depth planning, such as planning out
the next six months of work and getting the whole group’s ap-

70

Dixon, Ejeris, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Beyond
Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Chico, CA: AK Press 2019.
Enck-Wanzer, Darrel. The Young Lords: A Reader. New York:NYU Press, 2010.
Flaherty, Jordan. No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the
Savior Mentality. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016.
Gelderloos, Peter. The Failure of Nonviolence. Seattle: Left Bank
Books, 2015.
———. Anarchy Works: Examples of Anarchist Ideas in Practice.
2nd ed. London: Active Distribution / Sto Citas, 2015. First
published 2010 by Ardent Press (San Francisco).
GenerationFIVE. Transformative Justice Handbook. generationfive.org/the-issue/transformative-justice.
The Icarus Project. Madness & Oppression: Paths to PersonalTransformation and Collective Liberation. fireweedcollective.org, 2015.
INCITE!, ed. Color of Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2016.
———. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017.
It’s Going Down. itsgoingdown.org.
Morales, Iris. ¡Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords. Video.
New York: Third World Newsreel, 1996.
Klein, Naomi. The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the
Disaster Capitalists. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.
———. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New
York: Metropolitan, 2008.
Klein, Naomi, and Avi Lewis. The Take. Brooklyn, NY: First Run/ Icarus, 2004.
Koyama, Emi. “Disloyal to Feminism: Abuse of Survivors
within the Domestic Violence Shelter System.” eminism.
org.
Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Manchester, NH: Extending Horizon Books, 1976.
123

Resource List
This book expands upon the author’s previous writing
and worksheets published in Social Text and Medium. A
teaching guide to accompany this book is available online at<http://v.versobooks.com/Mutual_Aid_Teaching_Guide.pdf>
Below are more resources, some cited in this book.
Barnard Center for Research on Women. “Queer Dreams andNonprofit Blues” video series. bcrw.barnard.edu.
Batza, Katie. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Beam, Myrl. Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
bergman, carla, and Nick Montgomery. Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. Chico, CA: AK Press,
2017.
Big Door Brigade. bigdoorbrigade.com.
Butler, C.T. Lawrence, and Amy Rothstein. On Conflict and Consensus: A Handbook on Formal Consensus Decision-making.
theanarchistlibrary.org.
“Consensus: Direct Democracy @ Occupy Wall Street.” October 13, 2011. youtube.com/watch?v=6dtD8RnGaRQ.
Creative Interventions Toolkit. creative-interventions.org.
Critical Resistance. “Oakland Power Projects.” criticalresistance.org.
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories,
2003.

122

proval of that plan so that each team can then manage its partof the whole.
2. Creating a decision-making chart
A great way to prevent conflict and gain the efficiency
and productivity that task-specific teams can provide is tohave a decision-making chart that lets people know which
decisions can happen in teams and which are whole-groupdecisions. No decision-making chart can anticipate every
single possible decision a group can make, but putting some
big ones on there—especially ones more likely to be sensitiveor cause conflict—can help groups make decisions according
to their principles. Decision-making charts should always be
considered to be working documents. As groups try themout, they find out what is working and what isn’t, and makechanges accordingly.
Below is a sample decision-making chart for our example
group that delivers groceries to immunocompromised people
in the neighborhood. Mine looks like a table, but it could reallylook like anything, include any categories, or be made in whatever way meets a group’s needs. It could be designed as a flow
chart, a flower chart, circles, an ecosystem, or whatever makes
sense to the group.
Chart 6. Sample decision-making chart.
One common problem that groups address in these charts
is how to make fast-paced decisions, such as responding to media requests or a coalition request to sign on to a letter or eventthat needs an immediate response. Having a team or subgroupthat is authorized by the group to do a quick turnaround inthese situations can help groups stay responsive while being
grounded in a clear process. A quick-response group that has
two or three people who are well-versed in the group’s principles can tell if something is easy to respond to quickly, or if it
is more complex and needs to go to a larger group for a decision. The quick-response group is also responsible for letting
the whole group know immediately what quick decision was
71

Decision

Who
needs
to be informedandhow?
AddingDelivery
Whole
DeliveryWholea
new Team (or group at Teamgroup
weekanyone
monthly
by emailday for can pro- meetinganddeliveries pose toagain at
DeliverymonthlyTeam)meeting
Responding Communications
Communications
Communications
Reportto media Team
Team can Team
what theinquiry
reach out
requestto anywas andone they
howitneed forwas met,quotesand anyoranresults,
interviewto wholegroupby emailandatmonthlymeeting72

Who ini- Whotiates?
needs tobe consulted?

Who
canfinalizethe decision?

they use against our communities, and simultaneously build
new ways of surviving that are based in our principles ofliberation and collective self-determination. We must imagine
and build ways of eating, communicating, sheltering, moving,healing, and caring for each other that are not profit-centered,hierarchical, and destructive to our planet. We must practiceco-governing, creating participatory, consent-based ways ofcooperating that are not based in militarism.
Mutual aid work plays an immediate role in helping us get
through crises, but it also has the potential to build the skills
and capacities we need for an entirely new way of living at
a moment when we must transform our society or face intensive, uneven suffering followed by species extinction. As wedeliver groceries, participate in meetings, sew masks, write letters to prisoners, apply bandages, facilitate relationship skills
classes, learn how to protect our work from surveillance, plantgardens, and change diapers, we are strengthening our ability
to outnumber the police and military, protect our communities, and build systems that make sure everyone can have food,housing, medicine, dignity, connection, belonging, and creativity in their lives. That is the world we are fighting for. That is
the world we can win.

121

lice. The bus drivers’ union in Minneapolis issued a statement
declaring that their drivers have the right to refuse to transportarrested protesters and refuse to transport police to protests.
Ideally, our experiments with mutual aid and solidarity become bolder and bolder as experiences with our shared authority emancipate us from the illegitimate authority of dominantsystems. This has been visible in increasing actions to protect
immigrants from ICE arrests. In July of 2019, community members in Nashville, Tennessee, surrounded a man in his car toprotect him from ICE agents who had come for him. At thesame time, mutual aid groups all over the country were organizing to hide immigrants, to warn immigrants of coming ICE
raids, to care for the families of detainees and deportees, andto block buses leaving immigration prisons to bring people toairports for deportation. These same groups were also oftentied in with campaigns to shut down the immigration prison in
their region or stop the building or expansion of an immigration prison, to get local ordinances to ban ICE from using local
airports for deportation, to block collaboration between ICE
and local law enforcement in various ways, or to withdraw thebusiness license of a private prison used to cage immigrants.
These anti-ICE efforts provide a picture of how mutual
aid ties in with strategies aimed at beating back the explosive
growth of racist state violence, and building courage among
participants to take more and more direct action to protect
each other. As crises mount, our organizing could inspire
people to greater daring, using our people power to block
ICE and the police from arresting people, block marshals
attempting to evict tenants, and even to prevent militaryforces from occupying territory. We might reach a level ofmobilization where we free our own people from prison,rather than asking that their captors free them, and where
we redistribute stolen wealth rather than asking that it betaxed and spent differently. Our movements must contend
with the structures in place in order to dismantle the weapons
120

made so that others in the group are not surprised to find out,for example, the group has offered an endorsement, and so thatpeople can offer input if they disagree with that particular call.
It can be beneficial to have the quick-response group be a rotating role so that everyone gains experience and no person orteam becomes the group’s default deciders.
Some other items that might go on a decision-making chart:• Decisions about applying for or taking money• Decisions about spending money• Decisions about increasing the work in some significant
way (a new location, a new program, a new curriculum,a strategy for reaching a new population)• Decisions to end some part of the work
• Decisions to add new people or join larger groups or
coalitions• Decisions to ask people to leave or about the group leaving larger groups or coalitions• Decisions about endorsing something or someone• Decision to create a new paid role, eliminate a paid role,hire someone, or fire someone
These are all decisions that I have repeatedly seen produce
conflict in groups, when someone—often a charismatic leader
or founder—has made the decision without consulting others
and without a clear process. Not every decision a group makes
will go on the chart, but having a chart that lists some decisions
can help orient new members to how decision-making works,
increase transparency and consistency, and prevent conflict.
3. Practicing Proposal-Making
73

