like everyone may be ready to agree. Someone then calls for consensus and checks to see if there are any “stand asides”—those whowant to signify disagreement but don’t want to block the proposal
from moving forward—or “blocks”—those with disagreements significant enough that they 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,
and the group can either work further on modifying the proposal
then and there, or have some people work on it and come up witha way forward before the next meeting. If no one blocks, but many
people stand aside, the group may decide to discuss the reasonsfor 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 rightgroup—do they believe in the shared purpose?—or whether they
are withholding their views earlier in the process, or feeling notlistened 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 a groupof people agreeing to come to the next meeting with a developed
proposal to be discussed.
Consensus decision-making does not mean that every decision
is made by the whole group. Decisions can still be delegated toteams working on implementing part of the group’s larger plan.
For example, if the group does grocery deliveries, a specific teamcan work on filling out the delivery schedule and assignments. 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
For consensus to work well, people need a common purpose;some degree of trust in each other; an understanding of the consensus process; a willingness to put the best interests of the group at
the center (which does not mean people let themselves be harmed
64

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

Dean Spade2020

cause 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,” thegoal is to get as many people as possible to prefer your approach toanother, 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 eachother’s concerns are and try to create a path forward that addresses
all the concerns as well as possible. It is based on the belief that people can cooperate and care 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 andwellness, rather than cultivating a desire to have things exactly “myway.” In consensus, any participant can block a decision, so we taketime to actually talk through each member’s concerns because wecannot move forward without each other. Because we are trying tobuild agreement by modifying the proposal until it comes as close
as possible to meeting the full range of needs and concerns, we
also build the skill of making decisions with group members andcommunity members in mind, not just ourselves or our cliques, andbeing okay with something that is not our most preferred version
going forward. That is, we learn to imagine how decisions affectall of us differently, and how to productively move forward taking
other people’s needs and desires into account. People can “standaside” in consensus processes, letting others know that while they
are not totally behind this proposal, they agree it is best for thegroup to go forward with the decision, given all the views thathave been expressed and the efforts made to address concerns.
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
63trate 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,” yet there is rarely anyone to vote for who is not
owned by—or part of— the 1 percent, and the decisions those leaders make do not benefit the majority of people.
The opposite of this approach to decision-making is to make decisions together, caring about every person’s consent. This practiceis called consensus decision-making. Unlike representative government, consensus decision-making lets us have a say in things thatmatter 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 andcoercion.
It’s important to remember that no decision-making structure
can prevent all conflict or power dynamics, or guarantee that wewill never be frustrated or bored or decide to part ways. 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 decisionmaking gives us the best chance to hear from everyone concerned,
address power dynamics, and make decisions that represent thebest wisdom of the group and 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 are 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 we will not follow someone just be62

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.
39
Deserving hierarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Saviorism and Paternalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Co-optation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Characteristics of Mutual Aid vs Charity . . . . . . . . . 49
5. No masters, no flakes
53
Group culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Making Decisions Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
What Is Consensus Decision-Making? . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Advantages of Consensus Decision-Making . . . . . . . . 66
Making Consensus Decision-Making Efficient and Effective 69
Ways to use this chart: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
A Cautionary Note on Fame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3

Handling money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Burnout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Signs of Overwork and Burnout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
How Mutual Aid Groups Can Prevent and Address Overwork and Burnout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
What Individuals Experiencing Overwork and Burnout
Need . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
What Else Is True? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Use Direct Communication before Using Gossip and Social
Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Working with Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Perfectionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Reflection Questions: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Mad Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Signs of Difficulty under Pressure . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Guidelines for Greater Wellness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Bonus Activities That Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Unhelpful/Untrue Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Conclusion: Everything is at Stake and We’re Fighting
to Win116

Resource List

121

4intentionally, 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 canacknowledge differences in our capacities, talents, desires, and difficulties and still aim to create a culture where we support eachother in the work, learn new skills, and are connected and kind toeach other. The goal is not that everyone be similar, but that we allcomplement each other and build some shared practices based inshared values.
MADR’s slogan is “No Masters, No Flakes,” and it’s a great summary of key principles for collective mutual aid work. This dual
focus on rejecting hierarchies inside the organization and committing 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.

Making Decisions Together
Perhaps the most central group activity that makes everythingelse possible is making decisions. When we do it well, we makegood decisions on the basis of the best information available, wefeel 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 or disconnected from thegroup, and there is less motivation to proceed 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 work or go toschool and follow rules and laws that you had no say in 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 makedecisions that impoverish most people, pollute our planet, concen61

Helpful Qualities

Potentially Harmful Qualities
Reliable, responsible, punc- Flaky, late, no follow-throughtual, follows throughWelcoming to new people
Unwelcoming
Flexible, experimental
Rigid, bureaucratic, formulaic
Collaborative
Isolationist, competitive
Realistic workload, sustain- Overworking, perfectionist,able work flow, real culture of martyrdom
wellness and care
Direct feedback and growth
Silence and/or gossip and shit
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, appreciative Serious, resentful, stressfulof 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 priori- Rushed paceties and realistic expectations
Transparency
Secrecy
Generous
Having a scarcity mind-set,
penny-pinching60

Introduction: Crisis Conditions
Require Bold Tactics
The contemporary political moment is defined by emergency.
Acute crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change–
induced fires, floods, and storms, as well as the ongoing crises ofracist criminalization, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic
gender violence, and severe wealth inequality, threaten the survival of people around the globe. Government policies actively produce and exacerbate the harm, inadequately respond to crises, andensure that certain populations bear the brunt of pollution, poverty,
disease, and violence. 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 withsocial movements demanding transformative change, is called mutual aid.
Mutual aid has been a part of all large, powerful social movements, and it has a particularly important role to play right now,
as we face unprecedented dangers and opportunities for mobilization. Mutual aid gives people a way to plug into movements basedon 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 ofcare and generosity that address harm and foster well-being.
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 theoryof mutual aid as well as concrete tools for addressing some of the5most difficult questions facing mutual aid groups, such as how towork in groups and make decisions together, how to prevent andaddress conflict, and how to deal with burnout so that we can build
a lasting mobilization that can win.
Left social movements have two big jobs right now. First, weneed to organize to help people survive the devastating conditions
unfolding every day. Second, we need to mobilize hundreds ofmillions of people for resistance so we can tackle the underlying
causes of these crises. In this pivotal moment, movements canstrengthen, mobilizing new people to fight back against cops, immigration enforcement, welfare authorities, landlords, budget cuts,
polluters, the defense industry, prison profiteers, and right-winggroups. The way to tackle these two big tasks—meeting people’s
needs and mobilizing them for resistance—is to create mutual
aid projects and get lots of people to participate in them. Social
movements that have built power and won major change have all
included mutual aid, yet it is often a part of movement work thatis less visible and less valued. In this moment, our ability to build
mutual aid will determine whether we win the world we long foror dive further into crisis.
We can imagine what is possible when we come together inthis 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 sophisticatedmass mobilizations, including the use of bold tactics like fighting
police with poles, projectiles, laser pointers, and petrol bombs. Lam
was remarkably non-responsive to the pandemic, despite the vulnerable position of 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 criti6

ing the work they came together to do, to be well, and to build
generative relationships. In some groups that means people will
form sexual and romantic connections with people they meet in
the group. In others, that would be inappropriate or harmful, andthe group will create a culture that discourages it. In some groups,
people will love to sing and dance together, and in some groups
people will want to engage in spiritual rituals together. In somegroups, the nature of the work makes it essential to maintain certain forms of secrecy and security, to protect members who aretaking bold actions. In others, cultivating openness to new members will be 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 those about tostart one. For those already in a project, the chart can be used toassess 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 that conversation may be likely tobring to the group’s emerging culture will already be noticeable.
This chart can be used to talk about strengths and weaknesses
participants have experienced before in other groups, including
families, jobs, schools, and congregations, and what they want toemulate or avoid reproducing in this current group.
Chart 4. Qualities of Group cultures.
Real contradictions exist in the above chart. We want to be flexible, and we also want to have a culture of responsiveness, reliability, and punctuality. How do we work to cultivate both? Most ofus, having received our concept of responsibility from dominantculture, associate it with being forced, lured, or shamed into being “good,” ignoring our needs, and fearing punishment if we dowrong. How do we hold our values of flexibility, compassion, andjustice while building a culture where 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 of falling into automatic behaviors,
driving out new people, and falling apart. Creating a group culture59

HarmfulTendencies

What
leadership
looks
like
Secrecy,
Decisions
Hierarmadechy, Lack by
one
of Clarity person
or smallgroup;
Not cleartonewcomers
how decisions are
made; No
clear procedures
about
decisions
OverOneorPromising moreandpeopleUndermaking
Delivering, promises
Nonabout
responsiveness,
what theElitism
group
will
do
without
consulting
everyone;Group notrespon58
sive
tothe community
it serves,

Whatparticipation
looks
like
Be
or
follow thecharismatic
leader; If
the leader
disappears or
sells out,
the group
does; Confusion
about
roles anddecisions

Dangers

What
we want
instead

New people neverable
toplug in;
Theft ofresources;
Conflictabout
decisions;
Cliques

Transparency;
Sharedparticipatory
decisionmaking;
Leaderless andleaderfulwith everyone coleading

Participants Burnout;
don’t get Conflict;a say in Lossofwhetheralignment
the group with
takes
group
on more principles;work;
CooptaBeingtion
byoverelites
workedand overextended;
Conflictoverworkloads andunmet
needs;

Clear
planning
processes
andshareddecisionsaboutworkload;Accountability tocommunity being
served,especially its
most vulnerable
members

cized Lam for her delay in closing the city’s borders and her orderbarring 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 waveof 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 thattracked 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 the World Health Organization discouraging their use. They set up brigades that made anddistributed masks, specially making sure they reached poor people and old people. They created a system of volunteers to set up
hand sanitizer stations throughout crowded tenement housing andmaintain the supply of sanitizer at the stations. They also createddigital maps to identify the station sites.
This essential mutual aid work was complemented by bolder
strategies. When the government refused to close the border with
China, seven thousand medical workers, as part of labor unions
that had been formed during the protest movement, went on strikedemanding PPE and that the border be closed. Members of theprotest movement threatened the government with stronger action if steps were not taken to address the epidemic, and explosives were found at the border with China, possibly for this purpose. The Hong Kong government then created quarantine centersin dense neighborhoods, but never consulted the people in thoseneighborhoods, and the protest movement responded by throwing
explosives into the quarantine centers before they were used, causing the government 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 COVID-19.
7

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 the challenges ofgroup decision-making, conflict, and burnout. It includes chartsand lists that can be brought to group meetings to stimulate conversation and build shared analysis and group practices. Ultimately,
helps imagine how we can coordinate to collectively take care ofourselves—even in the face of disaster—and mobilize hundreds ofmillions of people to make deep and lasting change.

something done. This can lead 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 cultivate transparency, integrity, and generosity in our work and build ourcapacities to avoid the pitfalls discussed in chapter 4. We will lookat what decision-making and leadership look like when thesetendencies prevail, what alternatives to these ways of working
look like, and what personal qualities and behaviors we need tocultivate to address these tendencies.

