Wednesday, January 15, 2025

We Care For Each Other, We Fight For Each Other

Movement scholar Erica Chenoweth moderates an exchange among Kate Hess Pace of Hoosier Action, Ginny Goldman of Organizing Resilience, and Anna Duncan of the National Domestic Workers Alliance on the role, promise, and challenges of mutual aid in their varied organizing projects.

January 13, 2025
Source: Convergence





Mutual aid has many names and many faces, a deep history–and the potential to be a cornerstone strategy as we face compounding crises and advancing authoritarianism. It can sustain people by meeting urgent needs, build relationships and capacity, and seed the vision of a better world that people must have before they take action.

To explore this potential, the capacity-building group Future Currents conducted in-depth interviews with more than 50 organizations that were experimenting with weaving mutual aid into their ongoing power-building practice. They grounded the exploration in the experiences of the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and shared their findings in the October 2024 report Building Power Through Mutual Aid: Lessons from the Field. (Future Currents helps movement organizations think through and plan for complex challenges.)

This conversation brings together three organizational leaders who participated in the Future Currents project. Kate Hess Pace is executive director of Hoosier Action, an organization with mutual aid at its core. It works close to the ground in rural southern Indiana, an area that Pace describes as “fully extracted” and abandoned. Pace’s family roots in southern Indiana stretch back 150 years.

Anna Duncan is the senior organizing director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), which organizes to build leadership and improve working conditions for housecleaners, nannies and homecare workers. NDWA has 70 local affiliates in 20 states. In 2020, it organized a large-scale cash assistance program for domestic workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ginny Goldman co-founded Organizing Resilience (OR), an organization led by survivors of climate disasters from across the country. OR supports rapid-response efforts, networks power-building groups that deal with climate shock, and campaigns to overhaul federal disaster response. Goldman’s work there is informed by her experience at the Texas Organizing Project, a base-building organization she co-founded in 2009. “All of my political and organizing work has been done at the backdrop of climate disasters under a very right-wing government, which I’m sorry to say is all of our futures,” she says.

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth moderated the conversation. Chenoweth, a prolific author, directs the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard; they study how people can effectively resist authoritarianism and push for systemic democratic change. The 2021 report “Pro-Democracy Organizing Against Autocracy in the United States” that they co-wrote with Zoe Marks spurred Future Currents’ curiosity about mutual aid as a strategy.

Chenoweth opened the panel with a look at some of the history and expressions of mutual aid and guided the panelists as they teased apart some of the knotty questions around mutual aid as a strategy. How do you distinguish mutual aid from service provision, and help turn recipients into participants? How can organizers make the work political but not partisan, so it builds some of the bridges civil society in the US so desperately needs? Mutual aid by definition exists in spaces the government has vacated or spurned. How do organizers help feed the desire and build the skills to contest for power?


How do you distinguish mutual aid from service provision, and help turn recipients into participants?

Erica Chenoweth: The Future Currents report defined mutual aid as “an all-encompassing term for projects that provide direct and collective aid to people as a form of solidarity, often with an expressly political framework and the goal of long-term social change.” There are a number of other words people use to describe what we’re calling “mutual aid.” In their book Practical Radicals, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce called this “collective care.” The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano referred to it simply as “solidarity work,” in contrast to charity work.

Others have even referred to this more broadly as part of a category you might call “alternative institutions,” or institutions that people build from the grassroots in order to address issues that are arising for their communities that aren’t being addressed by other existing formal institutions.

There are different types of social conditions in which mutual aid becomes incredibly important, especially around collective hardships that are being suffered and endured by groups of people or communities. This has included things as diverse as support for families of people who were disappeared under the Pinochet regime in Chile and toy drives for needy children, and everything in between.

Sometimes these social conditions are intensely political, even though they look apolitical. For example, during the South African anti-apartheid movement, the provision of low-cost food and essential supplies was organized during boycotts of white-owned businesses. It was understood that communities participating in the boycott would not be able to otherwise provide for their families, which could really reduce morale among those participating.

Strike funds, bail funds, and hardship funds are all examples of economic mutual aid, as was the pooling of resources by free or formerly enslaved African Americans to purchase the freedom of enslaved people in the United States.