We all do the Proposal → Discussion → Modifications →Consensus process informally in social settings: I say I want togo out for dinner. My friend suggests the place on the corner.
I say it’s too loud there, how about the old place? We agree.
When dealing with more complex decisions involving more
people, it helps to actually think of the decision as a proposal
and develop it before the meeting.
For example, if our group has realized we need a databaseto track all the people calling our hotline, and that we need it
to be relatively secure because our callers are undocumented
and criminalized, and that we need it to be useable by people
with a broad range of computer experience, we might ask somegroup members to research existing options and come backwith a proposal that we can discuss. They will present what
they learned, tell us the pros and cons of various approaches,and propose what they think is the best solution. Now the next
conversation we have can be based on good, well-researched
information.
Treating something like a proposal rather than just an idea
or a preference means that group members take the time tothink through and research options, so that the whole groupdoesn’t become mired in speculation or very small details. For
example, if our group wants to plan a fundraiser for someone’s
transition from prison to life outside, we might have a subgroup or team work on a plan for the party that includes location, date, time, performances, outreach strategy, accessibility,
and other details, and bring that back to the next meeting foreveryone to discuss and modify. The process would be muchslower if as a large group we talked at length about all the details.
What happens when we discuss a proposal in our meeting
and we do not come to agreement? Usually, if the group thinks
we eventually need to figure this thing out (for example, we
still need a database but we have outstanding questions about
the options, or we still want to have the party but we realize
74

systems and ways of being together that we need. The stronger
we build our mutual aid projects, the more lasting our mobilizations can be.
Mutual aid is essential to the other tactics that make up our
movements, not only because it is the way to onboard millionsof new people into lasting movement participation, but also
because it supports all the other strategies. Decades of work
developing transformative justice projects provide an alternative vision for community support as we push to end police
budgets and redirect resources toward human need. Bail funds,
legal defense campaigns, and prison letter-writing projects support those criminalized for bold actions against the police andcorporations. Street medics treating tear gas and rubber bullet
injuries make street battles with police for days on end possible.
Healing justice projects and conflict mediation projects help us
live together in police-free zones. Mutual aid is essential to allof our resistance work.
Moments of crisis and transformative organizing empowerincreasingly bold actions of mutual support. On June 1, 2020,
Washington, DC, police surrounded protesters on a residential
street intending to arrest them for violating the 6 p.m. curfew
imposed by the city to quell uprisings over George Floyd’s murder. As police began making their arrests, people living on thestreet opened their doors to let protesters take shelter in theirhomes. Police tried to remove the protesters, even throwing
tear gas into the windows. But the residents kept the protesters
inside overnight, feeding them and meeting their needs. This
open refusal of police authority and willingness to take risks
for one another illustrates the vibrant possibilities of solidarityand mutual aid.
The same week that residents were defending protesters in
DC, bus drivers around the United States refused to allow police to commandeer public buses for making mass arrests. Despite offers of overtime pay to drive buses for this purpose, bus
drivers organized a shared resistance to cooperating with po119

people learning about the possibilities of addressing conflictand violence through mutual aid rather than criminalization.
In Seattle, after days of confrontations police abandoned
the East Precinct, and protesters established an autonomous
zone around it, taking up several blocks and a park. With thewithdrawal of the police and most businesses closed alreadybecause of COVID-19, the zone, like earlier Occupy encampments and other similar spaces where protesters have taken
public space, became a site of experimentation where practicesof governance, co-stewardship, leadership, decision-making,and collective care were being debated and innovated. Mutual
aid projects emerged in this space to provide mental healthsupport, food, water, medical care, masks, spiritual support,
haircuts, clothing, conflict mediation, and more.
At the same time that the mobilizations against policing
and for Black lives were growing, scientists announced thatMay 2020 had been the hottest May on record and that 2020,
like the ten preceding years, would likely be another recordbreakingly hot year; the Trump administration announced it
intended to open the Atlantic Maritime Monument to commercial fishing and waive environmental review for infrastructure
projects; the EPA slashed clean water protections; climatechange–induced permafrost melt caused the largest oil spillin Russia’s history; and scientists announced that carbon
dioxide levels were at a record high despite reduced emissions
during the pandemic. Everywhere we look, we see signs thatthe systems we have been living under are collapsing, andsomething new must emerge if we are to survive.
As the world faces the ongoing crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, a worsening economic depression, climate change, anddomination by illegitimate and racist policing, criminalization,and border enforcement systems and militaries, it is clear thatmutual aid projects are essential to the broader ecosystem ofpolitical action. Mutual aid helps people survive disasters of all
kinds, mobilizes and politicizes new people, and builds the new118

we don’t know how much time our favorite performers needon the program), the proposal can go back for further development. It need not go back to the same people. Perhaps someone
new wants to take it on and address the outstanding questions
because they have access to helpful information, or they havea good sense of the criteria that we are looking to meet, orthey have time between meetings to do this next step. Decisionmaking works better if, rather than anyone seeing it as “myproposal,” we can see it as the group’s proposal. That way weare less likely to become rigidly attached to one outcome.
One helpful tool is for a group to have a proposal template.
This can especially help new people know how to get theirideas heard if they have never been in a group that used a consensus process. Some groups keep this kind of template in ashared folder (paper or electronic) so that everyone can accessit. A proposal template could be as simple as the following:• What problem does this proposal address?
• What is the solution being proposed?
• What teams might this proposal involve, and do you
want to run it by any of them before bringing it to thewhole group?
• Is there any research that could help flesh out this proposal before people consider it?
You might also add a statement of the group’s shared purpose to the proposal, since that guides group decisions. Somegroups also add questions that the group has decided should always be addressed when moving forward, such as, “How will
this proposal affect access to our project for people with disabilities?” or “Does this proposal include any financial costs,
and if so what are they?”
4. Practicing Meeting Facilitation
75

How well or poorly we facilitate meetings will make or
break our groups. Skillful facilitation helps us make decisions
together, feel heard and included by each other, prevent and resolve conflict, celebrate our accomplishments and wins, grieve
our losses, and become people who can be together in new,more liberating relationships. Bad facilitation can make meetings boring, exhausting, oppressive, and damaging to individuals and groups. Most of us have never been to well-facilitatedmeetings, so we don’t know how to create them without help
from someone who has more experience in how to do it. In
other words, it’s worth putting some attention to meeting facilitation in your group—and if no one in your group has thatexperience, I hope the tools below and other resources available online can help guide all of you as you decide what works
best for your group.
Some very basic elements of good meeting facilitation
worth considering are:• Start and end on time.
• Write out an agenda (a list of what the group will talkabout at the meeting). If possible, circulate it to attendees
ahead of time so they can add items they want to discuss. At the beginning of the meeting, ask again if there
are missing items. If there are too many items for thetime allotted, work with the group to decide what canbe discussed next time or by a team in between regularmeetings.
• Assign a note-taker who will take notes that the group
can refer back to or share with people who couldn’t be at
the meeting. Sometimes it is nice to dedicate a space inthe notes for a task list where, as we go, we write down
which tasks people have agreed to do. This can be a goodreference for group members between meetings and be
76

