When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in early 2020, millions of Americans across the country were suddenly out of work and unable to afford food, rent, and other basic needs — and few sources of help existed. Out of that necessity, hundreds of groups sprang into action to meet those needs for their community members directly. Many of these were progressive base-building organizations that were adopting mutual aid as a practice for the first time or scaling up existing efforts that integrated mutual aid and power-building.

Since 2020, climate-related disasters have mounted and newly emboldened authoritarianism threatens even the shredded social safety net we have. This ups the ante for the work Future Currents examines in its new report, Building Power Through Mutual Aid: Lessons From the Field. The report studies the experiments of the early 2020s, looking at whether and how organizations can use mutual aid to strengthen ties, engage new people, and build power. It encourages us to interrogate, and perhaps let go, the idea that building power and collective care are mutually exclusive.

Mutual aid sits in a long tradition

In the context of this work, we define 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. 

Mutual aid remains poorly understood, even though it has a rich history in our movements, from Black liberation struggles to the LGBTQIA+ movement to the fight for abortion rights. 

“In every period of American history, African Americans pooled resources to solve personal, family, social, political, and economic challenges,” Jessica Gordon Nembhard detailed in her 2015 book  Collective Courage; they formed mutual aid societies, often led by women, that took care of essential community needs. Perhaps the most famous example of mutual aid in movement-building in the U.S. is that of the Black Panther Party (BPP). At its height, the BPP instituted free social programs — ranging from health clinics to offering rides to seniors to its much-vaunted breakfast program — that the group described as “survival pending revolution.” These programs were, as the group wrote, “meant to meet the needs of the community until we can all move to change the social conditions that make it impossible for the people to afford the things they need and desire.” They were “not answers or solutions” in themselves; rather, the group wrote, “they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation.”

Many of the organizers we spoke with referenced this long history of mutual aid in supporting the resilience of their communities when they were under attack. Allison Scott, the Campaign for Southern Equality’s interim executive director, noted that mutual aid was a key feature of the early days of the LGBTQIA+ movement: “It all began in our community, stepping up and taking care of each other when nobody else will. Before laws were being challenged, or anything else, that’s the first place we started — taking care of each other. Our movement is rooted in this, and this is a moment for us to go back to our roots. It’s a fundamental piece of who we are — we take care of our community first, and then we know we can all get to the bigger win together.” 

How we show up for people matters

The report features case studies of diverse base-building organizations including West Virginia Can’t Wait, People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER)-LA, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), Organizing Resilience, KC Tenants, and the Campaign for Southern Equality. 

Some of their experiments with mutual aid were short-term programs that ran their course as pandemic conditions eased; while others integrated — or even centralized — their mutual aid efforts into their organizational strategies. 

Organizations told us over and over again that how we show up for people matters more than our policy proposals. The pandemic mutual aid programs were essential to help volunteer leaders stay afloat, to hold communities together, and to practice our values. Not a single organizer we spoke with was worried that mutual aid programs let the government off the hook by filling in the gaps in social services that should be public programs’ responsibility. Rather, they told us that mutual aid created the space and conditions to demand those public programs. 

Some, like the Maine People’s Alliance (MPA), launched their own mutual aid hub when the pandemic hit, open to anyone who needed aid and assistance or who wanted to volunteer. Other groups took a different approach, focusing on direct cash assistance. These funds were especially important for organizations whose members were undocumented or had more informal work arrangements, given their exclusion from many government aid programs. National groups like Movimiento Cosecha, the  National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) raised millions of dollars, almost all of which was disbursed to immigrant workers in the form of cash assistance. 

Local organizations also took up similar work during the pandemic, albeit on a much smaller scale, usually focused on supporting their member-leaders. KC Tenants set up a mutual aid fund mostly to keep its member-leaders housed during the unprecedented crisis, recognizing that tenant leaders wouldn’t be able to organize if they couldn’t pay their bills. The pandemic spurred the Miami Workers Center to launch a permanent mutual aid program for its member-leaders in 2021. Known as the  Sisters in Struggle Mutual Aid Program (SISMAP), it is a year-round, ongoing program that offers financial assistance and essential supplies to members; the group also holds monthly women’s circle meetings and throws regular block parties. 

While the pandemic spurred many organizations to take on mutual aid projects for the first time, groups organizing to oppose the war on drugs and end cash bail and mass incarceration have long relied on mutual aid, collective care, and service provision as a key organizing strategy. One of them is VOCAL-NY, which sees harm-reduction services as a basic part of its work to end the war on drugs. In 2023, the organization was able to dramatically scale up those services via both a partnership with a large hospital system and its move to a larger office. 

“We can’t build a movement if our people are dead,” said Jawanza Williams,VOCAL-NY’s organizing director. “So, simultaneously, we need to have direct services that are going to immediately mitigate or eliminate premature death.” (As defined by the National Harm Reduction Coalition, “harm reduction” is “a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use” such as “safer use, managed use, abstinence, meeting people who use drugs ‘where they’re at,’ and addressing conditions of use along with the use itself.” This can include naloxone distribution, safe syringe programs, and other methods.)