Group cultureGroups have cultures. Group culture is built from the signals
we give people when they join or attend an event, norms the group
follows, how we celebrate together, how we engage 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 of the founders. If the founder isvague and loose with money, or often late to meetings, the groupmay be that way; or if the founder loves to sing at the end of meetings, the group may keep that practice going for a long time. Butgroup culture also changes as new people come in and as conditions change. We can make intentional decisions to change group
culture by having conversations about a group’s tendencies andmethods, 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 them are different and we all bring different qualities, skills, and viewpoints.
Ideally, we want a group culture that supports participants in do-

857This chapter will explore three organizational tendencies that
often emerge in mutual aid groups that can cause problems, andprovide ideas for how to avoid them:One. Secrecy, hierarchy, and lack of clarity. Many groups that failto 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 decision-making concentrate in one person or clique, and risk the group being torn apartby 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 likethey 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 ismoney at stake in falsely claiming to be able to accomplish morethan 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 a possibility. This tendency can include being nonresponsive, especially to community members in need, and sometimes being over-responsive to elites. Many groups, especially when moneyor ego is involved, answer calls from media or elected officials, but
not from the community members they are supposed to serve.
Three. Scarcity, urgency, competition. Some groups also develop
a culture of scarcity (of money, time, attention, and labor), whichmakes sense given the real scarcity that exists in many of our lives
under capitalism. However, when we do our work from a feelingthat there is not enough money, time, or attention to go around,
we sometimes get competitive with other groups or with other people within our group, or we feel so much urgency about particulartasks that we don’t take the necessary steps to do our task well,and we forget about being kind to each other in our rush to get

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 have in place are
not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse. We see examples ofmutual aid in every single social movement, whether it’s peopleraising money for workers on strike, setting up a ride-sharing system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, putting drinking waterin the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each otherin 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 theconditions in which we are made to live are unjust.
There is nothing new about mutual aid—people have worked together to survive for all of human history. But capitalism and colonialism created structures that have disrupted how people havehistorically connected with each other and shared everything theyneeded to survive. As people were forced into systems of wage labor and private property, and wealth became increasingly concentrated, our ways of caring for each other have become more andmore tenuous.
Today, many of us live in the most atomized societies in human history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines ourability to organize together to change unjust conditions on a large
scale. We are put in competition with each other for survival, andwe are forced to rely on hostile systems—like health care systems
designed around profit, not keeping people healthy, or food andtransportation systems that pollute the earth and poison people—
for the things we need. More and more people report that they haveno one they can confide in when they are in trouble. This means
many of us do not get help with mental health, drug use, family
violence, or abuse until the police or courts are involved, whichtends to escalate rather than resolve harm.
10

Default Practices
Hierarchy

Dangers of Default Approach
Abuse of power;
Burnout of a few
people and no way
for others to plugin; Unprincipledbehavior by people
at the top; People
at the top canbe bought off byattention, career
opportunities, or
money

Vague
decision- Individuals makemaking processdecisions without
consulting others;
Somedecisions
don’t get made intime; Conflict overdecisions
Leadership
held New people driftby people who away because they
have seniority or do not feel real coself-selectstewardship of thegroup; White people, men, and others with social privilege dominate

Alternatives
Horizontal
decision-making
structure
based
on consensus thatprevents decisionmaking from being
concentratedin
one person or asmall group, andthat can help tasks
and roles get distributed to many
peopleClear
decisionmaking processes
that everyone istrained in andthat includes all
members
Training
newpeople in how toparticipate
fully
in decisions andin new skills androles;
Cultivating a culture ofgroup
participation,
feminism,anti-racism

55

ings 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 we want
this work to be effective at saving lives and mobilizing people. Thisis essential to any effort to address injustice. Building efficient, participatory, transparent decision-making structures and cultures ofcare 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 from each 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 decision-making and feelco-ownership of the project stick around and do the work. People
who feel unclear about whether their opinion matters or how to bepart of making decisions tend to drift away. Strong structures also
help us plug in new people, orient them to the work, train them inskills they need to build, and give 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 that mutual aid
groups can fall into, so we know what’s at stake. In groups thataren’t clear about decision-making, it is much easier for a leader toget seduced by money or prestige and sell out 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 by conflict or by a failure to delegate decisions and tasks. A clear structure can help prevent conflictor provide ways to move through it, and can help make sure thatpeople are sharing responsibility.

54

In this context of social isolation and forced dependency on hostile systems, mutual aid—where we choose to help each other out,share things, and put time and resources into caring for the mostvulnerable—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 nothave what they need.
Mutual aid projects expose the reality that people do not havewhat they need and propose that we can address this injustice together. The most famous example in the United States 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, a service offering rides to elderly people
doing errands, and a school 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 the conditions 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 thePanthers’ free breakfast program got food and a chance to build
shared analysis about Black poverty. It broke stigma and isolation,
met material needs, and got people fired up to work together forchange.
Recognizing the program’s success, FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover famously wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all field officesthat “the BCP [Breakfast for Children Program] represents thebest and most influential activity going for the BPP [Black Panther12

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 fail to 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 never been in groups that had fair, participatory, transparent structures. We’ve been working at jobs where
bosses tell us what to do, 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: thebig protest march, the finalized legislation, the release of someone
from prison, the media coverage. We have not been taught to noticeor care about how things went along the way to a victory, whether
people’s capacity for confronting the next challenge was improved,or whether it was destroyed through burnout or damaging groupdynamics. Capitalism makes us think about short-term gains, notbuilding the long-term capacity for all of our well-being. This canmake it easy to go for the quick fix and ignore the damage we might
be doing to each other along the way. Many of us think “process
is boring.” Everyone wants a selfie with Angela Davis at the big
event, but many people are less interested in the months of meet53

Mutual Aid
De-professionalized survival
work done by volunteers
Beg, borrow, and steal supplies
Survival work rooted in principles of anti-capitalism, antiimperialism, racial justice, gender justice, disability justiceOpen meetings, with as many
people making decisions anddoing the work as possible

Support people facing themost dire conditions

Give things away without expectations

People participate voluntarily
because of their passion about
injustice and care for theircommunity
52Efforts to flatten hierarchies—
e.g., flat wage scales if anyone
is paid, training so that new
people can do work they
weren’t professionally trained

Charity
Service work staffed by professionals
Grant money for supplies/philanthropic control of program
Siloed single-issue work, serving a particular population or
working on one area of policy reform, disconnected fromother issues
Closed board meetings, governance by professionals or people associated with big institutions or donors, program operated by staff, volunteers limited to stuffing envelopes orother menial tasks, volunteers
not part of high-level decisionmaking
Impose eligibility criteria forservices that divide people
into “deserving” and “undeserving” recipientsSet conditions for getting
help—recipients have to fillout onerous paperwork, besober, have a certain family
status, have a certain immigration status, not haveoutstanding warrants, certain
convictions, etc.
People come looking for a job,wanting to climb a hierarchy,build a career, or become “important”
Maintaining hierarchies ofpay, status, decision making
power, influence that are
typical of the mainstream
culture (e.g., lawyers are more

Party] and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts
by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it standsfor.” 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: in the early 1970s the US Departmentof Agriculture expanded its federal free breakfast program—built
on a charity, not a liberation, model—that still feeds millions ofchildren today. The Black Panthers provided a striking vision ofliberation, asserting that Black people had to defend themselves
against a violent and racist government, and that they couldorganize to give 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 lack of garbage pickups in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, hijacked a city mobile x-ray
truck to bring greater tuberculosis testing to Puerto Rican communities, took over part of a hospital to provide health care, andprovided food and youth programs for Puerto Rican communities.
Their vision—for decolonizing Puerto Rico and liberating Puerto Ricans in the United States from racism, poverty, and police terror—
was put into practice through 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, andcommunity food projects. Although this moment is an importantreference point for the contemporary left, mutual aid didn’t startin the ’60s, but is an ongoing feature of movements seeking transformative change. Klee Benally, project coordinator at IndigenousMedia Action, argues that mutual aid is an unbroken tradition13

among Indigenous people across many cycles of colonialism,
maintained through traditional teachings that contemporary
Indigenous mutual aid projects are working to restore and amplify.
Settlers have long worked to undermine Indigenous people’s
self-sustaining practices by first destroying food systems and thenforcing dependency on rations given at forts and missions and,now, by settler nonprofits. Indigenous mutual aid efforts are botha matter 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 infrastructuresby creating Black alternatives. Long traditions of mutual aid
are also visible in working-class communities that have longsupported workers on strike so that they could pay rent andbuy food while confronting their bosses. Perhaps most of all, thepervasive presence of mutual aid during sudden disasters of all
kinds—storms, floods, fires, and earthquakes—demonstrates how
people come together to care for each other and share resources
when, inevitably, the government is not there to help, offers relief
that does not reach the most vulnerable people, and deploys law
enforcement against displaced disaster survivors. Mutual aid is a
powerful force.

for a mutual aid group to clarify shared values or find areas ofagreement and disagreement, or desire for further 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 they need something:eviction defense, childcare, social connection, health care, or help
in a fight with the government about something like welfare bene1451

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 a few people lead.
Despite these important goals, avoiding the pitfalls of cooptation, deservingness hierarchies, saviorism, and disconnect
from root-causes work requires constant vigilance. The last halfcentury of social movement history is full of examples of mutual
aid groups that, under pressure from law enforcement, funders,and culture, transformed into charity or social services groups andlost much of their transformative capacity. Here are some guiding
questions for mutual aid groups trying to avoid these dangers andpitfalls:• 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 ourwork cut out stigmatized and vulnerable people?
• What is our relationship to law enforcement?
• How do we introduce new people in our group to our approach to law enforcement?
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
50

fits, disability services, immigration status, or custody of their children. Being able to get help in a crisis is often a condition for being
politically active, because it’s very difficult to organize when you
are also struggling to survive. Getting support through a mutual
aid project that has a political analysis of the conditions that produced your crisis 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 a place that sees
the systems, not the people suffering in them, as the problem canhelp 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 this at the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), a law collective that provides
free legal help to trans and gender-nonconforming people who are
low income and/or people of color. I worked with the group from2002 to 2019. Again and again I saw people come to SRLP for help
because something bad happened to them in a shelter, in prison, orin interactions with cops, immigration authorities, the foster caresystem, or public schools. People seeking legal services for these
problems would be invited to participate in organizing and become
part of 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 trans orgender-nonconforming, for example—but also differed from 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 shared political education
programs, members could learn about experiences different fromtheirs and build solidarity across those differences. This changed—

15and continues to change—not only the individuals in the group, but
the kind of politics the group 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 fightonly for “the innocent” or “the nonviolent,” for example, and to dotheir work 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 nothave the means to prove their innocence, those who do not match
cultural tropes of innocence and deservingness. This narrow focus
actually strengthens the system’s legitimacy by advocating that thetargeting of those more 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 across issues andpopulations is what makes movements big and powerful. Without that connection, we end up with disconnected groups, working in their issue silos, undermining each other, competing for attention and funding, not backing each other up and not building
power. Mutual aid projects, by creating spaces where people cometogether 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 inreal people’s lives tend to develop a multi-issue and solidaritybased approach because their members’ lives are cross-cut bymany different experiences of vulnerability. Sometimes evengroups that start out with a narrow goal adopt a wider horizon ofsolidarity and a wider vision of political possibility if they use themutual aid model. An initial goal of serving people impacted byhomelessness quickly reveals that racism, colonialism, immigra16

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 theneighborhood.
Some transformative justice work is focused on prevention, andsome 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 that are supposed
to guarantee safety—the cops, prosecutors, and courts—fail to do so
and actually make things worse. These mutual aid projects work tobuild a new world, where people create safety through community
building and support each other to stop harmful behavior throughconnection rather than through caging.
These feminist activists and groups with an antipolice, antiviolence politics also developed much of the analysis that informs
this book. They identified how the system of nonprofitization andpressure from funders were pushing anti-violence work towardcriminalization, how mutual aid approaches were underminedwhen domestic violence shelters and hotlines became more likesocial services, and how the co-optation of anti-violence work
undermined solidarity, further endangering communities most targeted by police. Their wisdom can guide us in building successful
groups and movements and in resisting co-optation.