Conclusion: Everything is at
Stake and We’re Fighting toWin
The only thing that keeps those in power in that position is the illusion of our powerlessness. A momentof freedom and connection can undo a lifetime ofsocial conditioning and scatter seeds in a thousand
directions.
— Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
In May 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic that
exposed the brutality of racist, capitalist health systems andthe frailty of social safety nets, Minneapolis police brutallymurdered George Floyd, sparking global protests against
anti-Black racism and police violence. The mutual aid projects
that had been mobilizing during the first months of thepandemic became vectors of participation in the growing
protests. Millions of people participated in new ways inthis moment—providing food, masks, hand sanitizer, water,
medical support, and protection to each other while fighting
cops and white supremacists in the streets, organizing andsupporting funds for criminalized people, pressuring schools
and other institutions to cancel contracts with the police,
and more. In the first two weeks of the protests alone, an
unprecedented 3.5 million people donated to bail funds aroundthe United States. As organizers demanded the defunding
and dismantling of police departments, vibrant conversations
about transformative justice emerged, with more and more117• Controlling feelings are a normal response to social conditioning, but I don’t have to act on them. I can remind
myself to trust the wisdom of the group, let others learn
by doing, and offer my contributions with generosityand flexibility.
• Avoidant feelings are a normal response to social conditioning, but I don’t have to act on them. I can remind
myself of the feelings of purpose that guide me and thenmake a practical, reasonable action plan for following
through with my commitments. I can ask friends tohelp with accountability on tasks if needed. - All that I
choose to do will be better for me and others if it doesn’tcome from a “must” and “should” feeling, but insteadfrom sober discernment of how I can care for myself
and others.
• Everyone experiences ego issues when doing work together, not just me. But I don’t have to let those fears
and insecurities guide me. I can remember the true collective purpose of this work and have compassion for theparts of me that want attention or credit. I can remember
the ways that I am loved and seen by friends and people
in my group.

reviewed at the start of the next meeting to see if anything was left unfinished that needs attention.
• Assign each agenda item a time amount and have a timekeeper watch the time so the group doesn’t end up running the meeting too long or not getting to important
items.
• Provide food, beverages, poetry, a game, or music. Also
consider opening with a go-round check-in question thatis funny or invites people’s personalities to shine a little.
We don’t want to be over-serious. We’re here to work but
also to know and enjoy each other!
• To help the meeting be a participatory and supportive
space, establish group agreements. The group can agree,
for example, that each person will wait for three otherpeople to speak before speaking again (sometimes called“three before me”) or that they will respect people’s pronouns, or whatever else the group decides will create acaring and respectful space. Go over these agreements atthe beginning of each meeting and make sure newcomers understand them and get to ask questions or suggest
additions.
• When talking about something important, if time allows,
consider a go-round so that the group hears from everyone. This is especially important if the same people areusually talking and others are usually quiet.
One way to establish some group norms about facilitation
is to have an agenda template. This also helps people who are
facilitating or making an agenda for the first time. An agenda
template may look like the following:
Chart 7. Agenda template.
Ahead of the meeting, facilitators are responsible for thinking through how much time agenda items need, how to refresh

116

77

• The work I am doing in this group is difficult and theconditions we are facing are severe. It is okay that we
can’t meet everyone’s needs at once or solve everything.
• It is okay for me to place limits on what I can do forothers and say no to things.
• Everyone deserves to exist, including me.
• I don’t have to do anything perfectly. We are imperfectpeople doing imperfect work.
the group on any decision-making processes that the group has
agreed to so everyone is oriented, and how to create a warm
and participatory culture in the meeting. Facilitators often sortout these questions in conversations with others, such as byasking people who proposed things for the agenda how muchtime they need and how urgent it is that the item be discussed
at this meeting, by finding out if new people are expected tocome to this meeting, or by asking for help in any aspect of
agenda preparation.
Group dynamics are improved if facilitation rotates in thegroup along with other roles like notetaking and time-keeping,so that people can learn new skills and power dynamics don’t
stagnate and rigidify. When new people are asked to take onthese roles, they should be given support and guidance so they
can have a satisfying experience of serving the group in thisway. Some groups find it beneficial to have all meetings cofacilitated by two people.
People show up in groups to do important work, but weshow up as our whole selves, not work robots. We are social
beings who evolved in groups, and we have deep, ingrained
desires for safety, dignity, and a sense of belonging when weare with others. Good facilitation lets us satisfy these desires,
even in the presence of conflict and difference.
5. Welcoming New People
78• It is okay to try new things. I can stop whenever I want.
• I am neither the best nor the worst. I am learning justlike everyone else here. I have wisdom and experience
to offer just like everyone else.
• I cannot read minds. If I think someone does not like me,ignored me, or was mean to me, it may be a misinterpretation of their behavior.
• I don’t have to like everyone in this group to care about
them all. I can stretch myself to be kind and caring to people even if we have different styles of interaction. I canchoose to notice what values we have in common andwhat is beautiful about their contribution, rather thanfocusing on criticizing them.
• My contribution will be more sustainable and of greater
service if it comes from a sense of choosing to act on
purpose than if it is motivated by guilt or a sense of inadequacy. If I am choosing to do things on the basis of
those feelings, I can take a pause to reconnect to my purpose and make intentional choices about what kinds oftasks and responsibilities I can take on.

115• Hopeless thoughts like:– There is no point in trying.
– I have lost everything.
– I ruined everything.
– Nothing every works out for me/us.
• Self-hating thoughts like:– I’m a fraud.
– I am undesirable.
– I am the worst.
– I don’t deserve help/care/support/love/admiration/
survival.
– I am a bad person.
• Superiority thoughts like:– No one else can do this right.
– No one else can see the truth like I can.
– Everyone else is handling this incorrectly.
– Any criticism or feedback about my behavior is incorrect/inappropriate.
Helpful Truths to Remember
In this section, call on your most centered self, your inneradult, your inner kind parent, your highest spiritual self, or
however you think of that part of you that can offer a compassionate perspective. Go through your unhelpful thoughts list,
above, and explore what the part of you thinking each thought
needs to hear or remember to diffuse the untrue thought’s
power. The examples below may help you generate your list.

114

If we are going to win the big changes that we want andneed so that people can live with dignity and we can sustain
human life on our planet, we need to organize hundreds of millions of people who are not yet politically active to take boldcollective action together. We will never have as much money
and weapons as our opponents. All we have is people power.
We need to support people who have not been part of social
movement work to join social movements. They need to feellike they can become part of a response to conditions that theyfind intolerable.
Mutual aid is the best onramp for getting people involved intransformative action because they get to address things harming them and their communities right away. To harness newpeople’s energy and capacity for collective action, our groups
need to be ready to welcome them and, to paraphrase Toni
Cade Bambara, make resistance irresistible. We want them tojoin groups, have satisfying experiences of taking action, build
new skills, develop their own political understanding of injustice, and stay in the resistance movement for the rest of theirlives. Movements grow because new people join groups andfeel co-ownership and co-stewardship of the work, and thenrecruit other people and orient them so they get deep in too,and on and on.
Some things that help make groups and meetings accessible
and interesting to new people include:• Giving new people a chance to share why they careabout the issues and came to the group— many people
are seeking to break their own isolation and find aspace where they can be heard and be part of a sharedunderstanding of the root causes of injustice.
• Making meeting discussions as accessible as possible tonew people by providing a background of the problems
the group is addressing and the group’s activities so far;79

avoiding jargon, acronyms, and overly technical theoretical language.
• Giving new people a chance to share their ideas, even if
the group has thought about those ideas before.
• Making the group’s facilitation process transparent to
new people so they don’t feel lost about what is goingon or being discussed.
• Making sure someone follows up with each new person
after their first meeting to find out if they have questions, how they want to plug into the work, and if there
is anything that would make the group more welcoming
to them.
• Making careful decisions about agenda items and activities at meetings focused on orienting new people, sincesome detailed group discussions that need to happen
about ongoing work might not be the most accessible tonewbies.
• Helping new people plug into a clear role or task as soon
as possible so they feel a part of things.
One harsh reality in our currently under-developed, underpeopled, under-resourced movements is that sometimes we are
tired from doing all the work, and sometimes we have feelingsof resentment that more people aren’t engaged. When we greet
new people with exhaustion and resentment, we rarely succeed
in making participation in our group irresistible. Making ourmeetings welcoming, fun, warm, and energizing; making spacefor people to feel their rage and grief about the issues we areorganizing around; and cultivating care and connection with
one another strengthen the group and make the work moresustainable, in addition to supporting the well-being of all theparticipants.
80• Literature, music, art you want to make or read, listen to,look at.
• Spiritual practices you want to try or return to.
• Additional ways you want to connect with loved ones.
• Additional activities that may boost your mood or senseof purpose, connection, or self-worth.
• Ways to beautify your space• Ways you want to be generous to others.
• Things you want to try to improve your sleep, reduce
your pain, break your isolation, generate a more structured routine, break up a monotonous routine.

