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=                             Mutual_Aid                             =
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                            Introduction
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Mutual aid is an organizational model where voluntary, collaborative
exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place
amongst community members to overcome social, economic, and political
barriers to meeting common needs. This can include physical resources
like food, clothing, or medicine, as well as services like breakfast
programs or education. These groups are often built for the daily
needs of their communities, but mutual aid groups are also found
throughout relief efforts, such as in natural disasters or pandemics
like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Resources are shared unconditionally, contrasting this model from
charity where conditions for gaining access to help are often set,
such as means testing or grant stipulations. These groups often go
beyond material or service exchange and are set up as a form of
political participation in which people take responsibility for caring
for one another and changing political conditions.

Mutual aid groups are distinct in their drive to flatten the
hierarchy, searching for collective consensus decision-making across
participating people rather than placing leadership within a closed
executive team. With this joint decision-making, all participating
members are empowered to enact change and take responsibility for the
group.


                              History
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The term "mutual aid" was popularized by the anarchist philosopher
Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection 'Mutual Aid: A Factor of
Evolution', which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the
driving mechanism behind evolution, through biological mutualism.
Kropotkin argued that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the
survival of humans and animals and has been promoted through natural
selection, and that mutual aid is arguably as ancient as human
culture. This recognition of the widespread character and individual
benefit of mutual aid stood in contrast to the theories of social
Darwinism that emphasized individual competition and survival of the
fittest.


                              Practice
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Mutual aid participants work together to figure out strategies and
resources to meet each other's needs, such as food, housing, medical
care, and disaster relief while organizing themselves against the
system that created the shortage in the first place.

Typically, mutual-aid groups are member-led, member-organized, and
open to all to participate in. They often have non-hierarchical,
non-bureaucratic structures, with members controlling all resources.
They are egalitarian in nature and designed to support participatory
democracy, equality of member status, power-shared leadership, and
consensus-based decision-making.

Some challenges to the success of mutual aid groups include lack of
technical experts, lack of funding, lack of public legitimacy, and
institutionalization of social hierarchies.


                              Examples
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In the 1800s and early 1900s, mutual aid organizations included
unions, the friendly societies that were common throughout Europe in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medieval craft guilds, the
American "fraternity societies" that existed during the Great
Depression providing their members with health and life insurance and
funeral benefits, and the English working men's clubs of the 1930s
that also provided health insurance. In the United States, mutual aid
has been practiced extensively in marginalized communities, notably in
Black communities, working-class neighborhoods, migrant groups, LGBT
communities, and others. The Black Panther Party's urban food programs
in the 1960s were another prominent example of mutual aid. During the
AIDS crisis in the United States, many LGBT+ groups started mutual aid
networks to provide medical care, support groups, and political
activism when the government chose to ignore the community. A Common
Ground Relief mutual aid group organized to provide disaster relief
for the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid and grassroots solidarity
groups around the world organized distribution networks for food and
personal protective equipment. The term "mutual aid", previously
associated with anarchism, drifted into public parlance during the
pandemic. Local mutual aid groups, sometimes as local as the street
level, organized to help shop, deliver medicine, create games for
kids, offering civic connection during a time of isolation. Multiple
online outlets ran stories on how to create a mutual aid group.

Around the same time was the Black Lives Matter movement, which
resulted in multiple protestors detained and arrested by police. Bail
funds, which are community organizations that pays cash bail for
people in need for free, is another example of a mutual aid
organization.


                              See also
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* Benefit society
* Communal work
* Community fridge
* Gift economy
* Little Free Pantries
* 'Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution', by Peter Kropotkin
* Mutual credit
* Mutual organization
* Mutualism
* Solidarity
* Solidarity economy
* Sociability


                          Further reading
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*
'[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution]', Peter Kropotkin, 1902
*Hossein, Caroline Shenaz. 2018.
'[https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137602787 The Black Social
Economy]'. NY:Palgrave Macmillan
*[http://bigdoorbrigade.com/2019/08/29/first-draft-of-mutual-aid-syllabus/
Syllabus, "Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization"
course at University of Chicago with professor Dean Spade]
*
[https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-is-mutual-aid-and-how-can-it-help-with-coronavirus/
What Is Mutual Aid, and How Can It Help With Coronavirus?]
* 'For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation,
Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America', PM Press, by John
Curl, 2009
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20121113230805/http://arthur-engelbert.de/publikationen/help-gegenseitig-behindern-oder-helfen-eine-skizze-zur-wahrnehmung-heute/
"Help! Gegenseitig behindern oder helfen. Eine politische Skizze zur
Wahrnehmung heute", Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012]


                           External links
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* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lReWpkn0dU Mutual Aid Societies]
(lecture by Sheldon Richman)
*
[https://histphil.org/2020/03/24/mutual-aid-and-physical-distancing-are-not-new-for-black-and-racialized-minorities-in-the-americas/
Mutual aid and physical distancing is not new to the Black and
racialized minorities in the Americas By Caroline S. Hossein.]


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