Characteristics of Mutual Aid vs Charity
Mutual aid projects depart from the charity model in crucial
ways. Most mutual aid projects are volunteer-based and avoid thecareerism, business approach, and charity model of nonprofits. 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
49This work is often called “community accountability” or“transformative justice.” It includes many innovative strategies
developed in mutual aid groups. Drawing on lessons from yearsof experience, Creative Interventions authored a six-hundredpage 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 theroot 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 for supporting survivors of violence and confronting
harm-doers, working with them to figure out what they needto never inflict the harm again. These processes sometimes last
several years, with community members providing harmdoers
with support for their sobriety, mental health, and housing needs,
deepening understanding of their behaviors and their beliefs about
gender and sexuality, and doing whatever else they need to stop
the behavior.
The goal of this kind of work is to do the things that the criminal 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 to decrease the likelihood of harm in general, such as by providing healthy relationship skills training, addressing a culture of substance misuse, andchanging community ideas about sexuality and gender. The Safe
OUTside the System Collective, a part of the Audre Lorde Project in
New York City, has engaged a variety of tactics to address violenceagainst queer and trans people of color, including police violence.
One strategy it developed was building relationships with people
working in businesses 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 call48

tion enforcement, ableism, police violence, the foster care system,
the health care system, transphobia, and more are all causesof homelessness or causes of further harm to homeless people.
Solidarity and an ever-expanding commitment to justice emerge
from contact with the complex realities of injustice. This is exactly
how movements are built, as people become connected to eachother and as one urgent issue unspools into a broader vision ofsocial 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 andhow 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 kind of work, and that many
people—including themselves!—have something to offer. This departs from expertise-based social services that tell us we need tohave 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 to 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 workor go to school inside hierarchies where disobedience leads to punishment or exclusion. We bring our learned practices of hierarchy
with us even when no paycheck or punishment enforces our participation, so even in volunteer groups we often find ourselves in17

conflicts stemming from learned dominance behaviors. But collective spaces, like mutual aid organizing, can give us opportunities
to unlearn conditioning and build new skills and capacities. By participating in 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 participated in politicalresistance before, introducing them to practices like consensus
decision-making, occupying public space, distributing free food,and engaging in free political education workshops. Many whojoined Occupy did not yet have a developed critique of policing.
Participants committed to police abolition 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 tookwith 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 a shared purpose can be a reparative experience when we have been trained tofollow rules. Organizers from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR)
share the following story in their 2018 workshop facilitation guideto illustrate their argument that “audacity is our capacity”:
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 and said,“We are here for the 8am pickup.” When guards replied that theirnames were not on the list, they just insisted again, “We are here
for the 8am pickup.” They were eventually allowed in, told to18

programs and campaigns to portray the police as the protectorsof women and children. Toward this end, law enforcement sought
out alliances with the emerging anti–domestic violence movement,
supporting new laws that increased punishment for gender-based
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 for increased
criminalization, meanwhile taking on charity-model approaches
that treated people seeking help in punitive and paternalizing
ways. This shift increased the criminalization of communities ofcolor, made the services less accessible to the most vulnerable
survivors of violence, and provided good public relations forpolice, prosecutors, and courts.
Notably, these co-optive approaches also failed to reduce gender-based violence. Research has shown that procriminalization policy reforms that became popular in this period,
like mandatory arrest laws requiring police to make arrests during
domestic violence calls, resulted in the arrests 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 ourefforts to meet survival needs and cause us to contribute tolegitimizing or expanding the very 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 aid
work that resists co-optation. Women of color, working-class andimmigrant feminists, and feminists with disabilities have powerfully resisted this shift toward criminalization in the movement
against gender violence. They have created mutual aid projects toaddress harm and violence that refuse to collaborate with police.

47

in the case 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 anti-prison
movement groups who observed that when people call 911
for emergency medical help, the police also come, hurting andsometimes killing those who called for help. In response, the OPP
works to train people in communities impacted by police 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 immediate needs and mobilize people to build analternative infrastructure for crisis response guided by a sharedcommitment 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 sameat all: instead of profiting and only serving those who can pay, the
OPP’s programs build new ways of responding that allow thoseon the bottom to work together to meet survival needs while
dismantling racist infrastructure.
Many powerful lessons about co-optation come out of the feminist movement against domestic violence. That movement started
with mutual aid projects, such as volunteer-run shelters for violence survivors and defense campaigns for women criminalized forkilling their abuser or attacker. Unfortunately, the anti– domestic
violence movement emerged at the same time that criminalization
was about to balloon in the United States. The mass uprisings ofthe 1960s and ’70s brought a huge crisis of 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 cops of color, creating new police roles inschools through initiatives like the D.A.R.E. program, and creating46

take whatever they needed. After being let in once, aid workers
were able to return repeatedly. They made more badges for localorganizers, 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 dominantways of living have been suspended, people discover that they canbreak 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 disastermay require taking bold action without waiting for permission
from authorities. Disaster survivors themselves are the mostimportant 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 existence of foodjustice efforts that made it possible for many people to eat when
the corporate food system, which brings 90 percent of the island’s
food from off-island sources, was halted by the storm. 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 canlearn what we want to build to prepare for the next storm or
fire. In The Battle for Paradise, Naomi Klein argues that locallycontrolled microgrids are more desirable for delivering sustainableenergy, given the failures of the energy monopolies that currently
dominate energy delivery. In the wake of the devastating 2018
California fires, the public learned that the fires were caused by
Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s mismanagement, and thenwatched as California’s government immediately offered the19company a bailout, meanwhile failing to support people displacedby the disaster. Klein describes how large energy companies work
to prevent local and sustainable energy efforts, and argues that inenergy, as in other areas of survival, we should be working toward
locally controlled, participatory, transparent structures to replace
our crumbling and harmful 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 andbuild a transition from “dig, burn, dump” economies to sustainable,
regenerative ways of living, mutual aid offers a way forward.

20

the ideas of the youth jail opponents, passing legislation statingthat the city and county are committed to “zero youth detention.”
Meanwhile, the County built a youth jail for hundreds of millionsof dollars. This story of a local government co-opting the messageof the radical opposition, and showcasing grassroots, communityinitiated programs to legitimize expansion of the racist infrastructure of 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 privatizationand volunteerism in that participants critique certain social service
models and believe that voluntary participation in care and crisis
work is necessary. But the critiques of public safety nets made bymutual aid project participants are not the same 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 redistribute care and well-being, as part of larger movements that work to dismantle the systems that concentrate wealthin the hands of the 1 percent.
The difference between neoliberal projects and mutual aid approaches is well illustrated when we compare the privatization offire 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, theprivate firefighting business is growing, with wealthy homeowners paying for private fire services to come seal their homes, sprayfire retardants on the premises, and put owners in five-star hotels
while less affluent people watch their homes burn, struggle in shelters, and fight FEMA for basic benefits. Fire profiteers aim to create
a context in which only those who can pay get help or protection45

no connection to work that aims to get to the root causes of the
problem. In fact, it is being developed by the same tech industry
that has gentrified cities and increased housing insecurity.
In this atmosphere, mutual aid projects have to work hard toremain oppositional to the status quo and cultivate resistance,
rather than becoming complementary to privatization. In thewake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, corporate media news stories of boat owners volunteering to make rescues followed thisscript, neither criticizing government failures to rescue people
nor interrogating the cause of worsening hurricanes and whomthey most endangered. That is, the media stories of individual
heroes hid the social and political conditions producing the crisis.
Politicians and CEOs, who fantasize about a world where nothingis guaranteed and most people are desperate and easily exploited,
love the idea of volunteerism replacing a social safety net. If we
don’t design mutual aid projects with care, we can fit right into
this conservative dream, becoming the people who can barely
hold the 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 work of mutual aid projects that support people who have been criminalized.
Programs that divert some arrestees from the criminal system to social services or drug treatment, or that provide mediation between
people who have done harm and those they have harmed as an alternative to the criminal legal process, can keep people out of jailor prison. However, they can also become non-disruptive adjuncts
to carceral control, as they professionalize and become funded andshaped by police and 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
primarily by people of color—which receive minimal amounts ofpublic funding—as cover to argue that King County has alreadyaddressed concerns about youth incarceration through progressive
work with community partners. They have gone so far as to co-opt
44

2. Solidarity Not Charity!
Mainstream understanding of how to support people in crisis
relies on the frameworks of charity and social services. We shouldbe very clear: mutual aid is not charity. Charity, aid, relief, andsocial services are terms that usually refer to rich people or thegovernment making decisions about the provision of some kindof support to poor people—that is, rich people or the government
deciding who gets the help, what the limits are to that help, andwhat strings are attached. You can be sure that help like that is notdesigned to get to the root causes of poverty and violence. It is designed to help improve the image of the elites who are funding it
and put a tiny, inadequate Band-Aid on the massive social woundthat 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 ofwealth—the idea that rich people are inherently better and more
moral than poor people, which is why they deserve to be on top.
Not surprisingly, the charity model promotes the idea that mostpoverty is a result of laziness or immorality and that only the poor
people who can prove their moral worth deserve help.
Contemporary charity comes with eligibility requirements suchas sobriety, piety, curfews, participation in job training or 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, andgovernment workers determine which poor people deserve help.
Their methods of deciding who is deserving, and even the rules
21they enforce, usually promote racist and sexist tropes, such as theidea that poor women of color and immigrant women have too
many children, or that Black families are dysfunctional, or that Indigenous children are better off separated from their families andcommunities, or that people 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 poor families
from receiving additional benefits when they have a new child. For
example, in Massachusetts, a single parent with two children receives a measly $578 in TANF benefits each month. But if a second
child is born while the family is already receiving TANF, that childis ineligible, and the family receives $100 less per month, for a grantof $478. This policy emerges from the racist, sexist idea that poor
women, especially women of color and immigrant women, should
be discouraged from having children, and the faulty assumptionthat 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 and thoserun by nonprofits, are also set up in ways that make it stigmatizing
and miserable to receive help. The humiliation and degradation 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 to make 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 the massive nonprofit sector, which benefits rich people more than poor
people in two big ways. First, elite donors get to run the show. They
decide what gets funded and what doesn’t. Nonprofits compete to22participants about the harms of saviorism and the necessity ofself-determination for people in crisis.