Unhelpful/Untrue Thoughts
Painful or difficult thinking increases when we are underpressure. Often it will be familiar thinking that has appearedin other difficult times, feeding harmful behaviors that disconnect us from ourselves and others. Noticing these thoughts andbehaviors can give us a chance to interrupt them and see if they
can be reduced.
• Scarcity thoughts (about anything—food, money, work,
self-worth, sex, health):– I’m not doing enough.
– I’m doing everything and no one is helping.
– I’m not going to have what I need.
– I better get mine before everyone else takes it all.
– There are not enough people in this group.
– There is not enough time.
113• Limits on amount of or number of times you use social
media (for example, not upon waking or before bed).
-Goals for getting outdoors or interacting with the natural
world.
• People you want to be connected to, how often and inwhat ways.
• People you need to limit your exposure to and what
those limits are.
• Sleep schedules or other rest plans.
• Limits on working hours, creating days off or other limits
on work, including unpaid activist or artistic work if you
are overworking in those areas.
• Timelines for taking care of essential paperwork or logistics.
• Baseline activities to maintain physical space andhygiene.

Bonus Activities That Help
The previous section is a baseline set of goals you are committing to. This section can include things you may aspire todo, things you know would feel good, things that are lovely
extras to improve your state of being.
• Kinds of movement or exercise that are fun and feelgood.
• Cooking adventures.
• Gardening.
112

Leadership Qualities That Support Mutuality and Collaboration
One thing we need to do to create strong, sustainablemutual aid projects is shed the baggage of what we are told
“leadership” is in a racist, colonial, patriarchal society. Thatmodel is usually about individuality, competition, and domination. We often think of leaders as people in the spotlight,
holding the mic. To win big, we need to build leaderless andleaderful groups. This means we want lots and lots of people
involved, all of whom are building skills that help them do
the work and bring new people into the work. We wanttransparency in our groups, so that our opposition can’t messup our work by just neutralizing or co-opting one person. We
want everyone to have the strength and skills to lead. The
chart on the following pages can be a tool for individuals andgroups to reflect on what we’ve been taught about leadershipand how to redefine it for ourselves.
Chart 8. Leadership Qualities

Ways to use this chart:
1. Write or talk in your group about what is missing fromthese lists.
2. Circle qualities you see in yourself that you are working
to cultivate and grow. What might help them grow?
3. Circle qualities you see in yourself that are obstacles toyou practicing cooperative leadership or that don’t fit yourvalues. Where did you learn those qualities? How have they
served you? How have they gotten in the way of what you
want or believe in? What helps you move toward acting in
greater alignment with your values?
4. Notice qualities that are prevalent in groups you are in.
What could help cultivate qualities you think are beneficial andreduce ones that are harmful?
81Domineering Leadership“Success” defined by dominating others or being thedecider

Cooperative Leadership
Supports the growth ofdecision-making processes
that
includeeveryone
affected by the decision“My way or the highway” at- Wants to find out how othtitude
ers are doing, what theyneed or believe, what theywant
Self-promoting
Eager to help many people develop leadership skills
and share the spotlight, able
to assess when some things
should be done under theradar rather than seeking attention
Concerned with maintain- Willing to admit mistakes
ing reputation, looking like“the best,” looking “right”
Arrogant and superior
Humble and dignified
Good at talking and com- Good at communicating:manding
sharing and listening
Winsothers’support Wins support by being
through status, fear, or supportive,
consistent,
because others see them as trustworthy
most powerful
Certain they are rightOpen to influence andchanging their opinion
Concerned about the reputa- Concerned
about
the
tion of group with media or group’s material impact—
elitesdoes it alleviate sufferingand increase justice?
Fosters competition in the Fosters compassion and a degroupsire that no one is left out of
the group
Suspicious of new people
Generous and open to newcomers while holding clear
82
principles and boundaries
Impulsive—planschange Holds steady to the groups’
with their whims
decisions and purpose; reliable• Escaping through sex or romantic highs.
• Lack of sleep or oversleeping.
• Over-exercising or not moving enough for what yourbody/mind needs right now.
• Any other compulsive behavior that, in your experience,suggests imbalance.

Guidelines for Greater Wellness
In this section, try to set realistic expectations, not pieinthe-sky guidelines that will cause shame or feelings of inadequacy if they are not met. You can always increase and adjust
later. Be aware of harsh “should” messages that may show up
here, which many of us have in areas of eating, work, exercise,money, sex, and so on. Being mindful to avoid perfectionism,focus on gentle realistic steps toward greater balance.
This section might include things like:• A limit on the number of times per day you check email,social media, news, etc.
• Limits on amount of or number of times of day you engage in particular escapist or toxifying behaviors.
• Goals for how often and in what ways you want to moveyour body.
• Goals for making sure you feed yourself in nourishingways.
• Goals for meditation, spiritual practices, or anything elsethat would help but might be falling away right now.
• Types of media or apps you want to avoid or delete.
111• Overly critical thoughts about other people.

A Cautionary Note on Fame

• Feeling insecure in the group or like people are out to
get you, don’t like you, are talking about you, excludingyou.

Social media has encouraged our individualism and has enhanced the desire to “brand” ourselves as radical or as having
the “right” politics. It is in the interest of corporations like Facebook and Twitter that we spend as much time as possible creating free content for them, and that we feel compelled to getapproval on their platforms. All of this can motivate us to want
to be perceived to be doing things, rather than actually doing
them. Much mutual aid work is very ordinary, sometimes boring, and often difficult. To return to an earlier example, everyone wants a selfie with Angela Davis to post, but many people do not want to take the time to visit prisoners, go to courtwith people, wait in long lines at welfare offices, write lettersto people in solitary confinement, deliver groceries to an elderly neighbor, or spend many hours in meetings about how
to coordinate care for people in need.
When we get our sense of self from fame, status, or approval
from a bunch of strangers, we’re in trouble. It is hard to stickto our principles and treat others well when we are seeking
praise and attention. If we are to redefine leadership away fromindividualism, competition, and social climbing, we have to become people who care about ourselves as part of the greaterwhole. It means moving from materialist self-love, which is often very self-critical (“I will be okay and deserve love when
I look right, when others approve of me, when I am famous”)
and toward a deep belief that everyone, including ourselves, deserves dignity, belonging, and safety just because we are alive.
It means cultivating a desire to be beautifully, exquisitely ordinary just like everyone else. It means practicing to be nobody
special. Rather than a fantasy of being rich and famous, which
capitalism tells us is the goal of our lives, we cultivate a fantasy
of everyone having what they need and being able to creatively
express the beauty of their lives.

• Obsessing over details.
• Taking on too many tasks even though you know you’realready overloaded.
• Feeling controlling about how things get done in thegroup, not wanting to let other people do it differently.
• Avoiding tasks, flaking, becoming vague.
• Obsessively checking anything (social media, email, reflection in the mirror, your work, other people’s work,
your health, your money).
• Overworking on anything (house cleaning, paid job, activist work, art project).
• Letting the physical space around you get chaotic.
• Not eating or eating in ways that make you feel bad.
• Not taking regular meds or supplements that are helpful
to you.
• Misusing alcohol, drugs, shopping, video games, TV, social media.
• Avoiding people you love.
• Avoiding work that is meaningful to you.
• Avoiding work you need to do to survive.
• Not taking care of bills, paperwork, other logistical necessities.
110

83

This is a lifelong unlearning practice because we haveall been shaped by systems that make us insecure, approvalseeking, individualist, and sometimes shallow. Yet we also all
have the deeply human desire to connect with others, to beof service in ways that reduce suffering, and to be seen andloved by those who truly know us and whom we love. Mutual
aid groups are a place where we can notice these learned
instincts and drives in ourselves and unlearn them—that is,make choices to act out of mutuality and care on purpose.

