Mutual Aid

Analysis & Praxis

Spade provides many practical ways to address common problems that may arise with mutual aid. This section will give you some questions to reflect upon alone or discuss with others to help you put these ideas into practice.

ANALYSIS

1. Usually, co-option is accompanied by endorsements of privatization and public safety nets. How would the mutual aid critique compare to the neoliberal critiques that politicians and corporations make against these models?

2. In many schools across the U.S. and abroad, students are tasked with doing a certain amount of volunteer hours to graduate. How might Spade respond to this?

3. What other organization models might be useful in preventing co-option? Think about cooperatives (also known as co-ops), which you can read about here and here

PRAXIS

1. What mutual aid groups are active in your community? What are some of the issues they address? If you want to challenge your praxis further, try going to a meeting for one of the local mutual aid groups that interest you. 

2. Over this past summer 2020, we saw large-scale protests across the U.S. demanding police reform (defund the police) and justice for those who died at the hands of officers. Based on what you have read…

   1. What made those social movements effective? 

   2. If you have taken part in any of the mutual aid efforts accompanying the protests, how were they run? 

   3. Did you notice any of the common pitfalls in the groups you were a part of? How were they addressed?

   4. If you are unfamiliar with a relatively ‘successful’ defund the police movement, check out this podcast.

3. Carefully look through this chart on leadership. Circle qualities you see in yourself and are working to cultivate:

   1. What might help them grow? 

   2. Circle qualities that you see as obstacles to cooperative leadership and ask yourself where you learned those qualities, how they have served you, and how you can act more in alignment with your values.

1. Think about a group you are a part of, whether it be a specific group or culture as a whole.

   1. Does your group enable or produce perfectionist behaviors? If so, how? 

   2. How does it impact your group work, relationships with each other, and relationships with people who come to your project for help or to volunteer?

   3. How could we add more flexibility, care, compassion, and trust to our group culture? (p. 142)

2. Have you ever experienced burnout in any aspect of your life? If so, how did you manage it? 

   1. If it was while part of a larger group, did the leaders of that group talk about burn out? 

   2. If you are experiencing burnout while you’re reading this, what are some changes you can make to begin to ease your burnout?

3. Spade spoke about four common pitfalls that mutual aid projects are vulnerable to. In an effort to avoid these pitfalls, he offered these questions for self-reflection:

   1. Who controls our project?

   2. Who makes decisions about what we do?

   3. Does any of the funding we receive come with strings attached that limit who we help or how we help?

   4. Do any of our guidelines about who can participate in our work cut out stigmatized and vulnerable people?

   5. What is our relationship with law enforcement?

   6. How do we introduce new people in our group to our approach to law enforcement? (p. 61)

Resources to find mutual aid networks in your community:

• National search of mutual aid networks Mutual Aid Hub

• Try searching Google and various social media sites such as Instagram

• Reach out to community organizers for guidance

Resources for further reading:

• Article by Dayna Evans: Give Some, Take Some: How the Community Fridge Fights Food Insecurity

• Blog post by Leila Janah: Solidarity vs. Charity

• Domínguez, D. G., García, D., Martínez, D. A., & Hernandez-Arriaga, B. (2020). Leveraging the power of mutual aid, coalitions, leadership, and advocacy during COVID-19. American Psychologist, 75(7), 909-918. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000693

• Springer, S. (2020). Caring geographies: The COVID-19 interregnum and a return to mutual aid. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(2), 112–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620931277