Co-optation
For decades, politicians have combined attacks on public infrastructure and public services with an endorsement of privatizationand volunteerism. As public services are cut, politicians push foralready inadequate social safety nets to be replaced by family andchurch, implying that those who fail to belong to either deserve
abandonment. Alongside the destruction of public welfare, publicprivate partnerships are celebrated and bolstered by the fiction thateverything from hospitals to prisons to city governments should
be “run like a business.” The prevailing myth is that business models are more “efficient.” The truth is that making everything profitcentered, as we’ve seen with our health care system, actually degrades the care that people receive, as businesses seek short-term
gains at any expense.
A cultural narrative about “social justice entrepreneurship” hasalso emerged in recent decades, suggesting that people should notfight for justice but rather invent (and patent) new ways of managing poor people and social problems. One example of this kindof “entrepreneurship” that has received media fanfare is Samaritan and other smartphone apps that coordinate digital donations tohomeless people in ways that ensure restrictions on how they can
use the cash. These apps are more focused on the experience of thegiver than 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 homeless person’s counselor authorizes it for a specific purpose like rent. This is typicalof the kind of “innovation” that the social justice entrepreneurshipmodel celebrates—it embraces ideas of paternalism central to thecharity model, focuses aid on making donors “feel good,” and has
43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 touse their presumed superiority to make over these people andplaces, replacing old, dysfunctional ways of being with smarter,
more profitable, and more moral ones. In the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, politicians, non-profiteers, celebrity philanthropists, andcorporations conspired to remake the city of New Orleans andthe people in it by implementing devastating “innovations” thateliminated 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 the plans and dreams of elites and doreal harm to the populations who have lost the most.
Paternalism is also visible in programs within welfare and criminal punishment systems that force criminalized people and people seeking welfare benefits to take parenting classes, budgetingclasses, and anger management seminars. The idea that those giving aid need to “fix” people who are in need is based on the notionthat 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 are superior.
Mutual aid projects and their individual participants must
actively resist savior narratives. These ideas are so pervasive thateven those who have a systemic analysis of vulnerability stillsometimes fall into the trap. Most mutual aid projects benefit
from an explicit ongoing effort to build shared analysis among

42

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 thecauses 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 homelessshelter, because rich people would rather believe that homelessness is caused by poor people’s drug use than that it is caused bya capitalist housing market. To win grants, nonprofits also seek tomake themselves look “successful” and “impactful,” regardless ofwhether their work is actually getting to the root causes of the
problem. For example, social service nonprofits will often claim
they have worked with large numbers of people, even though mostof those people did not become less vulnerable or get what theyneeded from their contact with the nonprofit. Similarly, homelessness service groups sometimes claim that they 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-like shelters andmake people take budgeting classes or prove their 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 foodto poor and unhoused people, fighting real estate developers, slumlords, and gentrification, 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 the statusquo, or from admitting the limits of their strategies. In worst-casescenarios, nonprofits are integrated into programs that make vulnerable people even more vulnerable. An example of this is theHomeless Management Information System, a federal computerized information management tool that requires homeless services
23and charities to record the names and information of their clientsin order to receive federal aid, putting criminalized and undocumented people at further risk.
Second, the nonprofit system creates a tax shelter for rich people. They can put a bunch of their money in a charitable foundation,
allowing them to avoid paying taxes on it and instead getting to direct it to their favorite pet projects. Most foundation money goes tothings the board members and executive directors (who, in the caseof US foundations, are over 90 percent white) value, such as theiralma maters, the opera, and museums. Foundations are not evenrequired to give much of their wealth away: they give out only 5
percent a year and still reap the benefits of a tax haven for theirmoney and the social cachet of being a philanthropist. And that 5
percent can also be used to pay their friends and family hundredsof thousands of dollars per year to be “trustees” of their foundation.
The creation of the nonprofit sector that has ballooned in thelast half-century was a direct response to the threat posed by mass
mutual aid work in anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Non-profitization was designed todemobilize us, legitimizing unjust systems and hiding the realitythat real change comes from movements made of millions of ordinary people, not small groups of paid professionals. These days,
the nonprofits that purport to address poverty are mostly run bywhite elites. The idea promoted by nonprofits and universities isthat people with advanced degrees are best suited to figure out thesolutions 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 systems of white supremacy
and colonialism, and by wars and forced migrations. Elite solutions
to poverty are always about managing poor people and never about
redistributing wealth.

24

and worsen inequalities. Deservingness narratives justify those designs.
Even though mutual aid projects often emerge because of anawareness 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 with children, or stigmatize and exclude people with psychiatric disabilities for not fitting behavioral
norms.
In his book Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics, Myrl
Beam tells the story of a Minneapolis group founded by queer andtrans youth to support their community. As the group formalized
and got funding, it diverged from its initial mission and commitment to youth governance and became dominated by adults. The
group began to work with the local police to check warrants foryouth who came to the drop-in space. This functionally excluded
criminalized youth—disproportionately youth of color—from thespace and endangered 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 stigmatized people ineligible for what they are offering, they replicate the charity
model.
The charity model often ties aid and criminalization together,
determining who gets help and who gets put away, as we can see inthis 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 numberof guns that show up after a disaster. A dehydrated child without
access to electricity or air conditioning in the blazing Florida or41

ing or stay with 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 disastersurvivors rests on the idea that suddenly displaced renters andhomeowners are sympathetic victims, while people who werealready displaced by the ordinary disasters of capitalism—andare especially vulnerable after an acute disaster like a storm or
fire—are blameworthy and do not deserve aid. As I argued above,state and nonprofit disaster recovery and social services models
generally work to stabilize the existing distribution of wealth, nottransform it, so it makes sense that they provide little or nothing
to the poorest people.
After disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, the federal
government offered loans to homeowners and business owners,
and smaller loans to renters for replacing personal property. Only
those who were deemed to be “creditworthy” could qualify, andmany of those who qualified still never saw a penny. People in crisis are unlikely to be helped by having more debt—but putting themin debt does make money for banks reaping the interest. Similarly,
during the initial COVID-19 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. Amongindividual workers, those with the most precarious jobs were cut
out of unemployment benefits and the stimulus checks that were
supposed to provide relief. Undocumented people were ineligible
for relief. Disaster relief and poor relief are designed to uphold40

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 have the same kindsof problems as other businesses that rely on hierarchical models:
drastically unequal pay, race and gender wage gaps, sexual harassment in the workplace, exploitation of 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 that system.
One way the charity model is manifested is in the idea of “having a cause.” Celebrities and philanthropists show us that picking
an issue to care about and giving or raising money for it is part oftheir brand, in a similar vein as their fashion choices. This idea ofa charitable cause that is disconnected from other aspects of life
keeps us in our places. We are encouraged to be mostly numbedout consumers, but ones who perhaps volunteer at a soup kitchenon Thanksgiving, post videos about animal rights on our social media accounts, or wear a T-shirt with a feminist slogan now andagain. Only those few experts or specialists who work in nonprofits are supposed to make concern for justice a larger part of theirlives by turning it into a 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, andkeeps 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 resistance. At ourbest, 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 other25

about how we can cultivate liberation in all aspects of our lives.
Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like ahobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes forthe world and with 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 doa little volunteering or posting online is a great way to keep us in
our place. Keeping people numb to the suffering 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, andstir 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 sense of
purpose. In my experience, it is more engagement that actually
enlivens us—more curiosity, more willingness to see the harmthat surrounds us, and ask how we can relate to it differently.
Being more engaged with the complex and painful realities weface, and with thoughtful, committed action alongside others forjustice, feels much better than numbing out or making token,
self-consoling charity gestures. It feels good to let 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 cut out more stigmatized people; are an integrated part of our lives rather than a petcause; and cultivate a shared analysis of the root causes of the problem and connect people to social movements that can address thesecauses. Part II of this book focuses on how we can build our mutual aid groups in ways that can most successfully accomplish thesegoals, avoiding the pitfalls of the charity model and the learned hi26

4. Some dangers and pitfalls of
mutual aid.
Even while they explicitly work to reject the charity model, mutual aid projects can slip into some of the well-worn grooves of thatmodel 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 withefforts to eliminate public infrastructure and replace it with private
enterprise and volunteerism.

Deserving hierarchies
People start mutual aid projects because existing programs orother 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 theface 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 United States in a century, andthe most expensive natural disaster in the 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 wasestimated 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 hous39

Mutual aid work is important for meeting people’s survival
needs right now, and for mobilizing hundreds of millions of people
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 theon-ramp for people to get to work right away on things they feelurgent about, plug into social movements where they can learn
more about things they are not yet mad about, and build newsolidarities.
This section of this book is for people who want to start mutual
aid projects or who are already in them and want to intentionallybuild 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 the nitty-gritty, providing
tools for addressing common obstacles in mutual aid work. Thissection includes things groups can do to address conflict and avoid
slipping into charity-model or business-model practices, as well as
ideas for things individuals within groups can do to expand theirown capacity to do this work with as much compassion and careas possible—according to our principles.

38

erarchical 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 and thenare either repaired, replaced, or scrapped. Disasters exacerbate
and expose inequalities, showing the preexisting crises that 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 profitmaking 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 push their favored reforms. COVID-19, for example, has generated right-wing wins likeclosing the border; suspending environmental regulations; giving
the FBI, DEA, and local police hundreds of millions of dollars; andexpanding the capacity of police to harass and criminalize thepoor 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 care system. In seeking to curb theworst 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, andmore. While this relief has been far from universal or adequate, it
28

PART II. Working
Together on Purpose

of generosity, and make them long-term support systems that weco-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 COVID-19 crisis, in climate change– caused disaster zones, and during economic crises,
we have a chance to cultivate millions of new resistance fighters, toteach ourselves to work together in long-term ways, and to develop
our ability to practice solidarity-based co-stewardship in all areasof collective life. The climate crisis will continue to bring worsening
disasters into our communities in the coming years and decades.
The stronger we build our networks of mutual aid now, the more
prepared we will be to help each other survive those disasters andtransform our ways of living together toward liberation.

36

has demonstrated that many of the things our movements havefought for are entirely possible.
Disasters are pivotal times in the competition between politicalprograms, moments when much can be lost or won. Winning theworld we want is far from guaranteed. Our opponents, those whocurrently 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 anddisrupt their systems, retaking control of our ways of sustaining
life. If we want as many people as possible to survive, and to win
in the short and long term, we have to use moments of disaster tohelp and mobilize 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 have in
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 peakof 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, and corporate media will approach mutual aid in three ways, all of 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: Somewill ignore proliferating mutual aid efforts. Some will try to foldthem into a narrative about volunteerism, labeling mutual aid efforts “heroic” and portraying them as complementary to govern29

ment efforts and existing systems rather than as oppositional tothose systems. And some police and spy agencies will surveil andcriminalize mutual aid efforts.
This was visible in the response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Occupy Sandy, a volunteer-based mutual aid network that emerged
from Occupy Wall Street, organized over sixty thousand volunteers to provide food, water, medicine, and other necessities to people left without power and in dire conditions 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 time that 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 to ensure the legitimacy and stability of the current systems and delegitimize alternative ways of meeting human needs. At best, mutual
aid projects get framed as non-threatening temporary adjuncts toexisting 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 portrayedas unlawful, dangerous, and criminal. 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), when mutual aid efforts truly build and legitimize coordinatedaction and autonomy against existing systems, governments typically crack down on them.
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,
30

aid. “Scaling up” doesn’t mean 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 ourmutual aid work means building more and more mutual aid groups,
copying each other’s best practices, and adapting them to work forparticular neighborhoods, subcultures, and enclaves. It means intergroup coordination, the sharing of resources and information,
having each other’s backs, and coming together in coalitions totake bigger actions like rent strikes, labor strikes, or the topplingof 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
examples of this type of shift: a labor strike that becomes a factory takeover 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, butthey might be sharing practices and resources with other groups
building and maintaining local grids. Governance and innovation
remain local, but knowledge, support, and solidarity are networked
and shared.
To imagine a society where we share everything, co-govern everything, have everything we need and don’t rely on coercion anddomination, we have to shed the capitalist propaganda that tells us
people are naturally greedy, and that without police keeping us in
our places we would all hoard and harm. Instead, we can notice, as
is particularly clear in times of disaster, that people are naturally
connective and generous, though we often have cultural baggage toshed from being conditioned by white supremacy, patriarchy, andcapitalism. Again and again we see people sharing what little they
have after storms, floods, and fires, saving each other. Through mutual aid projects, many of us get a chance to deepen those practices
35