Handling money
Handling money can be one of the most contentious issues
for mutual aid groups. Because of this, it can be very usefulfor groups to consider whether this is something they want to
do. Some groups can do their work without raising money atall. Some groups can do their work just raising money throughgrassroots fundraising in their communities, taking small donations from many people. That kind of fundraising can avoid
the problem with grant-making foundations attaching strings
to grant money and trying to control the direction of the work.
Grassroots fundraising can help build a sense that the community controls the organizations rather than an elite funder, anddoing grassroots fundraising can be a way of spreading theideas of the group and raising awareness about the problems
the group works on. However, even if money is raised in thisway, managing money still comes with pitfalls.
Handling money brings logistical issues that can causestress and take time, such as figuring out how to do it fairly
and transparently and figuring out how to avoid a problem
with the IRS or otherwise expose group members to legal
problems. Because most people in our society have a tangled,
painful relationship with money that includes feelings and behaviors of secrecy, shame, and desperation, a lot of otherwise
84

These are the same things that make the work meaningful, satisfying, and pleasurable. But pressure and stress can bring out
patterned emotional responses and autopilot reactions and behaviors. Learning to notice the patterns and plan for them canhelp us make choices or get support at key moments so that
our actions can be as beneficial as possible to ourselves andthe people around us.
One technique to learn these patterns in ourselves is to use
a “mad map”—a guide we can make for ourselves that we canturn to when things go sideways or we feel ourselves slipping
into more difficult states. A mad map can be like a gift to yourfuture self, to help navigate the potentially dangerous watersof stress or conflict. It can guide you through the wild thinking, feeling, and behaviors that emerge when things are reallyrough, reminding you what helps and what harms during suchtimes. Your mad map can have any content you want. It can beillustrated, or include songs, physical movements, or images—
whatever feels best. Below are just some starter ideas and examples of potential content. Some people share their mad maps
with friends and loved ones. You can include sections on how
other people can support you when you are in difficulty or crisis, and what you do or do not want them to say or do if you
are struggling. (I learned about mad mapping from the Icarus
Project, and you can find more information in the resource listat the end of this book.)

Signs of Difficulty under Pressure
Some areas to think about when making this section might
include:• Overly self-critical thoughts (about your contributions
to the group, your appearance, personality, intelligence,etc.).
109

– I can’t start because I’m afraid I will do it wrong.
– I feel dread and a sense of avoidance about my task
because of my fear of failure, exposure, humiliation.
– I feel deadened by overwhelming shame or griefthat I am suppressing.

Reflection Questions:
1. Where does perfectionism show up in my life? School
work, job, family interactions, how I regard my body,
activism, social media interactions, housework? What isthe cost?
2. How might I be applying perfectionist standards to others? When am I intolerant of others’ learning processes
or differences? Where did I learn that? What emotions
motivate that? What is the cost of this intolerance to myrelationships, to my work, to my principles and purposein the world?
3. Does our group culture enable or produce perfectionist
behaviors? If so, how? How does it impact our group
work, relationships with each other, and relationships
to people who come to our project for help or to volunteer? How could we add more flexibility, care, compassion, and trust to our group culture?

Mad Mapping
Doing mutual aid work often brings some level of stress orpressure, because we are meeting urgent needs, learning new
skills, working in groups, and taking on new responsibilities.

108

awesome people will misbehave when money is around or get
suspicious of others’ behavior.
Sometimes groups want funds so they can pay people todo the work. When groups have no staff, it can be a challenge
to do mutual aid work that has to take place during typical
workday times, such as accompanying people to courts or social service offices. Staffing can increase capacity to provide
aid. But it is worth weighing some of the challenges that paid
staffing can bring. When groups that have operated on an allvolunteer basis get money to pay staff, there is a greater dangerof institutionalization and pandering to funders, because someone’s livelihood will be impacted if they lose the funders’ favor.
Groups can lose their autonomy, feeling pressured to direct
their work toward fundable projects or put time into measuring their work and reporting it according to funders’ demands,
rather than doing the work the way they think is most effective.
To get funding, groups may want to become nonprofits byapplying to the IRS, or get a nonprofit fiscal sponsor so thatthey can receive grants and/or tax-deductible donations. The
downside is that this requires financial tracking and administration skills. Becoming a nonprofit sometimes concentrates
power in the hands of people who have had more access tothese skills and systems, such as white people, people withmore formal education, and people with professional experience, especially when having those skills becomes a prerequisite for getting hired as staff. It also may bring government
attention and funder surveillance to the group and cultivate aculture of timidity or risk aversion. In addition, when groups
are dependent on funders, they have an incentive to declare
false victories or stick to strategies they have followed to win
funding in the past, even if those strategies are not working toward their purpose anymore. We see this problem frequently
in the nonprofit sector, where an organization will purport toserve some population’s needs but in reality serve only a small
85

number of people—yet the public story is that they have it covered. This can prevent new organizations from emerging that
can truly address more of the population’s need. When groups
are volunteer-based, people are more likely to admit their limitations and scrap bad ideas, because they are motivated by purpose, not elite approval.
Another pitfall of hiring paid staff is that when groups become staffed, unpaid volunteers in the group sometimes expect that staff person or few staff people to suddenly do all thework, and volunteers sometimes check out (especially if theyfelt overworked before the group started paying staf). This canmake the group vulnerable to a loss of capacity, to becoming
governed by just a few staffers, and to burnout and overwork of
those staffers. It can also be a setup for new staffers to be heavily criticized and considered to be “failures” because they areoverloaded with responsibilities. In some groups, where people
from the most impacted communities are hired, and they are
the same people who have the least formal work experience inprofessional settings, this can be a particularly cruel setup.
There can certainly be good reasons to seek funding andhave paid staff roles, but these steps should be taken with caution and with a focus on building transparent and accountablesystems regarding money and decision-making. At least two
people should always be working together on tracking funds
to help prevent theft. How money is earned and spent should
be clear to all group participants. The group’s values should
guide how money is spent—for example, the group should ensure that staff are paid fairly and equally rather than on thebasis of the privileged status that comes with a professional degree, and should ensure that people are not pressured to overwork. Having clear and transparent budgeting and planning
processes that can be understood by all participants, including
people with no prior experience with such processes, so everyone can weigh in and make decisions together will help preventthe group from shrinking to become staff-centered, small, and86– If some people are critiquing me, I should just leavethis group.
• Shoulds, Musts– I can’t make any mistakes or others will realize
what I am really like.
– I should already know everything about this topic.
– I should already be able to do this the same or better
than others.
– Any mistake will expose me as a fraud.
• Constant Checking– I have to go over any work I do, several times, before I can show it to anyone else.
– I have to keep checking in with others to make sureI am liked, look okay, didn’t say anything wrong,etc.
– I check my social media likes, my appearance, mybank account, my email constantly.
• Self-control– I must work all the time or I will become a lazy slob.
– I have to work extremely hard in order to deservea treat or a rest.
• Structure, Control– I must know what is going to happen.
– I must be prepared for possible outcomes.
– I can’t let anyone else do a task in case it goes
wrong.
• Procrastination107

also lead to people being overly controlling of group work,
which can mean work does not get delegated and the samefew people are doing everything. It can mean that people whostarted the group are patronizing to people who come in laterand do things differently.
Whenever we see inflexibility in ourselves or in a group
culture, there are opportunities for healing from social conditioning and cultivating new ways of being. The chart and reflection questions below are tools to use by yourself or in a group
to begin to unlearn perfectionism. Check anything that feels
familiar.
Chart 10. Perfectionism Checklist• Setting Even More Demanding Standards– Doing well isn’t good enough, I have to do better.
– If I don’t strive, I am a lazy and useless person.
– Other people or groups are producing more, reaching further, or getting more praise.
• Fear of Failure– I must do things perfectly.
– I must not fail.
– I can’t have others think poorly of me.
– If I try, then I will only fail.
– If I put myself out there, then others will thinkbadly of me, I should keep quiet.
• All-or-Nothing Thinking– If I have conflict in this group, everything is ruined
and I have to quit.
– My work is never good enough.
– There is a right way and a wrong way to do things.
106

likely less mobilizing and relevant. The more that people in thegroup can be aware of the dangers of institutionalization andphilanthropic control, the more likely the group can stay committed to its purpose and principles when handling money.