Mutual aid comes into play around safety and survival. This would be rapid response, rapid mobilization of humanitarian supplies to areas affected by disasters or political violence. Legal assistance that can be quickly mobilized to support people who’ve been wrongly imprisoned or wrongly detained, and monitoring, witnessing and unarmed bodyguards are other kinds of mutual aid.

There are forms of mutual aid related to health and well-being. For example, during the AIDS crisis there was provision of and distribution of safer sex supplies and an entire campaign around informing the public about the importance of this.

The Black Panther Party famously built the free breakfast program that was then kind of adopted by the federal government to expand its provision of free breakfast in schools, in part to undermine the Black Panther Party’s power and appeal, which was growing as a result of its provision of free food.

Disability activists, environmental activists, and many others have found mutual aid programs very important. During the COVID pandemic neighborhoods organized distributions of personal protective equipment, creating it themselves, sewing masks and the like, doing check-ins on vulnerable populations, doing medication and grocery runs, and many more things.

So we have just a very broad range of conditions under which this type of activity has taken place. One of the big questions for us as a panel is how communities have done mutual aid work, and what were the ultimate outcomes of that, particularly when it comes to building capacity for longer-term political transformation? So let me bring you all in now.
Hoosier Action: Church, bomb shelter and vanguard

Kate Hess Pace: Hoosier Action organizes in 13 counties and we don’t organize in any town bigger than 50,000. Now we have about seven chapters across the region that include Care Not Cuffs, for formerly incarcerated people and people in long-term recovery. We have a moms chapter, we have a clergy chapter, we have a chapter that’s mostly young people, a housing chapter.

Our base has a pretty wide ideological span, from Republican to never voted before to fairly progressive. Layering in mutual aid has allowed us to really knit together an organization.


As we’ve seen our institutions collapse and be replaced by dollar stores and liquor stores, there aren’t buildings that you can walk into, and be seen, and have values formation and meaning-making.

We live in a place that doesn’t really have the conditions for democracy. We don’t have an active press. We don’t have a lot of nonprofits and civic institutions. There’s a high level of poverty and not a lot of experience of political work, invitations to be a part of change. But we knew that we didn’t want to tilt into service provision, and wanted to really stay in the lane of what it means to change people’s circumstances over the long term.

We decided to be a truly place-based organization so we could be able to go deep with our leadership. We have this three-pillar framework. We’re a secular organization, but the first pillar we call “church.”

As we’ve seen our institutions collapse and be replaced by dollar stores and liquor stores, there aren’t buildings that you can walk into, and be seen, and have values formation and meaning-making. Because we do live in a place where land and property are quite cheap, we bought two buildings in an effort to have something that felt more material for people that they could help shape and build.

Our moms regularly do art projects in the building where they sit and talk about their experiences together. We have moms that are deep, deep in QAnon conspiracy and moms that are pretty attached to the Democratic Party, but sitting together and painting a pumpkin and talking about what it means to be a mom has really built relationships.

We’ve been pretty deep in the overdose crisis for a while, so our Care Not Cuffs team built a memorial garden that has publicly recognized lives lost to both overdose and suicide in our community. They did an event that was almost like a church service that opened it up.

And that also has created more legibility for people here who don’t have any experience of political work, but do have that experience of collective stewardship often in religious institutions.


We have moms that are deep, deep in QAnon conspiracy and moms that are pretty attached to the Democratic Party, but sitting together and painting a pumpkin and talking about what it means to be a mom has really built relationships.

The second pillar is what we call “bomb shelter.” So many of our people are deeply suffering and have immediate needs, and we have a large list of all of the resources that are available in our community and where they can go. We do regular medical debt workshops where we’re helping people figure out how to negotiate their bills.

And through all of our bomb shelter work, we’re trying to politicize about who decided and why this is the way it is. Also in that category, we do lots of know-your-rights training. The moms chapter has a lot of moms with kids with disabilities so we’ve done trainings on your rights if your kid has an IEP. We’ve done tenants’ rights trainings. They have very few rights here, but they do have some.