Part of the reason our dream of a savior government is so compelling is that it is hard for us to imagine a world where we meetcore human needs through systems that are based on principles ofcollective self-determination rather than coercion. We are accustomed to a situation where the choice is between a governmentthat either denies the disaster’s significance and abandons 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. Becauseof how capitalism controls the means for getting by—food, health,housing, communications, transportation—and how dependent weare 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 and eachother’s needs, based in shared commitments to dignity, care, andjustice. They let us practice coordinating our actions together withthe 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 tobe saved by professionals, government agents, or people elites consider “experts.” Mutual aid cultivates the practices and structuresthat move us toward our goal: a society organized by collective
self-determination, where people get a say in all parts of their lives
rather than just facing the coercive non-choice between sinking
or swimming; between joining a 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 conditions of their lives? Because of the dominance of corporate and nonprofit models, people
often think that “scaling up” means centralizing and standardizing
projects, but this runs directly counter to the wisdom of mutual
34

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 isillegal, supporting the well-being of people in the criminalized sex
trades, and helping homeless people occupy vacant homes, haveuseful knowledge and experience for all of us about navigating
safety risks. Studying those groups’ experiences and methods forevading and/or confronting police, securing electronic communications, and sheltering the most vulnerable people from exposure
can benefit 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—as withthe rebellion against racist police violence in the summer of2020—or fearing another destabilizing disaster, governments andthe 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 theform of welfare benefits, unemployment benefits, or a one-timestimulus check. But government aid can also take the form oflegalizing squatted property, providing mobile clinics, offering
meals at public schools, creating restorative justice programs,
creating resources for people being released from prison, andmore. Concessions like these, where the government provides
something previously only offered by mutual aid groups, canbe celebrated as limited victories by movements: Our organizing
was so strong they had to co-opt us! These concessions might also
provide vital support to many more people than mutual aid groups
can reach, as with the USDA’s free breakfast 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 arenecessarily limited. First, they can be shrunk or taken back whenever the moment of instability passes. This has been the historical31

pattern for poor relief in the United States: it gets expanded during a crisis, and then contracted and stigmatized as soon as thecrisis 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 in underground economies, homeless, or undocumented. The welfare and income support programsin the United States, ranging from old age and disability benefits to
support for families in poverty, are consistently designed to ensurethat women, people of color, and Indigenous people get left out or
get less. For example, the New Deal, which emerged to quiet theanti-capitalist rebellions brought on by the Great Depression andstabilize the capitalist system, was designed so that women anddomestic and agricultural workers (disproportionately Black and
Latinx) were excluded from the benefits created. By tying many
benefits to work, the New Deal also perpetuated a status quo 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 andinadequate, and designed to transfer far more wealth toward the
populations those systems were designed to support: white people,
rich people, straight people, and men. Often, the concessions arenever delivered at all, only promised in 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 more when
we demand more and build bolder, bigger pressure. It took mass
movements threatening capitalism’s very existence, like thoseseen 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 andnumbers. Even unsatisfying concessions, in other words, only
32

come with big, sustained, disruptive mobilizations. Nonprofit
leaders and politicians frequently encourage “pragmatism” andpeaceful incremental change, but the most radical imagination ofwhat we want, and the escalation of direct action to get it, is what
is truly pragmatic if we seek to win real change. Concessions wonin crises—crises of sudden disaster and crises created by powerfulsocial protest—will be as strong and lasting as the mobilizations
that made them 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 that are nondisruptive, with narratives about “peaceful protest” and “coming
to the table.” They encourage reforms premised on the assumptionthat the systems we seek to dismantle are fundamentally fair andfixable. We have to refuse to limit our visions to the concessions
they want to give—what we want is a radically different worldthat eliminates the systems that put our lives under their control.
If concessions are signs of our impact, at best providing somerelief 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 and use coercion and violence
to keep us tied to them, and if those systems primarily pursue theaim of concentrating wealth and decision-making power, what is
the alternative?
From our current vantage point, living in a world with the mostmilitarized borders, the most expansive surveillance technologies,
the most severe concentration of wealth, the most imprisonment
in human history, the most military bases and high-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 were different.

33

The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Dean Spade
Mutual Aid
Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
2020
https://1lib.us/book/6119675/99b812
theanarchistlibrary.org
65

“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 towork together—it is okay that we don’t have all these in place atthe start. The greatest area of 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 islikely 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 to make justicecentered decisions together about land, work, housing, water, minerals, energy, food, and everything else that matters, we need topractice new skills beyond dominance and submission in decisionmaking.
2. Better Implementation
When other people make decisions for us and we don’t get toraise concerns or disagreements, we are less likely to want 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 do66

ing the work, or do it differently, or don’t do it at all. In volunteer
groups, people who don’t get to have a say in decisions are likely
to just leave, because, unlike employees, they have no incentive tostay if the work does not align with their principles or feel meaningful to them. When we get to look at a proposal together and telleach other how it might be improved, hashing out our best ideas
until we have something that we all like or at least can live with,
we are more likely to vigorously do what we all decided, instead ofdrifting 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 firsttime, full of urgency about something they care about, and they
do not understand why things are being done the way they are, or
do not understand how things are being done, and do not havea 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, and a 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 usually thin—they don’t have much influencein the group, and while they may get some satisfaction from feelinglike 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 of doing 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 is on one specifictask like delivering the groceries or answering the hotline.
4. Helping to Prevent Co-optation
Co-optation of projects and groups often starts with the cooptation of individual people, often charismatic leaders or foundersof projects, who get bought off by elites through access to increased67

funding, influence, a job, or other forms of status. When a small
number of people have the power to shift the direction of a project,
it can be hard to resist the incentives that come 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 runninga project may not be the same people who have the most to lose
if the project veers toward elite interests. It is the most vulnerableof the participants who are most likely to have objections to theshifts that come with co-optation, such as new eligibility requirements that cut out stigmatized groups, or a new cozy relationshipwith 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 down around identity
lines (for example, most of the group’s women or currently undocumented people oppose a certain proposal) will be reevaluatedto assess a proposal’s alignment with the group’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’ participation. Decision-making systems focused on competition—on
getting my idea to be the one that wins—cultivate disinterest inother people’s participation. Consensus decision-making requires
participants to bring forward proposals to be discussed andmodified until everyone is sufficiently satisfied that no one will
block the proposal. This means participants get to practice wanting to hear other people’s concerns and other people’s creative68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.

approaches to resolving them. If the goal of our movements is tomobilize hundreds of millions of people, we need to genuinely
want others’ participation, even when others bring different 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 ways of practicing
wanting one another’s participation, not just going along withwhat charismatic or authoritative people say. In our culture, we
get a lot of practice either going along with bossy people or trying
to be the boss. It’s time to learn something different.

Making Consensus Decision-Making Efficientand 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
When mutual aid projects are just getting off the ground, theyoften have only a few people in them. With a small number ofpeople—five or less—it can be relatively quick and easy to discuss
everything together. As things get off the ground and 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
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69

proposals or to submit proposals for the group to decide on. Teamsor pairs can come together to do quick tasks between meetings, ora team can form as a long-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 find out 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 therequests 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, then change them, meld
them, or break them into multiple teams as conditions change andexperiences 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 by which
work happens more transparent. It can help work get done between
meetings because people can work out details and present proposals based on information they gathered and discussed with theirteam. It can also help prevent decision-making from getting bottlenecked at the whole group level, if teams are authorized to develop
and implement certain parts of the work according to the wholegroup’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 thewhole group’s approval of that plan so that each team can thenmanage its part of the whole.
2. Creating a decision-making chart
A great way to prevent conflict and gain the efficiency andproductivity that task-specific teams can provide is to have adecision-making chart that lets people know which decisions
can happen in teams and which are whole-group decisions. No
decision-making chart can anticipate every single possible decision70

McGuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rapeand Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement fromRosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. “From Banksand 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 and theFight against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: Universityof 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: South End, 2007.
Spade, Dean, and Roberto Sirvent. “Abolition and Mutual Aid Spotlight” interview series. blackagendareport.org.
Strike Debt. Shouldering the Costs: Who Pays in the Aftermath of
Hurricane Sandy? 2012. strikedebt.org.
Storytelling & Organizing Project. stopviolenceeveryday.org.
Survived & Punished. survivedandpunished.org.
Sylvia Rivera Law Project. From the Bottom Up: Strategies and Practices for Membership-Based Organizations. May 2013. srlp.org.

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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 published2010 by Ardent Press (San Francisco).
GenerationFIVE. Transformative Justice Handbook. generationfive.org/the-issue/transformative-justice.
The Icarus Project. Madness & Oppression: Paths to Personal Transformation 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.
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a group can make, but putting some big ones on there—especiallyones more likely to be sensitive or cause conflict—can help groups
make decisions according to their principles. Decision-making
charts should always be considered to be working documents. Asgroups try them out, they find out what is working and what isn’t,
and make changes 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 really look
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 event thatneeds an immediate response. Having a team or subgroup that is
authorized by the group to do a quick turnaround in these situations can help groups stay responsive while being grounded in aclear process. A quick-response group that has two or three people
who are well-versed in the group’s principles can tell if somethingis 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 groupis also responsible for letting the whole group know immediately
what quick decision was made so that others in the group are notsurprised to find out, for example, the group has offered an endorsement, and so that people can offer input if they disagree withthat particular call. It can be beneficial to have the quick-responsegroup be a rotating role so that everyone gains experience and no
person or team becomes the group’s default deciders.
Some other items that might go on a decision-making chart:• Decisions about applying for or taking money
71

Decision

Adding a
new weekday for deliveries

Who ini- Whotiates?
needs tobe consulted?

Who can
finalizethedecision?

Who
needs
to be informed
and how?
Wholegroup byemail andagain atmonthlymeeting

Delivery
Whole
DeliveryTeam (or group at Teamanyonemonthly
can pro- meetingpose
toDeliveryTeam)
Responding Communications
Communications
Communications
Reportto media Team
Team can Team
what theinquiry
reach out
requestto anyone
was andthey needhowitfor quotes
was met,oranand any
interview
results,
to wholegroupby emailandatmonthlymeeting72

Resource List
This book expands upon the author’s previous writing andworksheets published in Social Text and Medium. A teachingguide 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 and Nonprofit 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.

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centered, hierarchical, and destructive to our planet. We must practice co-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 andcapacities we need for an entirely new way of living at a moment
when we must transform our society or face intensive, unevensuffering followed by species extinction. As we deliver groceries,
participate in meetings, sew masks, write letters to prisoners,
apply bandages, facilitate relationship skills classes, learn how toprotect our work from surveillance, plant gardens, and change
diapers, we are strengthening our ability to outnumber the policeand military, protect our communities, and build systems thatmake sure everyone can have food, housing, medicine, dignity,
connection, belonging, and creativity in their lives. That is theworld we are fighting for. That is the world we can win.