Groups whose members have been hit by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and other emergencies linked to climate change have also been engaging in mutual aid. TOP, for example, includes funding in its budget every year for rapid response work. “We are very aware of the fact that climate disasters are going to be a continued reality throughout the state of Texas. We just always assume that that is going to be something that occurs however many times throughout the year,” said Alysa Guerrero, TOP’s statewide lead researcher. 

This year, TOP decided to expand its rapid response plan to include partnerships with existing mutual aid groups in Houston and the rest of Harris County, funding existing groups to do post-storm relief, with the eye toward broadening their impact. Guerrero explained the group’s thinking on this ecosystem approach to rapid response work: “We are just well aware of the fact that [existing groups] have been doing mutual aid year-round, and they’ve been doing it longer, and they probably might even know how to do it better than us. So, if we can lend some resources to them, that’s just a no-brainer, because we want to be able to have folks have their needs met, but we then also want them to be a part of the movement, whether that be through us or through other organizations.” 

Mutual aid is no magic bullet

During the pandemic, many organizations struggled to convert aid recipients into leaders and activists. Other mutual aid programs required outsized resources from the organization, dwarfing advocacy efforts. A number of groups decided to end their programs as the crisis passed, although all reported that they would do it again when an acute need arose. 

Groups like the MPA and the NDWA believed that their pandemic mutual aid work could help expand and politicize their bases. By highlighting the gaping holes in the social safety net, they thought, the work would energize aid recipients to take part in campaign work. But the pivot from service provision to organizing was “really hard,” as Jennie Pirkl, MPA’s organizing director at the time, explained. “The people who were super-engaged in outreach and providing help to people who needed help, a lot of them did not make that pivot. They were like, ‘What do you mean, you’re not doing this anymore?’ Transition was hard for people,” she said. MPA ultimately made the decision to end its mutual aid hub after a few months. 

Anna Duncan, NDWA’s senior organizing director, shared a similar reflection on NDWA’s fund for domestic workers, which was always meant to be a one-off project. The fund was successful in distributing cash aid to workers, but NDWA and its affiliates and local chapters have continued to grapple with how they can “translate folks who came into the organization for emergency assistance into members of the organization and how to plug them into the organizing….That’s the goal and the vision, and if it’s done well, then the mutual aid supports the base-building and organizing. But I think in reality, that’s been challenging,” Duncan said.

In other cases, mutual aid work did feed the organization’s growth. West Virginia Can’t Wait saw such success when it incorporated mutual aid into its 2020 electoral work that it launched the “Hometown Heroes” program in 2021. The program gave small grants to local people who were already organizing mutual aid projects, and supported the recipients with coaching, leadership training, and mental health and safety support. Since it started, the program has seeded new groups into the state’s movement ecosystem, grown WV Can’t Wait’s leadership pipeline, and produced a few candidates for local elected offices; it has become central to the organization’s work. “We think that the shift away from traditional campaign tools to things like mutual aid and defense and governance is the shift that we’re going to need even more of as authoritarians get more power in America over the next 10 years,” said Stephen Smith, the group’s co-chair.  

Mutual aid falls outside of the typical campaigning and power-building work that many of us are used to. For a set of community organizers, mutual aid projects are not organizing projects. As that kind of thinking goes, running a mutual aid project does not shift or build power and is more akin to charity. Yet, that mindset is shifting. The COVID-19 pandemic reminded many of us of the important role that mutual aid can play, kicking off a period of experimentation that, coupled with the experience of organizations that have long prioritized mutual aid, feels healthy and necessary. The organizers we spoke with for this report reflect a growing awareness that long-term organizing and mutual aid are not mutually exclusive and that the latter can strengthen the former. Mutual aid is not the magic bullet that answers all of the challenges of organizing, but what is clear is that by incorporating mutual aid into our work, our movements may be able to more effectively reach the people we need to and in the numbers we need. 

Provocations, not prescriptions

While we have captured some recommendations to consider based on lessons learned, the report is not meant to offer prescriptive solutions — rather, we hope it will kick-start a much-needed conversation and generate new (if old) ideas on what it will take for all of us to win together.

The top recommendations that came out of our conversations and analysis are:

  • Embrace experimentation.
  • Create spaces for sharing skills, tools, and other learning.
  • Create new shared tools.

These ideas are intended to serve as an invitation to rethink whether and how mutual aid can play a transformative role in our organizing. Even if your organization was not inclined to consider mutual aid during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, the twin crises of democracy and climate may motivate you to take a second look. About half the states in our country are under increasingly authoritarian, repressive, anti-democratic control — generating ever-more need for community care. As climate catastrophes increase in frequency, our movements will have a choice: Show up for people in crisis or let far-right groups occupy that terrain.

This report is our attempt to begin a discussion about when and how mutual aid can integrate in organizing and power-building models. We hope to support our sector to grapple strategically with how we can build the caring infrastructure that we will need to not only weather future crises but also build power.

Esther Wang was the lead researcher and writer for the report “Building Power Through Mutual Aid: Lessons From the Field.”