We don’t have a lot of ability right now to go upstream on environmental policy, but it’s really about preparing for what’s coming and dealing with what is happening with the climate right now. Our local governments were not responding to the hottest summer on record, so we organized 14 congregations to open as cooling centers through the summer. Now we have 14 clergy advocating to get more participation from local government.

The third pillar, which we call “vanguard,” is a little bit more in the traditional organizing model. It’s really a commitment to training our people to be leaders in the community and to have more of a fleshed-out context about why our part of the country has been fully extracted and had pretty significant economic devastation in the last several years.
National Domestic Workers Alliance: Centering political education

Anna Duncan: NDWA as an alliance has been around since 2007. Our bread-and-butter work has been legislative and budget campaigns at the municipal, state, and federal levels aimed at winning domestic worker bills of rights, addressing the historical exclusion of domestic workers from public services and key labor protections, and winning greater government investment in care, so all families that need care can actually access it and care workers can be paid fair wages.

Organizing with care is in our DNA. We’ve always recognized that we’re not going to be able to organize the population that we organize if we aren’t thinking about people’s needs as whole people. Most of our members have kids, so we always have to have childcare at events. A lot of them care for aging family members as well, so how do we incorporate other members of their family, making sure that we’re providing interpretation and translation, thinking about how folks are able to travel to things?

A big percentage of our base is undocumented. An overwhelming majority is women of color. So we need to respond to all of those different things in order for folks to show up and fight for their rights at work.

During COVID we had to do a pretty big shift at the national level to scale up and invest a lot more in mutual aid and direct support. In Spring 2020 we realized how many of our folks were losing all of their employment. They were providing essential care services, but they were not being given PPE; they were having to pay out of pocket to keep themselves and their clients safe. So we launched what we called the Coronavirus Care Fund, which was a national fund to distribute direct cash assistance to domestic workers who were out of work or otherwise facing financial hardship because of the pandemic.

We thought we would do something that would meet the needs of our existing members. Then we realized what the scale of need was, and also that there was an opportunity here for us to be able to reach and engage new domestic workers who were not already members. We ended up distributing cash assistance to about 50,000 domestic workers across the country, raising $30 million to distribute and having to build up a pretty robust infrastructure to do that distribution.

From the beginning we saw this also as an organizing strategy. People were not going to be able to join the campaigns that we were involved in if they were fighting eviction, or if they and their families were living in their car because they had already been evicted. So there was this need to be providing that support to get folks’ heads above water.


People were not going to be able to join the campaigns that we were involved in if they were fighting eviction, or if they and their families were living in their car because they had already been evicted.

And then we needed to also be doing the political education, talking to folks about the fact that we were providing this assistance because the federal government was not providing it to undocumented folks or because of the exclusion of domestic workers from unemployment benefits in many states.

We saw a huge increase in our membership, nationally and across all of our local organizations, but that was not without challenges.

All of us who’ve done mutual aid as part of organizing know that it’s a very different conversation when you’re bringing a member in because they are ready to fight, they are facing an injustice at work and they want to take action. It’s a different conversation than the one you have with somebody who’s coming in first for the direct assistance. That’s been a big learning for us on the importance of building in that political education from the beginning.
Organizing Resilience: Shifts in power when the power’s out

Ginny Goldman: The impetus to move ahead with Organizing Resilience came in 2021 when we were still under COVID rules and there was a lot of mutual aid and care and relief. Then winter storm Yuri hit and we couldn’t keep the lights on in the fossil fuel capital of the country and people were dying because they were trying to take care of themselves in very dangerous ways, like having barbecues in their living rooms to keep warm.

So naturally people swing into action and start taking each other into their homes. Folks are out passing out water, because the electricity was shut down so people couldn’t drink their water in apartment complexes; slum landlords already were not taking care of things. People’s pipes were frozen, and plumbers were out there. The union folks were helping people fix their pipes so it wouldn’t flood.

And yet you turn on the radio and you hear [Lt. Governor] Dan Patrick, [Governor] Greg Abbott, and “Cancun Cruz” [US Senator Ted Cruz] blaming the blackout on frozen wind turbines and the Green New Deal.