• 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, hiresomeone, or fire someone
These are all decisions that I have repeatedly seen produce
conflict in groups, when someone—often a charismatic leader orfounder—has made the decision without consulting others andwithout a clear process. Not every decision a group makes will
go on the chart, but having a chart that lists some decisions canhelp orient new members to how decision-making works, increasetransparency and consistency, and prevent conflict.
3. Practicing Proposal-Making
We all do the Proposal → Discussion → Modifications → Consensus process informally in social settings: I say I want to go 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 themeeting.
For example, if our group has realized we need a database to
track all the people calling our hotline, and that we need it to be

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73

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 some group members
to research existing options and come back with 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 isthe best solution. Now the next conversation we have can be basedon good, well-researched information.
Treating something like a proposal rather than just an idea ora preference means that group members take the time to think
through and research options, so that the whole group doesn’t become mired in speculation or very small details. For example, if
our group wants to plan a fundraiser for someone’s transition fromprison to life outside, we might have a subgroup or team work on aplan for the party that includes location, date, time, performances,
outreach strategy, accessibility, and other details, and bring thatback to the next meeting for everyone to discuss and modify. The
process would be much slower 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 we don’t know how
much time our favorite performers need on the program), the proposal can go back for further development. It need not go back tothe same people. Perhaps someone new wants to take it on and address the outstanding questions because they have access to helpful information, or they have a good sense of the criteria that weare looking to meet, or they have time between meetings to do thisnext step. Decision-making works better if, rather than anyone seeing it as “my proposal,” we can see it as the group’s proposal. Thatway we are less likely to become rigidly attached to one outcome.

74

Ideally, our experiments with mutual aid and solidarity becomebolder and bolder as experiences with our shared authority emancipate us from the illegitimate authority of dominant systems. Thishas 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 to protect him from ICE agents
who had come for him. At the same time, mutual aid groups allover the country were organizing to hide immigrants, to warn immigrants of coming ICE raids, to care for the families of detainees
and deportees, and to block buses leaving immigration prisons tobring people to airports for deportation. These same groups werealso often tied 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 the businesslicense 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 ofracist state violence, and building courage among participants totake 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
military forces from occupying territory. We might reach a levelof mobilization 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 be taxed and spent differently. Our movements must contend with the structures in place inorder to dismantle the weapons they use against our communities,
and simultaneously build new ways of surviving that are based in
our principles of liberation and collective self-determination. We
must imagine and build ways of eating, communicating, sheltering, moving, healing, and caring for each other that are not profit119

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 and corporations. 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-freezones. Mutual aid is essential to all of our resistance work.
Moments of crisis and transformative organizing empower increasingly 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 policebegan making their arrests, people living on the street opened theirdoors to let protesters take shelter in their homes. Police tried toremove the protesters, even throwing tear gas into the windows.
But the residents kept the protesters inside overnight, feeding themand meeting their needs. This open refusal of police authority andwillingness to take risks for one another illustrates the vibrant possibilities of solidarity and 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 police. The
bus drivers’ union in Minneapolis issued a statement declaringthat their drivers have the right to refuse to transport arrested
protesters and refuse to transport police to protests.

118

One helpful tool is for a group to have a proposal template. Thiscan especially help new people know how to get their ideas heard
if they have never been in a group that used a consensus process.
Some groups keep this kind of template in a shared folder (paperor electronic) so that everyone can access it. 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 the whole 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 purposeto the proposal, since that guides group decisions. Some groups
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 “Doesthis proposal include any financial costs, and if so what are they?”
4. Practicing Meeting Facilitation
How well or poorly we facilitate meetings will make or breakour 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-facilitated meetings, 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 someattention to meeting facilitation in your group—and if no one in75

your group has that experience, I hope the tools below and otherresources 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 talk aboutat the meeting). If possible, circulate it to attendees ahead oftime 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 the time allotted, work withthe group to decide what can be discussed next time or by ateam in between regular meetings.
• 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 in the notes for atask list where, as we go, we write down which tasks people
have agreed to do. This can be a good reference for groupmembers between meetings and be reviewed at the start of
the next meeting to see if anything was left unfinished thatneeds attention.
• Assign each agenda item a time amount and have a timekeeper watch the time so the group doesn’t end up runningthe 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 that isfunny 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!

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In Seattle, after days of confrontations police abandoned theEast Precinct, and protesters established an autonomous zone
around it, taking up several blocks and a park. With the withdrawal of the police and most businesses closed already becauseof COVID-19, the zone, like earlier Occupy encampments andother similar spaces where protesters have taken public space,became a site of experimentation where practices of governance,
co-stewardship, leadership, decision-making, and collective care
were being debated and innovated. Mutual aid projects emergedin this space to provide mental health support, food, water,
medical care, masks, spiritual support, haircuts, clothing, conflictmediation, and more.
At the same time that the mobilizations against policing and forBlack lives were growing, scientists announced that May 2020 had
been the hottest May on record and that 2020, like the ten preceding years, would likely be another record-breakingly hot year; theTrump 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; climate change–induced permafrost melt caused thelargest oil spill in Russia’s history; and scientists announced thatcarbon 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, and something 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, and domination by illegitimate and racist policing, criminalization, and border enforcement systems and militaries, it is clear that mutual aid
projects are essential to the broader ecosystem of political action.
Mutual aid helps people survive disasters of all kinds, mobilizes
and politicizes new people, and builds the new systems and waysof being together that we need. The stronger we build our mutual
aid projects, the more lasting our mobilizations can be.
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Conclusion: Everything is at
Stake and We’re Fighting toWin
The only thing that keeps those in power in that positionis the illusion of our powerlessness. A moment of freedom
and connection can undo a lifetime of social conditioning
and scatter seeds in a thousand directions.
— Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
In May 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic that exposed thebrutality of racist, capitalist health systems and the frailty of social
safety nets, Minneapolis police brutally murdered George Floyd,
sparking global protests against anti-Black racism and police violence. The mutual aid projects that had been mobilizing during thefirst months of the pandemic became vectors of participation in thegrowing 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 andwhite supremacists in the streets, organizing and supporting funds
for criminalized people, pressuring schools and other institutions
to cancel contracts with the police, and more. In the first two weeksof the protests alone, an unprecedented 3.5 million people donatedto bail funds around the United States. As organizers demanded thedefunding and dismantling of police departments, vibrant conversations about transformative justice emerged, with more and more
people learning about the possibilities of addressing conflict andviolence through mutual aid rather than criminalization.
116• 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 other people 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 a caring and respectful space.
Go over these agreements at the beginning of each meetingand 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 are usuallytalking and others are usually quiet.
One way to establish some group norms about facilitation is tohave 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 thegroup on any decision-making processes that the group has agreed77

to so everyone is oriented, and how to create a warm and participatory culture in the meeting. Facilitators often sort out these questions in conversations with others, such as by asking people who
proposed things for the agenda how much time they need and how
urgent it is that the item be discussed at this meeting, by finding out
if new people are expected to come to this meeting, or by asking
for help in any aspect of agenda preparation.
Group dynamics are improved if facilitation rotates in the group
along with other roles like notetaking and time-keeping, so thatpeople can learn new skills and power dynamics don’t stagnate andrigidify. When new people are asked to take on these roles, theyshould be given support and guidance so they can have a satisfying
experience of serving the group in this way. Some groups find it
beneficial to have all meetings co-facilitated by two people.
People show up in groups to do important work, but we show
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 we are with others. Good
facilitation lets us satisfy these desires, even in the presence of conflict and difference.
5. Welcoming New People
If we are going to win the big changes that we want and need sothat people can live with dignity and we can sustain human life on
our planet, we need to organize hundreds of millions of people whoare not yet politically active to take bold collective 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 havenot been part of social movement work to join social movements.
They need to feel like they can become part of a response to conditions that they find 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 new people’s
energy and capacity for collective action, our groups need to be78

this work and have compassion for the parts of me that wantattention or credit. I can remember the ways that I am loved
and seen by friends and people in my group.

115• I cannot read minds. If I think someone does not like me,ignored me, or was mean to me, it may be a misinterpretationof their behavior.
• I don’t have to like everyone in this group to care about themall. I can stretch myself to be kind and caring to people even if
we have different styles of interaction. I can choose to noticewhat values we have in common and what is beautiful about
their contribution, rather than focusing 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 of tasks and responsibilities
I can take on.

• Giving new people a chance to share why they care about
the issues and came to the group— many people are seeking
to break their own isolation and find a space where they canbe heard and be part of a shared understanding of the root
causes of injustice.

• 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 generosity and flexibility.

• Making meeting discussions as accessible as possible to newpeople by providing a background of the problems the groupis addressing and the group’s activities so far; avoiding jargon, acronyms, and overly technical theoretical language.

• Avoidant feelings are a normal response to social conditioning, but I don’t have to act on them. I can remind myself ofthe feelings of purpose that guide me and then make a practical, reasonable action plan for following through with mycommitments. I can ask friends to help with accountability
on tasks if needed. - All that I choose to do will be better forme and others if it doesn’t come from a “must” and “should”
feeling, but instead from sober discernment of how I can carefor myself and others.

• Giving new people a chance to share their ideas, even if thegroup has thought about those ideas before.

• 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 of114

ready to welcome them and, to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambara,
make resistance irresistible. We want them to join groups, have satisfying experiences of taking action, build new skills, develop theirown political understanding of injustice, and stay in the resistancemovement for the rest of their lives. Movements grow because newpeople join groups and feel co-ownership and co-stewardship of
the work, and then recruit other people and orient them so they
get deep in too, and on and on.
Some things that help make groups and meetings accessible andinteresting to new people include:• Making the group’s facilitation process transparent to newpeople so they don’t feel lost about what is going on 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 anythingthat would make the group more welcoming to them.
• Making careful decisions about agenda items and activities
at meetings focused on orienting new people, since some de79

tailed group discussions that need to happen about ongoingwork might not be the most accessible to newbies.
• 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 feelings ofresentment 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 our meetings
welcoming, fun, warm, and energizing; making space for people tofeel their rage and grief about the issues we are organizing around;and cultivating care and connection with one another strengthen
the group and make the work more sustainable, in addition to
supporting the well-being of all the participants.
Leadership Qualities That Support Mutuality and Collaboration
One thing we need to do to create strong, sustainable mutual
aid projects is shed the baggage of what we are told “leadership”
is in a racist, colonial, patriarchal society. That model is usually
about individuality, competition, and domination. We often thinkof leaders as people in the spotlight, holding the mic. To win big, weneed to build leaderless and leaderful groups. This means we wantlots 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
want transparency in our groups, so that our opposition can’t messup our work by just neutralizing or co-opting one person. We wanteveryone to have the strength and skills to lead. The chart on thefollowing pages can be a tool for individuals and groups to reflect
on what we’ve been taught about leadership and how to redefine
it for ourselves.
Chart 8. Leadership Qualities

80– 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 inner adult,
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.
• The work I am doing in this group is difficult and the conditions 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 for others
and say no to things.
• Everyone deserves to exist, including me.
• I don’t have to do anything perfectly. We are imperfect people doing imperfect work.
• It is okay to try new things. I can stop whenever I want.
• I am neither the best nor the worst. I am learning just likeeveryone else here. I have wisdom and experience to offer
just like everyone else.
113Unhelpful/Untrue Thoughts
Painful or difficult thinking increases when we are under pressure. Often it will be familiar thinking that has appeared in otherdifficult times, feeding harmful behaviors that disconnect us fromourselves and others. Noticing these thoughts and behaviors cangive us a chance to interrupt them and see if they can be reduced.
• Scarcity thoughts (about anything—food, money, work, selfworth, 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.
• 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.
112

Domineering Leadership
Cooperative Leadership“Success” defined by dominat- Supports the growth ofing others or being the decider decision-making
processesthat include everyone affectedby the decision“My way or the highway” atti- Wants to find out how others
tude
are doing, what they need or
believe, what they wantSelf-promoting
Eager to help many people
develop leadership skills andshare the spotlight, able to assess when some things should
be done under the radar rather
than seeking attention
Concerned with maintaining Willing to admit mistakes
reputation, looking like “thebest,” looking “right”
Arrogant and superior
Humble and dignified
Good at talking and command- Good at communicating: sharing
ing and listening
Wins others’ support through Wins support by being supstatus, fear, or because others portive, consistent, trustworsee them as most powerful
thyCertain they are rightOpen to influence and changing their opinion
Concerned about the reputa- Concerned about the group’s
tion of group with media or material impact—does it allevielites
ate suffering and 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
principles and boundaries
Impulsive—plans change with Holds steady to the groups’ de81
their whims
cisions and purpose; reliable
Judgmental and quick to ex- Can tolerate people being difclude others who aren’t like ferent in a lot of ways; sees
them or who disagree
potential in people to become

Ways to use this chart:• Sleep schedules or other rest plans.