Burnout
Burnout is a reason people often give for why they leavemutual aid groups. Burnout is more than just exhaustion thatcomes from working too hard. Most often, people I meet who
describe themselves as burnt out have been through painful
conflict in a group they were working with and quit because
they were hurt and unsatisfied by how it turned out. Burnout
is the combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion
in the work and instead encounter difficult feelings like avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety. If it were just exhaustion, we could take a break and rest and go back, but people
who feel burnt out often feel they cannot return to the work,or that the group or work they were part of is toxic.
These feelings and behaviors are reasonable results of theconditions under which we do our work. We are steeped in acapitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist culture that encourages us to compete, distrust, hoard, hide, disconnect, and confine our value to how others see us and what we produce. Our
work is under-resourced in important ways. Many of us cometo the work because of our own experiences of poverty or violence, and doing this work can activate old wounds and survival responses. We come to the work to heal ourselves andthe world, but we often do the work in ways that further harm
ourselves and impede our contribution to the resistance. When
our groups are focused on getting important things done “outthere,” there is rarely room to process our strong feelings oradmit that we do not know how to navigate our roles “in here.”87

Burnout is created or worsened when we feel disconnectedfrom others, mistreated, misunderstood, ashamed, overburdened, obsessed with outcomes, perfectionist, or controlling.
Burnout is prevented or lessened when we feel connected toothers, when there is transparency in how we work together,when we can rest as needed, when we feel appreciated by thegroup, and when we have skills for giving and receiving feedback. There are several things that groups can do to cultivate
conditions that prevent, reduce, or respond to burnout, andthere are things that individuals experiencing burnout can do.
Before people who are burnt out leave groups, they often cause
a lot of disruption and damage, so this section is also aimed at
reducing the harm that burnt-out or overworked people cancause. Figuring out how to have a more balanced relationshipto work and overwork is a matter of both individual healing
and collective stewardship of the group.

Signs of Overwork and Burnout• High stress when thinking about tasks being performedby someone else who might do it differently, or the groupcoming to a different decision than we would make.
• Feelings of resentment: “I’ve done the most for thisgroup” or “I work harder than anyone else.” This can include creating a damaging group culture of competition
about who works the hardest.
• Not respecting group agreements or group process because we feel above the process as the founder or thehardest worker.
• Feelings of competition with other groups that are politically aligned or with other issues or activists that weperceive as receiving more support.
88

Working Compulsively
Very long hours
Impossible standards
Insatiable, never done
Tightly scheduled
Arrogant and superior
Adding more work

Working Joyfully
Setting boundaries
Reasonable goals
Content with a day’s work
Room for the unexpected
Humble and dignified
No adding without subtracting
Unable to estimate time
Realistic time allotment
Non-stop
Pausing for change of pace,focus, new ideas
False deadlines
Appropriate timing
Driven, adrenalized
Feeling of being in flow
Sense of urgency
Relaxed about time
Must complete
work Can delay task
Confusing urgency with im- Able to prioritize
portance
Reacting to pressure
Following inner guidance
Mentally scattered
FocusedInefficient
Effective
Mistakes: misplace, drop, Doing it right the first time
spill
Rigid
Flexible
Intolerant of new ideas
Open-minded
Impatient
Calm
Perfectionistic
Learning from mistakes
without blaming
Tense
RelaxedLoss of humor
Keeping a humorous perspective
Loss of creativity
Flow of novel solutions
Overly serious and intense
Able to be playful
Not enjoyable
Finding work pleasurable
Abrupt with colleagues
Responsive to others
Loss of spontaneity
Open to the moment
Out of touch with feelings
Aware of moods
Doing many things at once
Doing one thing at a time 105
Body/mind out of sync
Unity of thought and action
Rushing
Leisurely paced
Blurred perception
Vivid impressions
Unaware, mechanical
Mindfulfeels like to participate in groups, what ideas we are carrying
around about leadership and productivity—is crucial to building a practice of working from a place of connection, inspiration, and joy. This means intentionally creating ways to practice a new relationship to work, and diving into the psychic
structures underlying our wounds from living and working in
brutal, coercive hiearchies. The following chart may be a useful reflection tool for individuals and groups trying to change
harmful cultures and practices of work.
Chart 9. Workaholics Anonymous’s “Working Joyfully”• Feelings of martyrdom.
• Desire to endlessly be given credit for our work.
• A desire to take on tasks and responsibilities in order to“be important” to the group or control outcomes.
• Feeling overwhelmed or experiencing depression and/or
anxiety.
• Feeling like we “have to” do all these things, cannot see
any way to do less work or have less responsibility.
• Inability to let others take on leadership roles.

Perfectionism
Perfectionism is an insidious and harmful force in our mutual aid groups and in our own psyches. “I’m not a perfectionist, everything I do is so imperfect!” we say to ourselves. Exactly. Nothing is good enough. We live in a very materialist
culture that tells us we need to have the “perfect” body, sexuality, family, consumer goods, home, and job. Even those of us
who know those norms are bullshit still struggle with the patterns of perfectionist thinking and behavior they can create.
In our personal lives this can give us anxiety and feed painfulmisperceptions of ourselves.
Perfectionism can shrink our mutual aid groups, causing
them to be exclusive, producing conflict, and feeding dynamics of overwork and burnout. Perfectionism sometimes appears
as a fear of saying anything that is politically off-base and being judged, so that people don’t share their opinions; or are
wildly defensive if someone questions something they said; orquickly attack or exclude anyone who doesn’t use the same jargon as them or is still learning something they already know
about. These tendencies can create cliquishness and make it
hard to grow our groups and movements. Perfectionism can
104• Hoarding information or important contacts so that others cannot rise to the same level of leadership (this behavior is usually rationalized in some way).
• A life-and-death feeling that “it must be done the way
I do it.” An extreme version of this can result in leaders
sabotaging the group or project rather than recognizingthat it may be time to step back and take a break fromleadership.
• Paranoia and distrust about others in the group or otherpeople working in this kind of work. Feelings of beingalone. Feelings of “me against [members of the group/
other groups/everyone].”• Over-promising and under-delivering, which can lead tofeeling fraudulent and afraid of being caught so far behind.
• Having feelings of scarcity drive decision-making:“There’s not enough money/time/attention.”• Having no boundaries with work—working all the time,
during meals, first thing upon waking and last before
89sleeping, during time that was supposed to be for connecting with loved ones. Not knowing how to do anything besides work. Not having fun or feeling relaxed onvacation or days off.
• Dismissal of the significance of group process and overvaluation of how the group is perceived by outsiders
such as funders, elites, and others.
• Being flaky or unreliable.
• Being defensive about all of the above and unwilling tohear critique. “I’m doing so much, I’m killing myself withwork. How can you critique me? I can’t possibly do any
better/more!”• Shame about experiencing all of the above.
We also carry around fallback attitudes and behaviors thatcan undermine our principles, especially when we are stressedout and over capacity. These can be behaviors we learned fromdominant culture and also roles we learned in our families.
When we are stressed and overworked, these things can comeout in damaging ways. It can mean we misuse or obstruct groupprocesses, disappear from the work, or act from a place of superiority or dominance on the basis of gender, race, ability, class,or educational attainment.

How Mutual Aid Groups Can Prevent andAddress Overwork and Burnout
Overwork is pervasive in mutual aid groups, and if we canmove away from shaming and blaming ourselves and others
and toward acknowledging it, we can support change. It is hard
to confront another person about behavior that is harmful, and
it is hard to be confronted about harmful behavior and listen
90

in groups, we have to look closely at the feelings and behaviors
that generate the desire to throw people away. Humility, compassion for ourselves, and compassion for others are antidotes
to disposability culture. Examining where we project on others
and where we react strongly to others can give us more options
when we are in conflict. Every one of us is more complex andbeautiful than our worst actions and harshest judgments. Building compassion and accountability requires us to take stock of
our own actions and reactions in conflict, and seek ways totreat each other with care even in the midst of strong feelings.