So the premise behind Organizing Resilience is pretty simple. Power is up for grabs during these climate shock moments. It is not neutral. It is not static. Power is either going to shift in our direction or it’s going to shift against us. So we have to prepare. Mutual aid is key. It’s not enough.


Power is up for grabs during these climate shock moments. It is not neutral. It is not static.

How do we use collective care to build power? We really have to wrestle with it and get better at it because I think we’re great at collective care.

Organizing Resilience is bringing people together from these places that are bearing the brunt of climate, and asking, “What are the patterns that unfold that we all need to understand and wrestle with around this climate-driven future?”

It is just unacceptable 20 years post Katrina to be operating as if these aren’t huge, important windows when power is shifting. We need to prepare. So we’re testing out things. What does cash assistance look like as an organizing tool, for example? What big systems can be redesigned in the aftermath of disasters?

When it’s not peak storm season, what does cash assistance look like? How do you get money out? How do you get people into your organization? After a hurricane, people love to go get their chainsaws out and cut out a tree. They feel so powerful getting a tree off someone’s house. How do we then talk to people about how to get in on the green economy? We can design jobs programs in advance, rather than figuring them out in the moment.
More than service

Erica Chenoweth: Kate, could you talk a little bit more about what you see as the difference between mutual aid and direct service provision, and maybe tell us what’s mutual about mutual aid in your context?

Kate Hess Pace: Many of our really important partners are in the lane of immediate support and help, often without any context or political framework or an invitation to be a part of changing things long-term. And there’s such a level of need here that it’s just a road we can’t walk down.

Mutual aid is more about community care. How do we get a little bit more of a floor underneath you? And often that’s actually something like: we’re going to train you to call your debt-holders, and we’re going to work with you on that. We’re all going to open our mail together and pull out these bills we haven’t wanted to look at. That is both about “let’s bring up your financial status” a little bit, but also “let’s move you out of that stigmatizing shame” which exists across our base, with the people coming out of incarceration too.

Because that is one of the barriers to them actually participating in real leadership: not seeing themselves as equal and valid participants in our democracy. I really want all of our mutual aid to be approaching people with that perspective.
From sharing tools to building for the future

Erica Chenoweth: Ginny, could you talk a little bit about those key moments of opportunity where people are improvising and organizing and understanding it, but not necessarily through a vehicle that could be containing that capacity for a longer-term power-building opportunity?

Ginny Goldman: Thank you for asking that, because I think that is the crux of the matter.

We are not doing anything that people haven’t done for each other for years and years and years. We need to stabilize some of these best practices. There are lots of tools that can just be pre-built and people can share them. And then it’s some of the scenario-planning work about “What’s your dream? Where do you want all these folks to go after the fact?”

And I’ll tell you, it’s not just go vote. It is go fight, right? We got to care for people and fight for people, care for people and fight for people. That’s what will heal us personally and collectively.

We also need to think about the new ways that we’re going to construct our organizations. We’re maintaining manyof the models that work, but we’re also running the risk that we’ll lose ground after the disaster or the crisis—orseeing the disaster response workget co-opted and taken up by the Right. TheProud Boys were out in Appalachia after Helene. They’re out talking to folks. They’re helping people and giving people political homes.

We can do that too, and we do do that. But we have to be clear-eyed about where we want this to go for the longer term, so that it becomes more seamless, less chaotic, and part of the climate-driven future organizing models that we’re building.
Bridging red and blue

Erica Chenoweth: The National Domestic Workers Alliance isn’t a national organization, but certainly has a variety of complicated terrain in which you’re operating across the country in different states and localities.

Anna, you were talking about political education as one of the ways in which you’ve been able to link the provision of mutual aid to these broader concerns. Can you talk about what you’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t among red constituents versus blue constituents?

Anna Duncan: Addressing the growing mistrust of government and institutions more broadly is important. Being able to respond with a real analysis of the ways the neoliberal state is failing us and has totally eroded the social safety net, and saying that we as a movement can actually change this. We are institutions ourselves. We have the power to take back the government agencies and institutions to do what government should be doing, which is showing up and providing what people need in times of crisis.

