Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next)

by Dean Spade

poverty-focused and homelessnessfocused nonprofits are essentially encouraged to merely manage poor people: provide limited and conditional access to prison-like shelters and make 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,

Most foundation money goes to things the board members and executive directors (who, in the case of US foundations, are over 90 percent white) value, such as their alma maters, the opera, and museums. Foundations are not even required 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 their money and the social cachet of being a philanthropist. And that 5 percent can also be used to pay their friends and family hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to be “trustees” of their foundation.

The creation of the nonprofit sector that has ballooned in the last half-century was a direct response to the threat posed by mass mutual aid work in anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s.

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.

This idea of a charitable cause that is disconnected from other aspects of life keeps us in our places.

Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us.