1. Write or talk in your group about what is missing from theselists.
2. Circle qualities you see in yourself that you are working tocultivate and grow. What might help them grow?
3. Circle qualities you see in yourself that are obstacles to youpracticing cooperative leadership or that don’t fit your values.
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 withyour values?
4. Notice qualities that are prevalent in groups you are in. What
could help cultivate qualities you think are beneficial and reduceones that are harmful?

• 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.

A Cautionary Note on Fame
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 freecontent for them, and that we feel compelled to get approval 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 withAngela Davis to post, but many people do not want to take thetime to visit prisoners, go to court with people, wait in long lines
at welfare offices, write letters to people in solitary confinement,deliver groceries to an elderly neighbor, or spend many hours inmeetings about how to coordinate care for people in need.

82• Timelines for taking care of essential paperwork or logistics.
• Baseline activities to maintain physical space and hygiene.

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 to do, things
you know would feel good, things that are lovely extras to improveyour state of being.
• Kinds of movement or exercise that are fun and feel good.
• Cooking adventures.
• Gardening.
• 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 sense of
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 yourpain, break your isolation, generate a more structured routine, break up a monotonous routine.
111

Guidelines for Greater Wellness
In this section, try to set realistic expectations, not piein-the-sky
guidelines that will cause shame or feelings of inadequacy if they
are not met. You can always increase and adjust later. Be awareof harsh “should” messages that may show up here, which manyof us have in areas of eating, work, exercise, money, sex, and soon. 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 nourishing ways.
• 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.
• 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 in what
ways.
• People you need to limit your exposure to and what thoselimits are.
110

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 stick to ourprinciples and treat others well when we are seeking praise and attention. If we are to redefine leadership away from individualism,
competition, and social climbing, we have to become people whocare about ourselves as part of the greater whole. It means movingfrom materialist self-love, which is often very self-critical (“I will
be okay and deserve love when I look right, when others approveof 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 afantasy of everyone having what they need and being able to creatively express the beauty of their lives.
This is a lifelong unlearning practice because we have all been
shaped by systems that make us insecure, approval-seeking, individualist, and sometimes shallow. Yet we also all have the deeply
human desire to connect with others, to be of service in ways that
reduce suffering, and to be seen and loved by those who truly know
us and whom we love. Mutual aid groups are a place where we cannotice 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 useful forgroups to consider whether this is something they want to do.
Some groups can do their work without raising money at all. Somegroups can do their work just raising money through grassroots83fundraising in their communities, taking small donations frommany people. That kind of fundraising can avoid the problem with
grant-making foundations attaching strings to grant money andtrying 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, and doing grassroots fundraising
can be a way of spreading the ideas of the group and raisingawareness about the problems the group works on. However, even
if money is raised in this way, managing money still comes with
pitfalls.
Handling money brings logistical issues that can cause stressand 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 moneythat includes feelings and behaviors of secrecy, shame, and desperation, a lot of otherwise awesome people will misbehave whenmoney is around or get suspicious of others’ behavior.
Sometimes groups want funds so they can pay people to do thework. When groups have no staff, it can be a challenge to do mutual
aid work that has to take place during typical workday times, suchas accompanying people to courts or social service offices. Staffing
can increase capacity to provide aid. But it is worth weighing someof the challenges that paid staffing can bring. When groups thathave operated on an all-volunteer basis get money to pay staff,
there is a greater danger of institutionalization and pandering tofunders, 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 mosteffective.
To get funding, groups may want to become nonprofits by applying to the IRS, or get a nonprofit fiscal sponsor so that they can
84• Obsessively checking anything (social media, email, reflection in the mirror, your work, other people’s work, yourhealth, 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 toyou.
• 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.
• Escaping through sex or romantic highs.
• Lack of sleep or oversleeping.
• Over-exercising or not moving enough for what your body/mind needs right now.
• Any other compulsive behavior that, in your experience, suggests imbalance.

109to help navigate the potentially dangerous waters of stress or conflict. It can guide you through the wild thinking, feeling, and behaviors that emerge when things are really rough, reminding youwhat helps and what harms during such times. Your mad map canhave any content you want. It can be illustrated, or include songs,
physical movements, or images—whatever feels best. Below are
just some starter ideas and examples of potential content. Somepeople 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 themto say or do if you are struggling. (I learned about mad mappingfrom the Icarus Project, and you can find more information in the
resource list at 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 thegroup, your appearance, personality, intelligence, etc.).
• Overly critical thoughts about other people.
• Feeling insecure in the group or like people are out to getyou, don’t like you, are talking about you, excluding you.
• Obsessing over details.
• Taking on too many tasks even though you know you’re already overloaded.
• Feeling controlling about how things get done in the group,
not wanting to let other people do it differently.

receive grants and/or tax-deductible donations. The downside isthat this requires financial tracking and administration skills. Becoming a nonprofit sometimes concentrates power in the hands ofpeople who have had more access to these skills and systems, suchas white people, people with more formal education, and people
with professional experience, especially when having those skills
becomes a prerequisite for getting hired as staff. It also may bringgovernment attention and funder surveillance to the group andcultivate a culture of timidity or risk aversion. In addition, whengroups 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 to serve some population’s needs but in reality serve only a small number of people—yet
the public story is that they have it covered. This can prevent neworganizations 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 the work, and volunteers sometimes check out (especially if they felt overworked
before the group started paying staf). This can make 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 tobe “failures” because they are overloaded 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 in professional settings, this can be a particularly
cruel setup.

• Avoiding tasks, flaking, becoming vague.
108

85

There can certainly be good reasons to seek funding and have
paid staff roles, but these steps should be taken with caution andwith a focus on building transparent and accountable systems 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 equallyrather than on the basis of the privileged status that comes with aprofessional degree, and should ensure that people are not pressured to overwork. Having clear and transparent budgeting andplanning processes that can be understood by all participants, including people with no prior experience with such processes, soeveryone can weigh in and make decisions together will help prevent the group from shrinking to become staff-centered, small, andlikely less mobilizing and relevant. The more that people in thegroup can be aware of the dangers of institutionalization and philanthropic control, the more likely the group can stay committed toits purpose and principles when handling money.

Reflection Questions:Burnout

Doing mutual aid work often brings some level of stress or pressure, because we are meeting urgent needs, learning new skills,
working in groups, and taking on new responsibilities. These are
the same things that make the work meaningful, satisfying, andpleasurable. But pressure and stress can bring out patterned emotional responses and autopilot reactions and behaviors. Learning to
notice the patterns and plan for them can help us make choices or
get support at key moments so that our actions can be as beneficial
as possible to ourselves and the 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 can turn towhen things go sideways or we feel ourselves slipping into moredifficult states. A mad map can be like a gift to your future self,

Burnout is a reason people often give for why they leave mutual aid groups. Burnout is more than just exhaustion that comesfrom working too hard. Most often, people I meet who describe
themselves as burnt out have been through painful conflict in agroup they were working with and quit because they were hurt
and unsatisfied by how it turned out. Burnout is the combination ofresentment, 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, andanxiety. If it were just exhaustion, we could take a break and restand go back, but people who feel burnt out often feel they cannot
86

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 is the 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 my relationships,
to my work, to my principles and purpose in 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 whocome to our project for help or to volunteer? How could we
add more flexibility, care, compassion, and trust to our group
culture?

Mad Mapping107

– 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 sure I
am liked, look okay, didn’t say anything wrong, etc.
– I check my social media likes, my appearance, my bankaccount, 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 deserve atreat 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.
• Procrastination– 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.

return to the work, or that the group or work they were part of is
toxic.
These feelings and behaviors are reasonable results of the conditions under which we do our work. We are steeped in a capitalist,
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 come to the work because of ourown experiences of poverty or violence, and doing this work can
activate old wounds and survival responses. We come to the work
to heal ourselves and the world, but we often do the work in waysthat further harm ourselves and impede our contribution to the resistance. When our groups are focused on getting important things
done “out there,” there is rarely room to process our strong feelings
or admit that we do not know how to navigate our roles “in here.”
Burnout is created or worsened when we feel disconnectedfrom others, mistreated, misunderstood, ashamed, overburdened,
obsessed with outcomes, perfectionist, or controlling. Burnout isprevented or lessened when we feel connected to others, when
there is transparency in how we work together, when we can rest
as needed, when we feel appreciated by the group, 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, and there 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 can cause. Figuring out how to have a morebalanced relationship to work and overwork is a matter of bothindividual healing and collective stewardship of the group.

– I feel deadened by overwhelming shame or grief that I
am suppressing.
106

87

Signs of Overwork and Burnout• High stress when thinking about tasks being performed bysomeone else who might do it differently, or the group coming to a different decision than we would make.
• Feelings of resentment: “I’ve done the most for this group” 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 the hardest
worker.
• Feelings of competition with other groups that are politicallyaligned or with other issues or activists that we perceive as
receiving more support.
• Feelings of martyrdom.

• 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.

• Desire to endlessly be given credit for our work.

– If I try, then I will only fail.

• A desire to take on tasks and responsibilities in order to “beimportant” to the group or control outcomes.

– If I put myself out there, then others will think badly ofme, I should keep quiet.