What does this look like for us in red states? Care is a very universal issue. NDWA, through our sister organization Care in Action, does a lot of voter engagement work, and we consistently hear from people that care is a priority. The inability to find child care, the inability to care for elderly and disabled family members and lack of access to paid leave are important across parties.

We’ve had some major campaign successes in North Carolina, in a very difficult state politically. During COVID we won temporary funding increases from the state for both home care workers and childcare workers, to be able fend off what was a real impending crisis.

In order to make some real inroads across party lines, we do need to be talking to folks about how this is the pain point and we actually have the solution if we are able to organize and really wield the power necessary to win these policies.

Erica Chenoweth: That really helpfully segues into one of the other expected benefits of mutual aid as part of a broader toolkit of power building: it addresses one of the weaker areas of American civil society right now, which is the ability to bridge across differences.

The United States has a vibrant and incredibly deep civil society, but over the last 50 to 60 years it’s moved from a relatively good balance between bridged civil society, where people came together across differences to address problems of mutual concern or even just to engage in recreation with one another, to a highly bonded civil society where people basically self-select into civil society formations where they’re easily identifying with one another. Healthy civil society needs both, but American civil society tilts much more toward the bonded type than the bridge type at this moment.


How do you keep a project political without making it partisan?

That can have implications for the way people think of different projects; sometimes basic mutual aid projects are seen as more aligned with partisan interests. But how do you keep a project political without making it partisan?

Kate Hess Pace: We have spent several years figuring out how build an independent political orientation. Where we live, people tip between hating government and hating corporations. We can pull them towards hating corporations, and sometimes position government as the solution and partner in the fight against these broader forces that are decimating our community.

Right now, the only way we participate in elections is through town halls in places where there’s no town halls. We just had one in Austin, Indiana. It’s a town of 4,000 and we had 200 people there. We had Libertarian, Republican and Democrat leaders, and we had our leaders in the room. A lot of our leaders got there through our mutual aid work.

The other thing that we’ve learned is that we have to be Indiana-forward. So much of our politics has become nationalized and our leaders see that it’s completely irrelevant to their lives, like two teams arguing on the TV. So that’s a lot of our work, really localizing and making it about them. We do throw both parties under the bus and try to make the politics about you and us and our communities and what we need.

Ginny Goldman: Well, we should throw both parties under the bus at times, but let’s not throw the government there. This is one thing that worries me when people talk about mutual aid, that we can do it better than the government.

You can—for a small period of time for a small number of people—and we can model what it would look like if we ran the government. We could shut down FEMA and rebuild something that actually works, right? But we should be clear-eyed that we are contesting to govern and that these are experiments and tests that are prefiguring that.

We know a lot more than we think around how to make this political and not partisan. When you tell folks in rural North Carolina that Wall Street execs and real estate developers from New York City are coming in to take your land, that is political, that is not partisan.

Anna Duncan: Both of those comments really resonate with me. And we’re all bracing for another round of crises. We’re anticipating a big fight around trying to prevent cuts to Medicaid, cuts to other critical services. People are going to lose their care. Care workers are going to lose their jobs. Our members are bracing for mass deportations. We’re going to need to figure out how to do all the things again—fighting those defensive fights, filling the gaps where there is immediate need.

To the point about how we’re doing work that’s political and nonpartisan: there are a lot of people who are going to be suffering in this crisis who are not yet in our movements and who really need to be in our movements. We need to be the ones who are there talking to them, making meaning of the economic suffering of this moment, making meaning of who is actually to blame for that suffering, and being able to work together to fight for those long-term solutions that are actually going to make all of our lives and communities better. We can’t lose sight of our vision and the power-building to be able to implement it.

Anna Duncan is an organizer and strategist based in Durham, NC with two decades of experience in labor, immigration, and housing movements. She is the Senior Organizing Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) where she oversees local and state organizing strategies and campaigns and leads capacity building for NDWA’s affiliate organizations. She previously led NDWA’s We Belong Together campaign focused on gender and immigrant justice, and got her start as an organizer fighting for affordable housing and against displacement in her hometown of Washington, D.C.


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