Working with Joy
It is not surprising that most of us have distorted relationships to work, including work in mutual aid groups. The conditions and systems we live under make work coercive, create
severe imbalances in who does which kind of work and forwhat kind of compensation and recognition, and make it hardto feel like we have choices when it comes to work. Working
to change the world is extremely hard because the conditions
we are up against are severe. We cannot blame ourselves forhaving a difficult relationship to our work, even though weunderstand that learning to work differently is vital for our
movements and for our own well-being and survival. We must
be compassionate to ourselves and each other as we practicetransforming our ways of working together.
We need each other badly to share what is hard about theoverwhelming suffering in the world and the challenge of doing work for change in dangerous conditions. Even in the faceof the pain that being awakened to contemporary conditions
causes, all of our work for change can be rooted in the comfort
and joy of being connected to one another, accompanying one
another, and sometimes being inspired by each other. Reflecting deeply about our own orientations toward work—what it103• Am I mocking them, laughing at them, or otherwise
being cruel? If the content of what you are sharing
is something you would not consider compassionate
or constructive feedback, something you would neversay to their face, it may be malicious gossip. Any time
we are feeling justified dehumanizing people in our
movements and social circles, it is good to pause andask, “What else is true?” We might be reacting to a deep
wound that needs our attention, and causing damage
along the way.
• Am I building my obsession with someone’s faults? Is the
choice to talk about this person’s behavior or qualities
right now going to help me be clear about my choices
and feelings, or is it building a habit of thinking too
much about this person and cultivating hyper-criticism
of them?
Giving direct feedback is hard. Rather than saying, “It wasdifficult for me when you did not follow through with the tasks
you took on at the meeting,” or “I wonder why you didn’t ask
me to join that team,” it is easier to project negative feelings andmalicious behaviors onto the other person and gossip about it.
This is likely to feel bad and damage relationships. When a lotof people in groups or scenes are doing this, it can make forbroad conditions of distrust, anxiety, and betrayal, and can augment hierarchies of valuation and devaluation, making groups
unstable and more vulnerable to disruption by law enforcement.
We live in a society based on disposability. When we feelbad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad oranother person is bad. Both of these moves cause damage anddistort the truth, which is that we are all navigating difficult
conditions the best we can, and we all have a lot to learn andunlearn. If we want to build a different way of being together
102

to what is being said. The ideas below do not change that, butthey may help individuals or groups create concrete steps toaddress the problems.
1. Make internal problems a top priority. The group cannot
do its important work if it is falling apart inside, and it cannot do its work well if it is promising to do work it does nothave the capacity to do. The internal concerns cannot wait until
later, because the giant need the group exists to fill is probably
not going to be reduced in the immediate future. This does notmean the group’s work needs to stop, but it may mean calling a
moratorium on new projects and commitments so that the situation does not worsen, and so that people can carve out time
for working on internal problems.
Groups working on internal problems might seek any of thefollowing resources:• Training in meeting facilitation, decision-making, consensus process, active listening, giving and receiving direct feedback.
• Facilitated discussions and training about how racism,ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, andother systems of meaning and control affect group development and culture, and how to change that.
• Collective planning of the group’s work so that participants build shared clarity on what the priorities are andwhat they have agreed to do and not to do together.
• Creating work plans for teams and/or individuals to figure out how to assign work fairly, assess workload, andplan out a reasonable pace of work.
• Conflict mediation between particular people or groups
working with a facilitator who understands the group’s
values and whom the people in conflict trust and/or see
as relatively neutral.
91

• Work on building transparency in the group so that people know what each other are doing, and allied groups
doing similar or related work know what the group is
doing.
• Regularly scheduled conversations where people canhear from each other about what is going well and whatneeds work in the group’s dynamics, or can discuss
issues or concerns about their own role and ask for thegroup’s assistance.
2. Make sure that new people are welcomed and trained toco-lead. This means new people are given a full background on
the group’s work, understand that they are being asked to fully
participate in all decisions, and have space to ask any questions
they need to in order to participate. Ensuring that everyone isgetting access to what it takes to co-lead is essential to building
leadership among more people. Group members and the groupas a whole will be better off if many people are leading, not justone or two.
3. Establish mechanisms to assess the workload and scale
back. How many hours is each member working? Is it beyond
what they can do and maintain their own wellbeing? Did they
actually track their hours for a week to make sure they areaware of how much they are working? Assess the workload
and scale back projects until the workload is under control.
Create a moratorium on new projects until capacity expands.
Enforce the moratorium—no one can unilaterally take on newwork for the group or for themselves as a member of thegroup.
4. Build a culture of connection. How can the group’s meeting culture foster well-being, goodwill, connection between
members? Eating together, having check-ins with interestingquestions about people’s favorite foods, plants, movies, or
politicizing moments may feel silly at first but makes a big
92• Are there any ways that I am stepping into a familiar rolewith my strong feelings about this person? In my innerreality, did I cast us into roles that relate to my family oforigin or other formative groups?

Use Direct Communication before Using
Gossip and Social Media
Sometimes the first impulse we have when we are hurt isto make our hurt known—through negative gossip or on social media platforms. Negative gossip and accusatory posts canhurt the person doing the gossiping, the target, the group, andthe movement. It usually magnifies conflict. This doesn’t meanthat we should not share difficult experiences we are having
so we can access support. We often need to speak with a friend
to help clarify what we are feeling, get affirmation of our experience, talk through possible responses, and get sympathy.
So, how can we tell if we are engaging in negative gossip thatmight harm someone? Here are several questions we can ask
ourselves:• Who am I telling? If you are having strong feelings about
someone in your mutual aid group, talking about themnegatively behind their back with other people in thegroup is likely to harm group dynamics and create a culture that will drive some people away. Talking to a therapist or a friend who is not part of the group is less likely
to be harmful. Telling the stories on social media is likely
to have many harmful and possibly unintended impacts
on everyone involved.
• Am I campaigning? What are my motivations in tellingthis? Am I trying to get support and process my experience, or am I trying to get other people to think badly
about this person?
101What Else Is True?
When we find ourselves obsessing over an opinion, story,or judgment, it can often be helpful to ask, “What else is true?”
For example, when conflict is emerging and we have strong
feelings, we might ask:
• What else is true about this person/group/space? Can I
think of any of their positive qualities? Can I think of
any way that I benefit from their actions? In addition towhat they did that I dislike, are there also other experiences that show a more full picture, demonstrate goodintentions, or balance any vengeful feelings toward thisperson?
• Might there be things I’m unaware of that are contributing to this situation or behavior?
• What else is true about my life that counterbalances thissituation? What else is in my life? What percentage ofmy time is spent in this space or with this person? Whatelse do I do and have? Does this situation feel like it occupies 80 percent of my mind space, while this group actually only takes up 5 percent of my week? If I am afraidof what this person thinks of me, can I think of otherpeople who I know that admire, care about, and respectme?
• Is this situation or person my responsibility? Is this something I can control? If not, can I imagine letting go, evenjust 5 percent or 10 percent, to gain some peace of mind?
• Are there ways that I am particularly activated by thisthat might have to do with my own history and experiences? Are there ways to give myself attention or carearound these wounds?
100

difference. Bringing attention to wellness into the group’s
culture means helping members be there as multi-dimensional
people, rather than just as work or activist machines. People
need to build deep enough relationships to actually be able totalk about difficult dynamics that come up, or those dynamics
will fester.
5. Make sure that the facilitation of meetings rotates, including agenda-making and other key leadership tasks. Rotatingtasks can help us address unfair workloads and transparency
concerns. Making sure everyone is trained on how to facilitate
meetings in ways that maximize the participation of all members of the group can help. Whenever there is a danger thatjust a few people will dominate an important conversation,
use a go-around rather than having people volunteer to speak.
Quieter members speaking up can really change the dynamic.
6. As a group, recognize the conditions creating a culture ofoverwork. It is not one person’s fault, and everyone may be feeling the different forms of pressure. Have one or many facilitated discussions about the pressures and dynamics that leadto overwork or to an individual’s dominating or disappearing
behavior. Create a shared language for the pressures the members may be under so they are easier to identify and address
moving forward.