• 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.
• Hoarding information or important contacts so that others
cannot rise to the same level of leadership (this behavior isusually rationalized in some way).
88

Whenever we see inflexibility in ourselves or in a group culture,
there are opportunities for healing from social conditioning andcultivating 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• All-or-Nothing Thinking– If I have conflict in this group, everything is ruined andI have to quit.
– My work is never good enough.
– There is a right way and a wrong way to do things.
– If some people are critiquing me, I should just leave thisgroup.
• Shoulds, Musts
105

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, spill Doing it right the first time
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 time104
Body/mind out of sync
Unity of thought and action
Rushing
Leisurely paced
Blurred perception
Vivid impressions
Unaware, mechanical
Mindful• 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 recognizing that it may betime to step back and take a break from leadership.
• Paranoia and distrust about others in the group or other people working in this kind of work. Feelings of being alone.
Feelings of “me against [members of the group/other groups/
everyone].”• Over-promising and under-delivering, which can lead to feeling 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 sleeping,during time that was supposed to be for connecting withloved ones. Not knowing how to do anything besides work.
Not having fun or feeling relaxed on vacation 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 to hear
critique. “I’m doing so much, I’m killing myself with work.
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 that canundermine our principles, especially when we are stressed out and89over capacity. These can be behaviors we learned from dominantculture and also roles we learned in our families. When we arestressed and overworked, these things can come out in damaging
ways. It can mean we misuse or obstruct group processes, 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 can moveaway 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 to what is being said.
The ideas below do not change that, but they may help individuals
or groups create concrete steps to address 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 not have 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 not mean the group’s work needs
to stop, but it may mean calling a moratorium on new projects andcommitments so that the situation does not worsen, and so thatpeople 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.
90

creating ways to practice a new relationship to work, and diving
into the psychic structures underlying our wounds from living andworking 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”

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 isgood enough. We live in a very materialist culture that tells us weneed 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 painful misperceptions 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 ofsaying anything that is politically off-base and being judged, sothat people don’t share their opinions; or are wildly defensive if
someone questions something they said; or quickly attack or exclude anyone who doesn’t use the same jargon as them or is stilllearning something they already know about. These tendencies cancreate cliquishness and make it hard to grow our groups and movements. Perfectionism can also lead to people being overly controlling of group work, which can mean work does not get delegated
and the same few people are doing everything. It can mean thatpeople who started the group are patronizing to people who comein later and do things differently.

103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 and beautiful than our worst actions and harshest judgments. Building compassion and accountability requires us to takestock of our own actions and reactions in conflict, and seek ways
to treat each other with care even in the midst of strong feelings.

• 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.

Working with Joy• Creating work plans for teams and/or individuals to figureout how to assign work fairly, assess workload, and plan out
a reasonable pace of work.

It is not surprising that most of us have distorted relationships
to work, including work in mutual aid groups. The conditions andsystems we live under make work coercive, create severe imbalances in who does which kind of work and for what kind of compensation and recognition, and make it hard to feel like we havechoices when it comes to work. Working to change the world isextremely hard because the conditions we are up against are severe. We cannot blame ourselves for having a difficult relationshipto our work, even though we understand that learning to work differently is vital for our movements and for our own well-being andsurvival. We must be compassionate to ourselves and each other as
we practice transforming our ways of working together.
We need each other badly to share what is hard about the overwhelming suffering in the world and the challenge of doing workfor change in dangerous conditions. Even in the face of the painthat being awakened to contemporary conditions causes, all of ourwork 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 ourown orientations toward work—what it feels like to participate ingroups, what ideas we are carrying around about leadership andproductivity—is crucial to building a practice of working from aplace of connection, inspiration, and joy. This means intentionally102• Collective planning of the group’s work so that participantsbuild shared clarity on what the priorities are and what they
have agreed to do and not to do together.

• 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.
• 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 can hearfrom each other about what is going well and what needs
work in the group’s dynamics, or can discuss issues or concerns about their own role and ask for the group’s assistance.
2. Make sure that new people are welcomed and trained to co-lead.
This means new people are given a full background on the group’s
work, understand that they are being asked to fully participate inall decisions, and have space to ask any questions they need to inorder to participate. Ensuring that everyone is getting access towhat it takes to co-lead is essential to building leadership among
more people. Group members and the group as a whole will bebetter off if many people are leading, not just one or two.
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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 are aware of how muchthey 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 new work for the group or for themselves
as a member of the group.
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 interesting questions about
people’s favorite foods, plants, movies, or politicizing moments
may feel silly at first but makes a big 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 to talk 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. Rotating tasks canhelp us address unfair workloads and transparency concerns. Making sure everyone is trained on how to facilitate meetings in waysthat maximize the participation of all members of the group canhelp. Whenever there is a danger that just a few people will dominate an important conversation, use a go-around rather than having people volunteer to speak. Quieter members speaking up canreally change the dynamic.
6. As a group, recognize the conditions creating a culture of overwork. It is not one person’s fault, and everyone may be feeling thedifferent forms of pressure. Have one or many facilitated discussions about the pressures and dynamics that lead to overwork or
to an individual’s dominating or disappearing behavior. Create a

92• 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 never say 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 and ask, “What else is true?” We might
be reacting to a deep wound that needs our attention, andcausing 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 andfeelings, 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 was difficult 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 tojoin that team,” it is easier to project negative feelings and malicious behaviors onto the other person and gossip about it. This is
likely to feel bad and damage relationships. When a lot of people
in groups or scenes are doing this, it can make for broad conditionsof distrust, anxiety, and betrayal, and can augment hierarchies ofvaluation and devaluation, making groups unstable and more vulnerable to disruption by law enforcement.
We live in a society based on disposability. When we feel bad,
we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad. Both of these moves cause damage and distort the truth,
which is that we are all navigating difficult conditions the best wecan, and we all have a lot to learn and unlearn. If we want to build a
different way of being together 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 for101• Are there any ways that I am stepping into a familiar rolewith my strong feelings about this person? In my inner reality, did I cast us into roles that relate to my family of origin
or other formative groups?

Use Direct Communication before Using
Gossip and Social Media
Sometimes the first impulse we have when we are hurt is tomake our hurt known—through negative gossip or on social media
platforms. Negative gossip and accusatory posts can hurt the person doing the gossiping, the target, the group, and the movement.
It usually magnifies conflict. This doesn’t mean that we should notshare 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 that might 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 the groupis likely to harm group dynamics and create a culturethat will drive some people away. Talking to a therapist
or a friend who is not part of the group is less likely tobe harmful. Telling the stories on social media is likely tohave many harmful and possibly unintended impacts on
everyone involved.
• Am I campaigning? What are my motivations in telling this?
Am I trying to get support and process my experience, or am
I trying to get other people to think badly about this person?
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shared language for the pressures the members may be under sothey are easier to identify and address moving forward.

What Individuals Experiencing Overwork
and Burnout NeedIn addition to creating group approaches to burnout, we cantake 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, orto disconnect. This is healing work aimed at helping us be wellenough to enjoy our work, make sustained lifelong contributions
to the movements we care about, and receive the love and transformation that is possible in communities of resistance. Above all, we
must take a gentle approach to ourselves, avoid judgment, recognize the role of social conditioning in producing these responses inus, and patiently and humbly experiment with new ways of being.
The compulsive worker, over-worker, or control freak mightcome to understand their needs in the following ways:• I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what is goingon, who I can ask for honest feedback about my behavior,
and who can help support me and soothe me when I feel
afraid of doing something in a new way. For example, thesepeople might remind me that even though someone else in
the project will do this task differently, it is better to let them
do it so they can build their own skills and I can use the time
for something 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 givelove to the wounds underneath my compulsive, competitive,
or controlling behavior, reminding me that I am worthwhile93and my value does not hang on what the group does, howmuch work I do, or what other people think of me.
• I need supportive people who can also point out compulsive,
competitive, or controlling behavior or ideas when they hearthem from me or see me engaging in them. It can be difficult
to receive such feedback, but it is truly a gift.
• 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 sharing it, islikely a sign that others think I am a leader and that what I
do matters. They are doing the hard and uncomfortable taskof raising a concern because they see me as a person with influence. I can remember that, no matter how it is delivered,this feedback is an investment in me and in our work, andan act of love. I can seek out a friend separately to process
the difficult feelings that receiving 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
leadership in the group or project.
• If I hate everyone I’m working with or feel like I am goingto 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 this reactive 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 overwork94

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?” Forexample, when conflict is emerging and we have strong feelings,
we might ask:
• What else is true about this person/group/space? Can I thinkof any of their positive qualities? Can I think of any way
that I benefit from their actions? In addition to what they
did that I dislike, are there also other experiences that show
a more full picture, demonstrate good intentions, or balance
any vengeful feelings toward this person?
• 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 this situation? What else is in my life? What percentage of my timeis spent in this space or with this person? What else do I do
and have? Does this situation feel like it occupies 80 percentof my mind space, while this group actually only takes up 5
percent of my week? If I am afraid of what this person thinksof me, can I think of other people who I know that admire,care about, and respect me?
• Is this situation or person my responsibility? Is this something I can control? If not, can I imagine letting go, even just
5 percent or 10 percent, to gain some peace of mind?
• Are there ways that I am particularly activated by this thatmight have to do with my own history and experiences? Are
there ways to give myself attention or care around thesewounds?

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Two. Remember, no one made us feel this way, but we are having
strong feelings and they deserve our caring attention.
It can be easy when we are hurt or disappointed to decide that
another person caused our pain. Certainly, others’ actions and inactions stimulate feelings in us, but what feelings get stimulated,and how strong they are, has a lot to do with ourselves and ourhistories. 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 the insecurities 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—wesometimes 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 canhave a big reaction—sometimes acting outward toward them, sometimes harming ourselves. The trick is to realize that our raw spots
belong to us, 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 mymutual aid group who did not follow through on something. If I
then launched an informal campaign to get other people in thegroup 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 to what happened, andthat my feelings are not my flaky collaborator’s fault. I can hold off
on campaigning against them and find right-sized action to address
my concerns for the good of all.

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ing). 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 to slow down
to explore what is underneath.
• I need a healing path for myself if I want to be part of healing
the world. What that looks like is different for everyone, andcould include individual or group therapy, 12-step programs(including Workaholics Anonymous), exercise, bodywork,
spiritual exploration, art practice, gardening, and building
meaningful relationships with family or friends. Whatever
it is, I have to engage in a gentle way and be careful that it
does not become another thing to perfect or to try to be theleader of. Pursuing a healing path can be a way to practicedoing 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 andI am experiencing negative feelings about myself and others.
If I want move toward a more balanced role in the group, oreven transition out altogether, I need to do so gradually andintentionally. I need to transfer relationships and knowledge
and skills that I hold and make sure that my transition is donein a way that ensures support for the people continuing thework.

Conflict
Working and living inside hierarchies does not teach us how todeal with conflict. Most of us avoid conflict either by submitting toothers’ 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 onothers. Our culture teaches us that giving direct feedback is risky
95and that we should either suppress our concerns or find ways tomanipulate situations and get 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, andacting on what is useful. To survive our various social positions,
we internalize specific instructions about when and how to numb
our feelings and perceptions, avoid giving feedback, disappear, act
defensively or offensively, demand appeasement, or offer appeasement. As a result, we are mostly unprepared to engage with conflictin generative ways and instead tend to avoid it until it explodes orrelationships 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 to blame.
If we do work we care deeply about with other people, we will
experience conflict because the stakes of the work feel very highto 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, themore 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 reasons that conflict can beso pitched in social movement groups include:• We have the strongest feelings about people who are closest
to us. We are more likely to be up at night stressing about aconflict with a friend or collaborator than thinking about the
mayor or some other person whom we have a more distantrelationship with.
• When we come into movement spaces with high expectations and desires for belonging and connection, disappointment is likely.
96• Sometimes we are so used to feeling excluded that we tune
into that familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously
looking for evidence that we are different or are beingslighted or left out.
• Even good experiences, like finding a space that breaks ourisolation by joining a group with others who share our values or identities, can bring up our conditioned thinking andfeeling. 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 are thinking about us.
• Mutual aid work, by definition, responds to intense unmet
needs and brings stress and pressures that can heighten feelings and provoke reactive behavior.
Given that conflict and strong feelings are inevitable if we areworking on something we love with people we care about, what
can we do to cause less harm to each other and our 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 coming up:
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 go on
autopilot. That autopilot could take the form of a obsessive criticalthinking 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 carefulattention to ourselves can stop us from going with the autopilot
reaction that might not be aligned with our intentions, purpose, orvalues and might damage our relationships.
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