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

by Dean Spade

Even though mutual aid projects often emerge because of an awareness 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 and trans 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 for youth who came to the drop-in space. This functionally excluded criminalized youth—disproportionately youth of color—from the space 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 in this account from a Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) participa...