What Individuals Experiencing Overwork
and Burnout NeedIn addition to creating group approaches to burnout, we
can take action in our own lives when we recognize our own
symptoms of overwork and burnout. This requires us to work
on changing our own behavior and that we be willing to examine the root causes of our impulses to over-commit, to control,
to overwork, or to disconnect. This is healing work aimed at
helping us be well enough to enjoy our work, make sustained
93

lifelong contributions to the movements we care about, andreceive the love and transformation that is possible in communities of resistance. Above all, we must take a gentle approachto ourselves, avoid judgment, recognize the role of social conditioning in producing these responses in us, and patiently andhumbly experiment with new ways of being.
The compulsive worker, over-worker, or control freak
might come to understand their needs in the following ways:• I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what isgoing on, who I can ask for honest feedback about mybehavior, and who can help support me and soothe
me when I feel afraid of doing something in a newway. For example, these people might remind me thateven though someone else in the project will do thistask differently, it is better to let them do it so they
can build their own skills and I can use the time forsomething healing that has been missing from my life.
These people might help remind me that it will be okay
if I say no to a task or project. These friends can help
me give love to the wounds underneath my compulsive,
competitive, or controlling behavior, reminding me that
I am worthwhile and my value does not hang on what
the group does, how much work I do, or what otherpeople think of me.
• I need supportive people who can also point out compulsive, competitive, or controlling behavior or ideas when
they hear them from me or see me engaging in them. It
can be difficult to receive such feedback, but it is truly agift.

and inactions stimulate feelings in us, but what feelings get
stimulated, and how strong they are, has a lot to do with ourselves and our histories. Often, when something really riles us
up, it is because it is touching an old wound or raw spot.
Three. Get curious about our raw spots.
We all have raw spots—things that bother us because of theinsecurities we carry or the way we were treated as kids at
school or by our families at home. Other people do not know
our raw spots—we sometimes do not know them ourselves—
so people are often surprised at the impact of their actions on
our feelings. We can become curious about our own raw spots,
finding origins in childhood experiences, the cumulative impact of microaggressions and systemic harm, or other sources.
When someone brushes a raw spot, we can have a big reaction—
sometimes acting outward toward them, sometimes harming
ourselves. The trick is to realize that our raw spots belong tous, rather than us being hostage to them, and that we can experience the feelings, notice them, and decide how to move
forward, rather than having the feelings drive our behavior.
For example, imagine my feelings got hurt by a person in
my mutual aid group who did not follow through on something.
If I then launched an informal campaign to get other people in
the group to perceive my flaky collaborator as a person lacking integrity, and to get them pushed out of the group, or if I
refused to work with them anymore, we could lose a lot. If I
know their actions hit my raw spot, I can observe my feelings
coming up, being aware that they may not be proportional towhat happened, and that my feelings are not my flaky collaborator’s fault. I can hold off on campaigning against them andfind right-sized action to address my concerns for the good ofall.

• When I get feedback from friends or collaborators about
concerns they have, I need to resist the impulse to defend
myself or critique the way they delivered their message.
This feedback, including any anger they express while
94

99

our values or identities, can bring up our conditioned
thinking and feeling. We might feel like we don’t deserve it or like we are fraudulent. We might even unconsciously make up stories about what other people arethinking about us.
• Mutual aid work, by definition, responds to intense
unmet needs and brings stress and pressures that canheighten feelings and provoke reactive behavior.
Given that conflict and strong feelings are inevitable if
we are working on something we love with people we careabout, what can we do to cause less harm to each other andour groups? How do we hold the strong feelings that come up,
and how do we survive the conflict without being our worst
selves to one another?
Here are three ways to check in with ourselves, get perspective, and act based on our principles when conflict is comingup:One. Get away for a quiet moment to feel what is going on inside. This inquiry could also include talking to a friend or writing
things down.
A lot of times when we perceive some kind of threat, we goon autopilot. That autopilot could take the form of a obsessive
critical thinking about another person, self-hating thoughts,
disappearing, picking a fight, getting lost in work, getting
wasted, or obsessing all night and not sleeping. Whatever it
is, it can help to ask ourselves about what kinds of feelings
are coming up. Paying careful attention to ourselves can stop
us from going with the autopilot reaction that might not bealigned with our intentions, purpose, or values and might
damage our relationships.
Two. Remember, no one made us feel this way, but we arehaving strong feelings and they deserve our caring attention.
It can be easy when we are hurt or disappointed to decidethat another person caused our pain. Certainly, others’ actions
98

sharing it, is likely a sign that others think I am a leader
and that what I do matters. They are doing the hard anduncomfortable task of raising a concern because they seeme as a person with influence. I can remember that, nomatter how it is delivered, this feedback is an investment
in me and in our work, and an act of love. I can seek out
a friend separately to process the difficult feelings thatreceiving this feedback brings up. The need to avoid acting out my defensiveness, or taking on a victim narrative,
is especially important when I am in a position of privilege of any kind and/or have more developed leadershipin the group or project.
• If I hate everyone I’m working with or feel like I am
going to die or like I have to stay up all night working, this is probably about something older or deeper
in my life, not about the current work/workplace/group/
coworker. If my heart is racing, if I feel threatened, if I
feel like I can’t get out of bed, if I feel like I can’t speak to
my coworker or I’ll explode, I am probably experiencing
pain deeply rooted in my life history. To get out of thisreactive space, I need to devote resources to uncovering
the roots of my painful reactions and building ways of being in those feelings that don’t involve acting out harm
to myself or others (including the harm of overworking).
The first step is recognizing that my strongest reactions
may not be entirely or primarily about the work-related
situation directly in front of me, and being willing toslow down to explore what is underneath.
• I need a healing path for myself if I want to be part ofhealing the world. What that looks like is different foreveryone, and could include individual or group therapy,
12-step programs (including Workaholics Anonymous),
exercise, bodywork, spiritual exploration, art practice,95

gardening, and building meaningful relationships withfamily or friends. Whatever it is, I have to engage ina gentle way and be careful that it does not become
another thing to perfect or to try to be the leader of.
Pursuing a healing path can be a way to practice doing
things because they feel good rather than because they
accomplish something.
• I need to stick around. It may be tempting to disappear
altogether from a group if relationships have gotten difficult and I am experiencing negative feelings about myself and others. If I want move toward a more balancedrole in the group, or even transition out altogether, I needto do so gradually and intentionally. I need to transfer
relationships and knowledge and skills that I hold andmake sure that my transition is done in a way that ensures support for the people continuing the work.

Conflict
Working and living inside hierarchies does not teach us
how to deal with conflict. Most of us avoid conflict either bysubmitting to others’ wills and trying to numb out the impact
on us, or by trying to dominate others to get our way and being numb to the impact on others. Our culture teaches us thatgiving direct feedback is risky and that we should either suppress our concerns or find ways to manipulate situations andget what we want. We are trained to seek external validation,
especially from people in authority, and often have few skills
for hearing critical feedback, considering it, and acting on what
is useful. To survive our various social positions, we internalize
specific instructions about when and how to numb our feelingsand perceptions, avoid giving feedback, disappear, act defensively or offensively, demand appeasement, or offer appeasement. As a result, we are mostly unprepared to engage with96

conflict in generative ways and instead tend to avoid it until it
explodes or relationships disappear.
Conflict is a normal part of all groups and relationships. But
many of us still seem to think that if conflict happens, it means
there is something wrong—and then we seek out someone toblame. If we do work we care deeply about with other people,
we will experience conflict because the stakes of the work feelvery high to us, and that conflict is likely to bring up wounds
and reactions from earlier in our lives. This may mean we revert to oppressive scripts and power dynamics from the dominant culture.
The emergence of conflict does not have to mean that someone is bad or to blame, and the more we can normalize conflict,the more likely we can address it and come through it stronger,rather than burning out and leaving the group or the movement, and/or causing damage to others. Some of the reasonsthat conflict can be so pitched in social movement groups include:• We have the strongest feelings about people who areclosest to us. We are more likely to be up at night stressing about a conflict with a friend or collaborator than
thinking about the mayor or some other person whom
we have a more distant relationship with.
• When we come into movement spaces with high expectations and desires for belonging and connection, disappointment is likely.
• Sometimes we are so used to feeling excluded that wetune into that familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously looking for evidence that we are different or are
being slighted or left out.
• Even good experiences, like finding a space that breaks
our isolation by joining a group with others who share97